A Revolution Deferred

This year marks 10 years since the Arab Spring began as a protest movement in North Africa and the Middle East, transforming the region and ushering an era of social upheaval still with us today.Much of the anniversary-related commentary on the legacy of the Arab Spring fixates on how this challenge failed. We are told to look at Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and especially Libya—things haven’t changed, or they are much worse than before. But, the mistake of this diagnosis is its assumption that the historical process started by the Arab Spring is complete. We are still in the interregnum from which it started, and for Iranian-American scholar Asef Bayat, the Arab Spring typified the political mobilizations characteristic of the interregnum, what he calls the “non-movement”—“Non-movements refers to the collective actions of non-collective actors; they embody the shared practices of large numbers of ordinary people whose fragmented but similar activities trigger much social change, even though these practices are rarely guided by an ideology or recognizable leaderships and organizations.”For Bayat, the post-2008 outpouring of non-movements constitute “revolution without revolutionaries”—but the journal Endnotes turns this on its head, noting that instead, “we are witnessing the production of revolutionaries without revolution, as millions descend onto the streets and are transformed by their collective outpouring of rage and disgust, but without (yet) any coherent notion of transcending capitalism.” From the Arab Spring itself to moments like #FeesMustFall, the non-movement provides the organizational form for a disorganized age. In this episode of AIAC Talk we explore how much longer the revolution will remain deferred, and are joined by Nihal El Aasar and Zachariah Mampilly. Nihal is an Egyptian independent researcher currently based in London and Zachariah is the Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New York.