{"id":2470,"date":"2017-10-19T22:41:27","date_gmt":"2017-10-20T02:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/?p=2470"},"modified":"2017-10-20T16:52:10","modified_gmt":"2017-10-20T20:52:10","slug":"bernard-e-harcourt-on-the-arab-spring-a-readers-companion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-on-the-arab-spring-a-readers-companion\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | On the Arab Spring: A Reader\u2019s Companion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Bernard E. Harcourt<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cIndeed, it remains a question if what emerged during the Arab Spring were in fact revolutions in the sense of their twentieth-century counterparts.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">\u2014 Asef Bayat, <em>Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring<\/em> (2017)<a href=\"#_edn1\" name=\"_ednref1\">[1]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>From Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, and Syria, to other Arab states such as Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, and Yemen, a series of mass mobilizations, uprisings, and rebellions shook the Arab world in 2011 and rippled throughout the rest of the continents. The popular unrest was portrayed using a wide range of concepts: \u201cUprisings.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn2\" name=\"_ednref2\">[2]<\/a> \u201cRevolts.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn3\" name=\"_ednref3\">[3]<\/a> \u201cUpheavals.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn4\" name=\"_ednref4\">[4]<\/a> \u201cCommotion.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn5\" name=\"_ednref5\">[5]<\/a> \u201cInsurrectionary energies.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn6\" name=\"_ednref6\">[6]<\/a> \u201cRevolutions.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn7\" name=\"_ednref7\">[7]<\/a> \u201cRevolutionary episodes.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn8\" name=\"_ednref8\">[8]<\/a> \u201cRevolution 2.0\u201d<a href=\"#_edn9\" name=\"_ednref9\">[9]<\/a> \u201cPolitical revolution.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn10\" name=\"_ednref10\">[10]<\/a> \u201cLong revolution.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn11\" name=\"_ednref11\">[11]<\/a> \u201cReformism.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn12\" name=\"_ednref12\">[12]<\/a> Even \u201cRefolutions,\u201d<a href=\"#_edn13\" name=\"_ednref13\">[13]<\/a>\u2014a mixture of \u201crevolutionary mobilizations and reformist trajectories.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn14\" name=\"_ednref14\">[14]<\/a> \u00a0To some, it comprised a series of \u201ctrue revolutions that was hijacked, manipulated, or stalled by the counterrevolution.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn15\" name=\"_ednref15\">[15]<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The multiplicity of concepts reflected at the time, and still today, a lot of confusion about what exactly happened and why. Were these revolutions, in the end? Or insurrections? Or rebellions? Recall that in Tahrir Square and around Egypt, the 18 days of upheaval resulted in over 800 deaths and thousands of injuries, following lengthy violent street battles. Mubarak was deposed after thirty years of autocratic rule, and stood trial. In Libya, Qaddafi and his son were killed, executed by rebels\u2014Qaddafi&#8217;s lifeless body was trampled and defiled by riotous crowds. The uprisings in Syria led to a bloody civil war, still ongoing, of international proportions. Ben Ali in Tunisia was overthrown and replaced by the country\u2019s first-ever democratically elected president. How should we understand the popular uprisings that produced these momentous events in the Arab world? Should we describe them using a single concept or different ones? Do we assess them by their outcomes\u2014civil war here, a military coup there, or democratic elections? And how can we interpret an uprising, in its immediacy, when the outcomes are so indeterminate? Is it even possible to assess the uprisings in themselves, in isolation from their subsequent historical development? Can we even analyze them now, before we really know what they will ultimately lead to?<\/p>\n<p>Coming on the heels of <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/1-13\/\">Uprising 1\/13<\/a>, which explored the <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-epilogue-on-revolution\/\">modern concept of revolution<\/a> as a form of social emancipation and transformation of social structures, and <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/2-13\/\">Uprising 2\/13<\/a>, which examined the fragmentation of that ideal through the proliferation of <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-epilogue-four-modalities-of-insurrection\/\">Maoist-inspired insurrectional models <\/a>from the 1960s onward, we confront here mass protests that directly challenge our schemes of understanding. To think through the present, it seems, may be even more demanding than to conceptualize the past.<\/p>\n<p>A central question arises: <em>What models of uprising can we discern in the Arab Spring and how do the existing paradigms that we have already explored\u2014revolution or insurrections\u2014help us understand these upheavals?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Our <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/3-13\/\">readings<\/a> offer guidance\u2014different perspectives, perhaps, or a variety of ways to explore the Arab Spring as a form(s) of uprising.<a href=\"#_edn16\" name=\"_ednref16\">[16]<\/a> They offer at least five objective lenses that allow us to focus on different levels of these historical events\u2014each of which may provide a key to understanding the Arab Spring uprisings:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The importance of geo-political interests;<\/li>\n<li>The ideological dimensions of the protest movements;<\/li>\n<li>The place of domestic power struggles;<\/li>\n<li>The contingency of political protest; and<\/li>\n<li>The role of reformism in revolution<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Let\u2019s look at each of these in turn.<\/p>\n<h1>1\/\u00a0 The larger geo-political context<\/h1>\n<p>Tariq Ali and Perry Anderson highlight the broader geo-political context within which the popular uprisings unfolded and, ultimately, were rechanneled. For Ali and Anderson, the mass mobilizations were instrumental in bringing about change, but that change was determined and controlled by the broader imperialist interests of the United States and Europe\u2014interests having to do primarily with oil and national security and the maintenance and security of Israel.<\/p>\n<p>Tariq Ali argues that the entire trajectory of Middle Eastern politics\u2014from the lengthy rule of autocrats over the past decades to the rapid fall of Mubarak, Qaddafi, Ben Ali, etc., and the invasion of Iraq\u2014are determined and primarily shaped by U.S. interests, specifically by \u201cthe intertwining logics of Washington\u2019s jealous guardianship of the region\u2019s oil and Israel\u2019s grip over its Middle East policy.\u201d (*2) Ali offers a close reading of the imperialist history of the region\u2014and of the varying treatment of the different dynasties during the Arab Spring\u2014to show the subtle variations of Washington\u2019s impact on the region and influence on the life course of the different uprisings. Ali demonstrates, for instance, how Washington quickly entered into talks with the Egyptian army high command to make sure they would abide by the 1979 treaty with Israel. (*3) Neither Ali nor Anderson minimize the popular unrest. The Arab \u201cuprisings\u201d began, in Ali\u2019s words, \u201cas indigenous revolts against corrupt police states and social deprivation.\u201d (*2; see Anderson *3) But they were quickly internationalized to control their outcomes. The \u201creal politics at stake,\u201d in Ali\u2019s terms, are U.S. and Israeli interests in the region. (*5)<\/p>\n<p>Anderson shares this view: what is most characteristic about the history and politics of the region is the long imperial history and its continued hold over the Arab present. What sets the Middle East apart, Anderson writes, is \u201cthe unique longevity and intensity of the Western imperial grip on the region, over the past century.\u201d (*1) And it is this long history that explains both the longevity of the former despots in the region (41 years for Gaddafi, 29 for Mubarak, 23 for Ben Ali), as well as their rapid and sequential fall. For many years, the autocrats guaranteed U.S. and European interests with more certainty than democratic elections would have ensured. As a result \u201cImperial and dictatorial logics remain[ed] intertwined.\u201d (Anderson *3) But the social pressures exploded in 2011 as a result of the crises of inequality, unemployment, and misery\u2014blowing the lid off the kettle. The combustion aimed at the existing regime and its downfall\u2014the most common outcry was for the fall of the despots: \u201c<em>Al-sha\u2019b yurid isquat al-nizam<\/em>\u201d or \u201cThe people want the downfall of the regime!\u201d (Anderson *3) In this context, Washington ultimately continued to control the levers, maintaining good relations where it felt it needed to, and fomenting regime change elsewhere\u2014willing as ever to find an Erdogan to replace a Mubarak or a Ben Ali (*4).<\/p>\n<h1>2\/\u00a0 The question of ideology<\/h1>\n<p>By contrast to the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist insurgents of the post-war period, the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring were predominantly reformist, Asef Bayat argues, and they led more of a \u201crefolution\u201d than a revolution: a mass uprising whose goal was not so much to put in place a new regime, as it was to get the old regime to reform itself. These were not, Bayat contends, revolutionary take-overs of power and state apparatuses, but rather demands that the political system reform itself. On his view\u2014signaling Foucault\u2014the people in Tahrir Square were communicating that \u201cWe will not be governed like this anymore,\u201d they were not seizing power in order to put in place a new form of government. In effect, the revolutionaries were reformists, as were the ensuing uprisings.<\/p>\n<p>The problem, according to Bayat, is that the radical and militant ideologies of the 1960s and 70s (anticolonial, Marxist-Leninist, and militant Islamist) had given way to a pervasive neoliberalism and complacency that replaced those ideologies with belief instead in \u201cthe individual, freedom, rights, civil society, free market, and legal reform.\u201d (18) For Bayat, the fault lies in \u201cthe spread of postmodern thought in academia\u201d that \u201cfurther constricted efforts to imagine grand ideas, utopian orders, and universal values\u2026\u201d (18-19). The fault lies in Michel Foucault, responsible for\u00a0 our \u201cquietism.\u201d (19) Identity politics undermined radicalism\u2014echoing recent critiques of identity politics by Mark Lilla. Recognition replaced redistribution. And all these ideological weaknesses produced new anarchists who were horizontal, structureless, and leaderless.<\/p>\n<p>The real effects of neoliberalism in the Arab world may have contributed to the social pressures that erupted in the Arab Spring by creating greater inequalities and popular dissent, but the pervasive ideology itself simultaneously demobilized and deradicalized the opposition. (23) It demobilized class struggle and the ambitions of redistribution. It even demobilized the Islamist movements, leading them away from anti-imperialism and toward reformist politics. (26)<\/p>\n<p>In the end, the Arab uprisings lacked an intellectual anchor or ideology\u2014such as, for instance, radical anti-imperialism or anti-capitalism. Pulling a page from Samuel Moyn&#8217;s <em>The Last Utopia<\/em>, Bayat writes that \u201cArab revolutionaries were preoccupied more with the broad issues of human rights, political accountability, and legal reform.\u201d (11) And ultimately, the uprisings have not fundamentally broken with the old political and social order (with the exception of Tunisia, 11) What we saw were movements characterized by \u201ctheir lack of ideology, lax coordination, and absence of any galvanizing leadership and intellectual precepts [that] have almost no precedent.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn17\" name=\"_ednref17\">[17]<\/a> It is this demobilization that explains, for Bayat, why there was \u201cno significant shift in the structure of power and state institutions or economic vision, even though a spectacular uprising did succeed in toppling an entrenched dictator\u201d in Egypt. (15) Bayat continues:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What transpired in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, I argue, were neither revolutions in the sense of the twentieth-century experiences (i.e., rapid and radical transformation of the state pushed by popular movements from below) nor simply reform (i.e., gradual and managed change carried out often from above and within the existing structural arrangements) but a complex and contradictory mix of both. In a sense, they were \u201crefolutions\u201d\u2014revolutionary movements that emerged to compel the incumbent states to change themselves, to carry out meaningful reforms on behalf of the revolution. (18)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<h1>3\/\u00a0 The domestic struggle for authority<\/h1>\n<p>Tala Asad returns to Arendtian themes of\u00a0 authority to reexamine the fate of the Egyptian uprising\u2014and raises as well important questions about the role of the spiritual, religion, and tradition in revolutionary uprisings (e.g., the purported Islamic Awakening in Egypt (169)), questions that we will return to and explore deeply in the context of <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/6-13\/\">Uprising 6\/13 on Foucault in Iran<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>On Asad\u2019s view, the uprising in Egypt reflected an aspiration to create a new democratic tradition, but did not produce a new foundation because it got co-opted by the military. As a result, in Asad\u2019s words, \u201cthe solidarity it generated was evanescent.\u201d (184) No new tradition was born. Instead, the military high command, hand-in-hand with capitalist interests, stepped in to fill a vacuum of authority. On this key question of authority, Hannah Arendt had failed to recognize, Asad contends, \u201cthat <em>coups d\u2019\u00e9tat<\/em> belongs to the same family of political violence as revolution.\u201d (183)<a href=\"#_edn18\" name=\"_ednref18\">[18]<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The military high command killed the revolutionary potential in Egypt, thereby creating a new authority. The protesters initially and mistakenly viewed the military as their saviors, but all along the military saw things very differently: \u201cThey understood that it was not the uprising that undermined state authority but the erosion of state authority\u2014of its credibility\u2014that had allowed the popular uprising to explode and the military to move in.\u201d (185) For Asad, the uprising never created a new foundation because the military and capitalist interests reconstituted the authority of the state.<\/p>\n<p>For Asef Bayat as well, the counterrevolutionary forces had to be interpreted predominantly through the lens of the \u201cdeep state,\u201d especially the police and intelligence services, rather than the tentacles of US imperial interests (see, e.g., 16-17). \u201cAll revolutions,\u201d Bayat writes, \u201ccarry within themselves the germs of counterrevolutionary intrigues.\u201d (16) Bayat recognizes the larger geopolitical interests, and his history of the Iranian Revolution reflects the US role in both installing and deposing the Shah; but the focus of his analysis is more on the deep state and domestic struggles for authority.<\/p>\n<h1>4\/\u00a0 The contingency of protest<\/h1>\n<p>Soha Bayoumi and Sherine Hamdy present yet another facet to the uprisings: their quotidian aspect and fortuity. Bayoumi and Hamdy show how physicians got swept into the mobilizations, many of them experiencing a kind of political awakening out of their more mundane existence, others getting pulled into the stream further because of their prior commitments to social justice and improved health care.<\/p>\n<p>In their study, based on interviews with physicians who were members of \u201cDoctors Without Rights\u201d and \u201cTahrir Doctors\u201d during the occupation of Tahrir Square and later during \u201cThe Battle of Mohamed Mahmoud Street,\u201d Bayoumi and Hamdy document how so many of their subjects became implicated in the uprisings as a result of their being assaulted and victimized by the police while playing the role of the neutral first aid responders. They became politicized despite their purported neutrality precisely because of the violations of that neutrality. (229) Others were radicalized by witnessing the violence inflicted on the protesters. (232) Drawing on Peter Redfield\u2019s writings and on their many interviews, Bayoumi and Hamdy suggest that \u201cthe simple act of witnessing can both serve as a source of knowledge and forge one\u2019s alliances and guide one\u2019s moral compass.\u201d (233)<\/p>\n<p>What their interviews reveal is the haphazard and fortuitous ways in which individuals often get involved in protest movements and uprisings\u2014by witnessing, by playing a neutral role, by accident. These doctors, for the most part, were not radical militants, nor even necessarily reformists. To be sure, they were not initiating or leading the protests (for the most part); and they were not (for the vast majority) the vanguard of the movement. But they contributed to the revolutionary episode in the process of getting implicated.<\/p>\n<p>The documentary <a href=\"https:\/\/maisonfrancaise.org\/tahrir-liberation-square\"><em>Tahrir: Liberation Square<\/em><\/a> (dir. Stefano Savona, 2012), shown on October 12, 2017, at the Maison Fran\u00e7aise, somewhat confirmed this view of the uprising. It followed a handful of passionate Tahrir Square protesters who nevertheless seemed, at times, to vacillate and who, like the subjects described by Bayat, had no roadmap for what might come after the downfall of the regime.<\/p>\n<h1>5\/\u00a0 Reformism and revolution<\/h1>\n<p>Safwan Masri focuses on Tunisia, the exceptional case\u2014what he calls \u201cAn Arab Anomaly,\u201d insofar as it was the only uprising that produced, so far, lasting regime change: from an autocratic leader, Ben Ali, who maintained power for over two decades, to the country\u2019s first-ever democratically elected president, with a new constitution and fair parliamentary elections.<\/p>\n<p>What explains the Tunisian anomaly, Masri maintains, is precisely the people&#8217;s reformism. In effect, Masri turns Bayat on its head: the revolutionary uprising in Tunisia could only, and did only, succeed and produce real regime change <em>because<\/em> it was tilled on soil that was reformist by actors who were reformists. It is precisely \u201cTunisia\u2019s remarkable culture of reform, which dates back to the nineteenth century and is rooted in a progressive and adaptive brand of Islam\u201d that accounts for the success of the revolution. (xxvii)<\/p>\n<p>In effect, according to Safwan Masri the driving force of the successful regime change in Tunisia was in fact a certain reformism that has marked the country for a century, that transformed the educational system, and that brought about a coexistence of religion and secularism. Masri points to a number of dimensions\u2014women\u2019s rights, educational reforms, a strong labor movement. Women, for instance, achieved the right to vote and run in elections as early as 1957, and the right to abortion in 1973 (two years before France). (11-15) \u201cReformism,\u201d Masri writes, \u201chas been critical to the nation\u2019s evolution into a progressive and tolerant society.\u201d (xxvii)<\/p>\n<p>Masri eschews broad political theoretic claims (xx), but nevertheless, his book proposes one: a history of reformism may facilitate the success of a popular revolution. \u201cA country where certain liberal conditions existed\u2014women\u2019s rights, modern education, and religious moderation\u2014might just have a better chance than most to transition to democracy.\u201d (xix) This makes Tunisia an exceptional case\u2014predisposed to democracy by its culture of reformism\u2014that is unlikely to replicate in the other Arab nations. There were other possible contributing factors, Masri notes\u2014a homogenous population, lower geopolitical importance, stable boundaries predating the colonial period, an easier post-colonial transition. But the key factor, Masri argues, is a history of reformism.<\/p>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\">What is to be done?<\/h1>\n<p>As Talal Asad\u2019s essay and the very title of Tariq Ali\u2019s intervention from 2013, \u201cBetween Past and Future,\u201d suggest, Hannah Arendt\u2019s writings on tradition and authority loom large in these conversations. You will recall that her essay \u201cWhat Is Authority?\u201d was published in a volume of her own titled <em>Between Past and Future<\/em>. Talal Asad explicitly draws the link to Arendt\u2019s essay, which, he writes, \u201ctraced a very specific concept of tradition that was central to European history, in which it was bound closely to both authority and religion, such that undermining of the one inevitably led to the undermining of the other two.\u201d (181) Modern society, for Arendt, destroyed tradition, and in the process, authority.<\/p>\n<p>Arendt remarked that \u201cauthority has vanished from the modern world,\u201d (91) and, as a result, that \u201cwe are no longer in a position to know what authority really <em>is<\/em>.\u201d (92) The problem, in Arendt\u2019s view, was fundamental and foundational to our current human condition:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The fact that not only the various revolutions of the twentieth century but all revolutions since the French have gone wrong, ending in either restoration or tyranny, seems to indicate that even these last means of salvation provided by tradition have become inadequate. Authority as we once knew it, which grew out of the Roman experience of foundation and was understood in the light of Greek political philosophy, has nowhere been re-established, either through revolutions or through the even less promising means of restoration, and least of all through the conservative moods and trends which occasionally sweep public opinion. For to live in a political realm with neither authority nor the concomitant awareness that the source of authority transcends power and those who are in power, means to be confronted anew, without the religious trust in a sacred beginning and without the protection of traditional and therefore self-evident standards of behavior, by the elementary problems of human living-together. (141)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A kind of despair attaches to this idea of the demise of authority\u2014a despair that, today, seems to accompany so many reflections on the Arab Spring (with the exception perhaps of Safwan Masri\u2019s book on Tunisia.) Asef Bayat emphasizes this \u201cdespair that came to afflict so many activists in postrevolutionary moments\u201d (27). Masri too recognizes how, across much of the Arab world, the Arab Spring \u201cquickly turned into a dark and stormy winter, crushing all hopes for better lives and representative governments for those who had challenged the repressive status quo.\u201d (xxv)<\/p>\n<p>Against this despair, Talal Asad argues instead for more polyvalent forms of political engagement that contest authority at different levels or, in his words, that would \u201caddress numerous overlapping bodies and territories.\u201d (212) This would mean not always seeing conflict and aiming resistance at the same target\u2014at times focusing on matters of national citizenship, at others of religious faith, and still at others of local governance.<\/p>\n<p>Asad reminds us of the remark Foucault made in the context of the Iranian Revolution: \u201cConcerning the expression \u2018Islamic government,\u2019 why cast immediate suspicion on the adjective \u2018Islamic\u2019? The word \u2018government\u2019 suffices, in itself, to awaken vigilance.\u201d (206) It is vigilance across the board that would be called for\u2014without any specific privilege to tradition, to the national, or to the local: multiple different strategies of resistance at various different levels. Asad sees in this a way out, not only out of the failure of the Egyptian revolution, but more generally for us all. These problems, he notes, reflect a \u201ctragedy not merely of Egypt but of our time.\u201d (214)<\/p>\n<p>Others, such as Tariq Ali and Perry Anderson, point us back to earlier, more radical strands of revolutionary thought and practice. For Anderson, writing in 2011, what was missing in the Arab Spring was a stronger strand of anti-imperialism. The only way for the Arab revolts \u201cto become a revolution,\u201d Anderson wrote in 2011, is for the region as a whole to reneg on the Camp David Accords. \u201cThe litmus test of the recovery of a democratic Arab dignity lies there,\u201d Anderson concludes (*5).<\/p>\n<p>Tariq Ali, for his part, points us back to Lenin as a guide to rethink uprisings\u2014especially in his most recent book <em>The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution<\/em> (2017). For this seminar, Ali specifically pointed our attention to Lenin\u2019s <em>April Theses<\/em>, originally pronounced by Lenin at meetings of soviets in Saint Petersburg in early April 1917, so in between the first revolution of February 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>April Theses<\/em> were, as Ali reminds us, a clarion call to action and to order at a time when the Bolshevik leadership was adrift\u2014a provocative, \u201cexplosive,\u201d and extremely controversial call for a second, truly socialist revolution to overcome the first, bourgeois political revolution. (151, 164) At that time, Lenin called on his party members to unleash that second revolution\u2014in terms that would have had a special resonance in Egypt in 2011:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cThe specific feature of the present situation in Russia,\u201d Lenin wrote at the time, \u201cis that the country is <em>passing<\/em> from the first stage of the revolution\u2014which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie\u2014to its <em>second stage<\/em>, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.\u201d (*2)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>These words, Ali notes, \u201cpaved the way for the revolution in October 1917.\u201d (10) They paved the way for the kind of vanguard, leader<em>ful<\/em> revolution that, it seems, was consciously avoided by many in Tahrir Square, and latter in Zuccotti Park. The contrast could not be sharper.<\/p>\n<p>The question this raises, ultimately\u2014in the face of political leaders like Donald Trump, Recep Erdo\u011fan, or Rodrigo Duterte\u2014is the proper role for leadership on the other side of the barricades. This is a question we will explore in the context of <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/3-13\/\">Uprising 3\/13<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\">Bibliography<\/h1>\n<p>Tariq Ali, \u201cBetween Past and Future,\u201d <em>New Left Review <\/em>80, March-April 2013.<\/p>\n<p>Perry Anderson, \u201cOn the Concatenation in the Arab World,\u201d <em>New Left Review <\/em>68, March-April 2011.<\/p>\n<p>Talal Asad, \u201cThinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today,\u201d <em>Critical Inquiry<\/em> 42 (Autumn 2015)<\/p>\n<p>Asef Bayat, <em>Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring<\/em>, Chapter 1 (Stanford University Press, 2017)<\/p>\n<p>Soha Bayoumi and Sherine Hamdy, \u201cEgypt\u2019s Popular Uprising and the Stakes of Medical Neutrality,\u201d <em>S. Cult Med Psychiatry<\/em> (2016) 40: 223<\/p>\n<p>Safwan M. Masri, Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly (Columbia University Press, 2017)<\/p>\n<p>Tariq Ali, <em>The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution<\/em> (Verso 2017)<\/p>\n<p>Hannah Arendt\u2019s \u201cWhat Is Authority?\u201d in <em>Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought<\/em> (New York: Viking Press, 1961)<\/p>\n<p>Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, \u201cThe Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution,\u201d aka \u201cThe April Theses,\u201d <em>Pravda<\/em> No 26 (April 7, 1917)<\/p>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\">Notes<\/h1>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref1\" name=\"_edn1\">[1]<\/a> Bayat 2017:2.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref2\" name=\"_edn2\">[2]<\/a> Ali 2013:*1; Anderson 2011:*3 and *4; Asad 2015:181 and 184; Bayat 2017:8 and 10; Hamdy and Bayoumi 2015:223; Masri 2017:5.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref3\" name=\"_edn3\">[3]<\/a> Anderson 2011:*3 and *5;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref4\" name=\"_edn4\">[4]<\/a> Anderson 2011:*1 and *4; Bayat 2017:1 and 2;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref5\" name=\"_edn5\">[5]<\/a> Anderson 2100:*3.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref6\" name=\"_edn6\">[6]<\/a> Ali 2013:*1.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref7\" name=\"_edn7\">[7]<\/a> Bayat 2017:2, 8, 9, passim; Masri 2017:xix.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref8\" name=\"_edn8\">[8]<\/a> Bayat 2017:1.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref9\" name=\"_edn9\">[9]<\/a> Bayat 2017:16, quoting Wael Ghoneim.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref10\" name=\"_edn10\">[10]<\/a> Bayat 2017:15, quoting Gilbert Achcar.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref11\" name=\"_edn11\">[11]<\/a> Bayat, drawing on Raymond Williams, <em>The Long Revolution<\/em>, London 1961.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref12\" name=\"_edn12\">[12]<\/a> Masri 2017:xxvii.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref13\" name=\"_edn13\">[13]<\/a> Bayat 2017:17.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref14\" name=\"_edn14\">[14]<\/a> Bayat 2017:27.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref15\" name=\"_edn15\">[15]<\/a> Bayat 2017:15.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref16\" name=\"_edn16\">[16]<\/a> Note that Bayat 2017:8-10 provides a short chronology of the Arab Spring uprisings; Masri 2017:1-3 for the Tunisia uprising;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref17\" name=\"_edn17\">[17]<\/a> Bayat 2017:2.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref18\" name=\"_edn18\">[18]<\/a> Asad adds that <em>coups d\u2019\u00e9tat<\/em> differs from revolution only \u201cin being a challenge from within the governing elite\u2014one that aims to change only the rulers of the state not the system itself, but that legitimates itself in terms of necessity (saving the nation and ensuring its progress).\u201d (183)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Bernard E. Harcourt \u201cIndeed, it remains a question if what emerged during the Arab Spring were in fact revolutions in the sense of their twentieth-century counterparts.\u201d \u2014 Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (2017)[1]&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-on-the-arab-spring-a-readers-companion\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue Reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[51935],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-3-13"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}