Asef Bayat - Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring

Revolutionary Life

The Everyday of the Arab Spring

ASEF BAYAT

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England

2021

Copyright 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Jacket photograph: Tahrir Square, January 25, 2012 by Gigi Ibrahim

Jacket design: Tim Jones

978-0-674-98789-0 (hardcover)

978-0-674-26947-7 (EPUB)

978-0-674-26948-4 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Bayat, Asef, author.

Title: Revolutionary life : the everyday of the Arab Spring / Asef Bayat.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021016270 | Subjects: LCSH: Arab Spring, 2010 | EgyptHistory2011 | EgyptHistoryProtests, 20112013. | TunisiaHistoryDemonstrations, 2010 | EgyptSocial life and customs20th century. | EgyptSocial life and customs21st century. | TunisiaSocial life and customs20th century. | TunisiaSocial life and customs21st century.

Classification: LCC JQ1850.A91 B38 2021 | DDC 909 / .097492708312dc23

LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2021016270

H OW DO WE TELL THE STORY OF REVOLUTION? The standard narrative focuses on the state, high politics, the palace, and pashas to examine the outcome and gauge success or failure of revolutionary movements. This perspective is undeniably crucial for any understanding of revolutions, including the ones that rose up from 2010 and have collectively been called the Arab Spring. The remarkable uprisings that spread throughout the Arab world signaled the emergence of a new generation of twenty-first-century revolutions that were rich as movementsbut woefully poor as change.No wonder that by the middle of the decade, most observers described these revolutions as outright failures. This appraisal may ring true if we take a macrostructural, political, and state-centric perspective to look at these historical experiences. The picture, however, becomes more complex if we shift the lens to observe and examine what happened in the social realm, in the everyday life, and among the grassroots. This book is an attempt to offer a different way of thinking about revolution by focusing not simply on the elites, the state, and regime change but also on what the revolution meant to the ordinary people, to the poor, the marginalized youth, women, and other subaltern groups in their everyday life. The story of revolution, then, is not just what happened at the top; it is also the tale of what went on at the basein farms, factories, families, and schools; in social relations governed by old hierarchies; in peoples subjectivities; and in the practices of everyday life. At the core of this inquiry is not just what the revolution did to the everyday, but equally what the everyday did to revolution. Never mind that these two domains of human experience are hardly separate even though they are invariably seen as such. This book brings together and bridges the analytical disconnect between everyday lifeas the realm of the ordinary, the mundane, and the routine, and revolutionsas the domain of the extraordinary, the monumental, and rupture.

The idea of this book came to me just a few weeks after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. This was roughly a year after I had published Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East,in which I discussed how unassuming nonmovements, those collective actions of noncollective people, were important players in pushing for cumulative change in the countries of the Middle East under authoritarian regimes, neoliberal economies, and moral surveillance. Now, in light of the uprisings, I was confronted by a host of questions from journalists, activists, and academics about what role, if any, those nonmovements had played in these extraordinary revolutions. At the time, I had no clear idea. But the question was intriguing enough intellectually and politically to push me to explore further the nature and dynamics of these remarkable political uprisings. I have been engaged in this journey since March 2011, when I began my field research in revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia, continuing with a half-dozen fieldtrips during which I attended events, rallies, and street protests; visited popular neighborhoods, street markets, labor unions, research centers, and political parties; and held conversations with activists, academics, officials, as well as ordinary people in caf