Revolution in Bad Times

By Asef Bayat, New Left Review

Back in 2011, the Arab uprisings were celebrated as world-changing events that would re-define the spirit of our political times. The astonishing spread of these mass uprisings, followed soon after by the Occupy protests, left observers in little doubt that they were witnessing an unprecedented phenomenon—‘something totally new’, ‘open-ended’, a ‘movement without a name’; revolutions that heralded a novel path to emancipation. According to Alain Badiou, Tahrir Square and all the activities which took place there—fighting, barricading, camping, debating, cooking and caring for the wounded—constituted the ‘communism of movement’; posited as an alternative to the conventional liberal-democratic or authoritarian state, this was a universal concept that heralded a new way of doing politics—a true revolution. For Slavoj Žižek, only these ‘totally new’ political happenings, without hegemonic organizations, charismatic leaderships or party apparatuses, could create what he called the ‘magic of Tahrir’. For Hardt and Negri, the Arab Spring, Europe’s indignado protests and Occupy Wall Street expressed the longing of the multitude for a ‘real democracy’, a different kind of polity that might supplant the hopeless liberal variety worn threadbare by corporate capitalism. These movements, in sum, represented the ‘new global revolutions’. [1]

Asef Bayat on the Arab Spring

Un-civil society: the politics of the `informal people’

by Asef Bayat, 1997

In the years between 1976 and the early 1990s a series of popular activities took place in Iran’s large cities which did not receive sufficient attention from scholars primarily because they were drowned out by the extraordinary big bang of the Revolution. Their importance was dismissed in part because they seemed insignificant when compared with the Revolution, that universal image of social change par excellence, and in part because they seemed to be ordinary practices of everyday life. Indeed, the origin of these activities goes back decades earlier, but it is only in the late 1980s and early 1990s that their political consequences began to surface.

Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East

by Asef Bayat, Standford University Press, 2009

In the popular imagination, the Muslim Middle East is frozen in its own traditions and history—a land of mosques and minarets, veiled women, despotic regimes, and desert sand. But this assumption fails to recognize that social and political change comes in many guises. In this eye-opening book, Asef Bayat reveals how under the shadow of the authoritarian rule, religious moral authorities, and economic elites, ordinary people can make meaningful change through the practices of everyday life.

Though not as visible on the world-stage as a mass protest or a full-scale revolution, millions of people across the Middle East are discovering or creating new social spaces within which to make their claims heard. The street vendor who sets up his business in the main square, squatters who take over public parks, Muslim youth who frequent public hangouts in blue jeans, and protestors who march in the streets, poor housewives who hang their wash in the alleyways, and educated women who pursue careers doing "men's work"—all these people challenge the state's control and implicity question the established public order through their daily activities. Though not coordinated in their activities, these "non-movements" offer a political response, not of protest but of practice and direct daily action.

Street Politics: Poor people's Movements in Iran

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, an active political movement emerged on the streets of Iran's largest cities. Poor people began to construct their own communities on unused urban lands, creating an infrastructure----roads, electricity, running water, garbage collection, and shelters----all their own. As the Iranian government attempted to evict these illegal settlers, they resisted----fiercely and ultimately successfully. This is the story of their economic and political strategies.

From `Dangerous Classes' to `Quiet Rebels': Politics of the Urban Subaltern in the Global South

by Asef Bayat, 2000

A major consequence of the new global restructuring in the developing countries has been the double process of integration, on the one hand, and social exclusion and informalization, on the other. These processes, meanwhile, have meant further growth of a marginalized and deinstitutionalized subaltern in Third World cities. How do the urban grassroots respond to their marginalization and exclusion? What form of politics, if any at all, do they espouse? Critically navigating through the prevailing perspectives including the culture of poverty, survival strategy, urban social movements and everyday resistance, the article suggests that the new global restructuring is reproducing subjectivities (marginalized and deinstitutionalized groups such as the unemployed, casual labor, street subsistence workers, street children and the like), social space and thus a terrain of political struggles that current theoretical perspectives cannot on their own account for. The article proposes an alternative outlook, a `quiet encroachment of the ordinary', that might be useful to examine the activism of the urban subaltern in the Third World cities

A new Arab street in post-Islamist times

by Asef Bayat, Foreign Policy

The popular uprising in Tunisia has surprised many — Western observers, the Arab elites, and even those who have generated this remarkable episode. The surprise seems justified. How could one imagine that a campaign of ordinary Tunisians in just over one month would topple a dictator who presided over a police state for 23 years? This is a region where the life expectancy of ‘presidencies’ match only the ‘eternal’ rule of its sheiks, kings, and Ayatollahs who bank on oil and political rent (western protection) to hang onto their power and subjugate their people. But the wonder about the Jasmine revolution — and the subsequent mass protests in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, and more spectacularly in Egypt’s numerous cities on Jan. 25, 2011 — also comes from a common mistrust among the Arab elites and their outside allies about the so called ‘Arab street’ — one that is simultaneously feared and pitied for its‘dangerous irrationality’ and ‘deplorable apathy.’