Asef Bayat is Professor of Sociology and Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn and Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring.
Bayat, a sociologist and an acute chronicler of everyday life in
the Middle East and North Africa, explores the fate of marginalized
people in the uprisings of the Arab Spring.
*Foreign Affairs*
Stands out…for its brilliance and lack of sentimentality…Focusing
on Egypt and Tunisia, Bayat’s argument is that the events of 2011
set something radical in motion and imposed a new set of social
relations onto everyday life. The book is rich with examples of
this everyday resistance from both countries.
*Jacobin*
Pioneers an important topic…By diving deeper into overlooked and
marginal groups, Bayat reveals the dynamics of ordinary people
disregarding individual ideals and participating in something
exceptional. Revolutionary Life is a study of the ordinary that is
anything but.
*Middle East Quarterly*
[Bayat] has been a sure-footed observer of revolutions for
decades…Although the Arab revolts appear to have largely failed,
Bayat argues that even revolutions that do not reach the pinnacle
of power leave behind lasting change.
*Survival: Global Politics and Strategy*
This remarkable book uncovers how mass revolutionary uprisings
shape—and are shaped by—the everyday experiences of people from all
walks of life. In Revolutionary Life, Asef Bayat has delivered
another tour de force.
*Erica Chenoweth, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment,
Harvard University*
Through finely detailed studies of the uprisings in Tunisia and
Egypt, highlighting the lives of the poor and subaltern, Bayat
illuminates the gap between changing political structures and
transforming everyday life that contemporary revolutions everywhere
must bridge. He makes an important and timely argument about how,
although they did not significantly change state power, the Arab
Spring revolutions gave rise to new subjectivities and a new
political imaginary, which could be powerful resources for the
future.
*Michael Hardt, Professor of Literature, Duke University*
While revolutions are mostly made from below, through mass
mobilization of ordinary people, they are usually narrated from
above. Reversing that perspective, Asef Bayat explains the
development of the Arab Spring by analyzing the everyday life of
the subaltern. Most innovative for the study of extraordinary
moments and their outcomes is the importance he gives to the
transformations in people’s subjectivities, expectations, and
practices as a trigger for, but also a constraint upon, social and
political change. Empirically rich and theoretically provoking,
this is a must-read book for all those interested in contentious
politics.
*Donatella della Porta, Professor of Political Science, Scuola
Normale Superiore*
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