Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring
Author: Asef Bayat Harvard
Publisher: Harvard University Press, USA
While, of course, there were uprisings and mass protests in the period from the late 1970s, some of the most important include the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the anti-globalisation protests in the late 1990s in, among others, Seattle, Gothenburg, and Genoa – the revolts and revolutions that took place in 2011 in North Africa and the Middle East constitute a decisive turning point in the recent history of rebellion after a long period without significant protests.
women rejected patriarchal gender norms, students rejected an archaic education system, and the youth were at the forefront of the fight against the government’s forces.
Arab Spring
The so-called Arab Spring, which started in Tunisia in December 2010 and quickly spread to Egypt in January 2011 and then to Yemen, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and several other countries in the region, appears in retrospect as the starting shot of an entirely new comprehensive cycle of uprisings, in which we still seem to find ourselves.
From the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in January and February 2011, we have a sequence that includes events such as the plaza occupation movements in Southern Europe, which led to Syriza and Podemos, the Occupy movement in the USA in the autumn of 2011; the major transport protests in Brazil in 2013; democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2014 and 2019; protests against racist policing in the USA in 2014 and again in 2020, where we had the George Floyd revolt; Maidan in Ukraine in 2014; the Yellow Vests in France in 2018 and 2019; the Sudan commune in 2019; uprisings in Kazakhstan and Sri Lanka in 2022; the feminist uprising in Iran; and most recently strikes and demonstrations against Macron’s pension reform in France in the spring of 2023. As described by Donatella di Cesare and Endnotes, among others, we are dealing with a global discontinuous sequence, where uprisings continue to occur, with demonstrators taking to the streets demanding that local governments or dictators step down.
In most places, the mass protests have not resulted in regime change, but they famously did in Tunisia and Egypt, where Ben Ali and Mubarak were quickly ousted. By demonstrating in the streets and occupying central squares, protesters succeeded in toppling dictators who had been firmly in power for decades and, until then, seemed like they would stay indefinitely.
In the years following 2011, both revolutions have famously been rolled back, and both Egypt and Tunisia are today again ruled by dictators. The reversal happened fastest in Egypt, where the military retook power after a short alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. Since 2014, Egypt has been ruled with a firm hand by President and General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Any form of collective mobilisation has long been impossible. Tunisia was long the exception in analyses of the Arab Spring. If Syria and Libya quickly were thrown into civil wars, and Egypt became a military dictatorship, not only were elections held on several occasions up to 2020 in Tunisia and governments formed with the participation of various parties, it was possible to articulate demands for social justice without ending up in prison. That is no longer possible. Now, President Kais Saied sits in power with expanded powers. He fired the government in 2021 and gave himself the right to dismiss judges in January 2021. In the summer of 2022, he dissolved the parliament and introduced a new constitution, centralising power around the president. The immediate conclusion seems negative: the Arab Spring has turned into an ice-cold winter.
Revolutions live on in everyday life
The Iranian-American sociologist Asef Bayat, who has already written several important books about mass protests in the Middle East, has published a new book, Revolutionary Life, where he tries to challenge the analysis of the Arab Spring as a univocal defeat. According to Bayat, we misunderstand the revolutions if we focus exclusively on the regimes and how political power is organised. As he writes, there is no doubt that the old regimes have been reestablished. But the revolutions live on in everyday life, according to Bayat.
The revolutions were decisive for the young, women, and the poor. All three groups played an active role in the uprisings and experienced them as an opening where they gained agency. Many did things they had never done before: women rejected patriarchal gender norms, students rejected an archaic education system, and the youth were at the forefront of the fight against the government’s forces. As Bayat writes, the autocratic closure that has taken place in both countries, of course, has great significance, but he tries to show that the three groups have not only learned from the revolutions but that there are still various projects and organisations, all maintaining a connection to the revolutionary events of 2011.
Neighbourhood Committees – local youth groups
One of Bayat’s most convincing examples of the revolution’s afterlife in everyday life is the so-called Neighbourhood Committees, a local youth group established in Tunisia and Egypt during and in the aftermath of the uprisings. Bayat understands them as an organisational form modelled on the microcosm of another social order, which the revolutionaries established on Tahrir Square in Cairo in January–February 2011. Bayat describes how these youth groups, in the first moment during the revolutionary uprisings, where the state’s repressive and ideological institutions collapsed or disappeared – functioned as a mixture of civil society and neighbourhood watch, among other things, taking care of removing trash.
In the next phase, after the regimes had been reestablished, they functioned as organisations for local development. According to Bayat, many of these groups have succeeded in surviving, even after the regimes have turned up the repression and tightened their grip on the counter-public established in 2011. Today, the dream of another society thus lives on in the thousands of small or large Neighbourhood Committees. When the uprising comes next time, it will thus have a different starting point. That is Bayat’s hope. He does not formulate it himself that way, but that is the point of the analysis.
Bayat is quite right to focus on the plaza occupation model. Undoubtedly, it has been central in the new cycle of uprisings. In 2019 and 2020, we saw again how demonstrators occupied squares and used them as a starting point for actions. This was the case in Sudan and Sri Lanka, where marketplaces were occupied. However, the occupation of central squares in the capital also comes with obvious limitations, as it has been difficult to move from the city’s open, crowded spaces into factories and other production sites, i.e., move from the circulation to the production sphere. The uprisings have, so to speak, remained on the squares and assumed the form of political or rather anti-political protests, where the political leaders or even the entire political system are rejected.
the rejections are so radical that they go beyond just demanding reforms or a regime change.
Going further into the dissolution
Bayat has introduced the term «refolution» as a description of the uprisings, whereby he tries to point out the newness of the protests, that they take place without references to the three dominant revolutionary models from the 20th century in the region, anti-colonial nationalism, Leninism, and militant Islamism. According to Bayat, none of the ideologies work anymore, and the new uprisings take place in a kind of ideological limbo, where there is primarily rejection.
Bayat, however, misunderstands the absence of ideologies as a demand for the systems to reform themselves. But rather, the rejections are so radical that they go beyond just demanding reforms or a regime change. We should probably rather understand the revolts as destitutive, as The Invisible Committee and Giorgio Agamben do.
As Bayat himself quotes a 22-year-old young Tunisian man as saying he is simply uninterested in politics, because politicians are nothing but actors who are after money. That insight, what we can call a revolutionary anti-political perspective, does not constitute a bad starting point for the upcoming uprisings, which at least perhaps avoid being caught in political electoral acts, as happened in Greece and Spain.
There is not much to preserve in a crisis-ridden capitalist world, and it may soon become necessary to go further into the dissolution.