Egypt’s 2011 uprising, subaltern cultural politics, and revolutionary weakness

Explanations for the weakness and failure of the uprisings in the Arab world of 2011 range from the hard-power and structure-centred accounts of conventional political science to interactionist studies emphasizing micro-dynamics and relational mechanisms. Drawing on Gramscian perspectives, and fieldwork in Egypt, this article aims to open up an occluded line of investigation into the subaltern cultural politics of the uprising in Egypt as a way to make sense of revolutionary weaknesses and limits. While critical researchers have studied the political economy of the revolutionary process and the counter-revolution, considered activist organizational and strategic deficits, and studied the limits on the political vision of middle class revolutionaries, less attention has been paid to subaltern cultural politics. This article argues that the study of popular good sense against the regime and common sense supporting the army can help explain revolutionary weakness in Egypt during 2011-13

What can academics and activists learn from each other?

John Chalcraft leads the Collective Action Forum, an innovative project designed to bring academics and activists together. He argues that engaging with activists can help universities take a fresh look at the world’s problems and make a positive impact on society

Middle East popular politics in Gramscian perspective

This article outlines a theoretical framework for researching popular politics in the Middle East and North Africa. It sketches a Gramscian alternative to existing approaches in materialist Marxism, cultural studies, and social movement studies. It also aims to think a Gramsci useful to historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, beyond the common loci of Gramsci scholarship in political theory, comparative literature, and international relations. With a start point in Gramsci's philosophy of praxis, it puts forward a concept of popular politics as a mostly slow-moving, complex, and many-layered transformative activity, a form of historical protagonism comprising a variety of moments, capable of working changes on existing forms of hegemony and founding new social relations. The point is to enable researchers in Middle East studies to see and research popular politics, carry on a critique of transformative activity, and inform transformation in the present

Revolutionary weakness in Gramscian perspective: the Arab Middle East and North Africa since 2011

This article sets out a Gramscian perspective on revolutionary weakness in the MENA. It aims not at a top-down analysis of how activists were crushed, but at a bottom-up analysis evaluating activist activity. Drawing on a reading of Gramsci, fieldwork in Egypt, and recent research on MENA protest, it adopts a Gramscian concept of transformative activity and applies it to the MENA since 2011. It argues that the basic elements of transformative activity in Gramsci include subaltern social groups, conceptions of the world, collective will, organisation, strategy/tactics, and historical bloc. It argues that transformative activity involves the organic articulation of these distinct moments in a complex, differentiated unity. On the basis of this view, the article shows how sense can be made of revolutionary weakness in the MENA since 2011 through a critical analysis of problems in the organic articulation of revolutionary mobilisation

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and radical democracy

This chapter argues that the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, far from being anti-Semitic, can be usefully compared with recent radical democracy movements. Drawing on participant observation over a number of years, the chapter explores the core features of the BDS movement’s trans-local mobilizing project: highly diverse constituencies, rights-based and inclusionary identities and principles, networked and non-hierarchical organization, and a direct-action and participatory repertoire of collective action. The chapter emphasizes a distinctive feature of the movement’s strategy: it seeks to address and change political society without aiming to take up an established position of power within political society itself. The chapter argues that the movement’s radically democratic features, far from implying chaos, weakness, and failure, help account for this particular movement’s cohesion and potency

The Arab uprisings of 2011 in historical perspective

This chapter aims to place the Arab uprisings of 2011 in historical perspective, addressing questions of change and continuity by comparing and contrasting these uprisings with previous cases of contentious mobilization in the region, going back to the nineteenth century. The chapter argues that the uprisings can be linked to growing protests against domestic regimes in the region since the 1970s, and are similar to people-power uprisings in other parts of the world. The chapter points to the under-researched democratic genealogies of these uprisings, arguing that these played an important role in securing the unity of contentious crowds. The mass uprisings had their surprising and creative dimensions; they emerged without any preceding state breakdown and they constituted the people as a sovereign subject in a way distinctive from anticolonial nationalism

Monarchy, migration and hegemony in the Arabian Peninsula

Migrants make up a greater proportion of the workforce in the Arabian peninsula than perhaps in any other region of the world. Migration politics, however, has been either understudied – in comparative politics and conventional economics – or treated by authors influenced by modernization theory and Marxism alike in a deterministic manner. Using Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony, historic bloc and alternative hegemony, this paper aims to analyse the significance of migration for the changing fate of monarchy in the region since 1945. On the basis of primary and secondary sources in Arabic and English I argue that migration has played two different roles in the region. In the 1950s and 1960s, it formed a part of an oppositional bloc challenging monarchy. From the 1970s to the 2000s, however, the oppositional bloc dissolved and migration became an adjunct rather than a challenge to the ruling order