Authors

In 2010, a year before the outbreak of the Arab uprisings, I published a book called Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East in which I discussed how ordinary people—the poor, marginalized women, or youth—could bring a..

How could I not write it? The outbreak of the uprisings—starting with Tunisia (where no one expected it, except perhaps people like the militant miners of Ghafsa) and then quickly moving to Egypt, then Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and others—generated an extraordinar..

“What would Gramsci think of our current predicaments?” wondered the young leftist mayor of the Italian city of Cagliari, Massimo Zedda. “He would probably think that things have improved, but we also have many problems in Sardinia… That is why we need to organize.” With this proclamation, the b..

Things in the Middle East usually appear far worse than they really are when looked at from the outside. But  on my recent visit to Egypt—as I talked and listened to people, watched local television, read daily papers and made observations—it became clear that revolutionaries were going thr..

Asef Bayat, editor, Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Pre..

On the face of it, 30 June was a "coup": the army intervened to remove an elected president, annul the constitution, and oversee an interim government to undertake new elections for president and parliament, and draft a new constitution. But what if this is what the majority of people ..

Serious concerns are expressed currently in Tunisia and Egypt about the sabotage of the defeated elites. Many in the revolutionary and pro-democracy circles speak of a creeping counter-revolution. This is not surprising. If revolutions are about intense struggle fo..

For years, western political elites and their local allies have charged the Arab peoples with political apathy and lethargy. The argument that Arabs are uninterested in seeking to wrest greater democratic freedoms from their author..