Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring by Asef Bayat (review)

Questions regarding why the Arab uprisings that began in 2010 failed (as of yet) to bring about a revolutionary transformation of politics in the region and whether they, in fact, warrant characterization as revolutionary at all continue to be debated by scholars of the region. Asef Bayat’s monograph, Revolution without Revolutionaries, sets about the task of “making sense” of it all. Bayat’s central claim is that the Arab uprisings “were revolutionary in terms of movement and mass mobilizations but reformist in terms of strategy and vision for change” (p. 158) — and, thus, better considered “refolutions,” his term for a complex and contradictory amalgam of revolutionary and reformist elements (p. 18). The main contribution of Bayat’s work is less that central claim — with which many will and should argue — than the nuanced, complex, and critical explanation of why this was the case. Drawing upon comparisons with the revolutionary movements of the 1970s, which Bayat experienced firsthand as a young activist in Iran, the author brings a rich repertoire of concepts and sociological theories to bear on his explanation. While Bayat’s text is perhaps written for an advanced audience well versed in social movement and sociological theory, his writing is surprisingly accessible and interspersed with sufficient historical context and ethnographic details that it should find a wider audience among those with interest in understanding the contemporary politics of the Arab region and contentious politics beyond the region.

The book’s first four chapters offer a comparison of 1970s activism with that of the 2010s. Engaging work from a wide range of analysts of the Arab uprisings, as well as the Occupy rebellions they inspired — including Manuel Castells, Sidney Tarrow, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jack Goldstone, and Gilbert Achcar — Bayat concludes what many highlighted as “novel” about the movements (their horizontal, post-ideological, and flexible character) may have held certain advantages for mobilization, but proved detrimental as a strategy of revolutionary transformation. Unlike the 1970s, when both Marxian socialism and political Islam in the region offered a body of strategic and programmatic elements to inform an anti-imperialist, social justice vision of a “third way,”¹ the Arab uprisings occurred at a time when, as the author summarizes it later in the work, “the very idea of revolution had been discredited, a time when neoliberal ideas had seeped into the common sense of our political classes” (p. 203). As a result, the Arab revolutions were undertaken without revolutionaries, that is, without vision for an emancipatory project to serve those marginalized, excluded, and dispossessed. Even Islamists, who many at first believed to be the inheritors of regime changes wrought by the Arab revolutions, did not prove to be revolutionary. Both mainstream and moderate Islamists are shown by Bayat to have reconciled themselves to a neoliberal order by focusing on cultural transformation but offering little in the domain of political economy.

The remainder of the book continues to focus on explaining the various paradoxical elements of the uprisings that are at once surprisingly radical yet tragically limited. Addressing the question of why the Arab revolutions were a largely urban phenomenon, in Chapter 5, Bayat enters into discussion with David Harvey’s Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso, 2012) and introduces the complex interaction between processes of “inside outing” and “enclosure” in the neoliberal Arab city (p. 95). In regard to the former, Bayat finds an outdoor economy (of street vendors, street laundries, alleyway repair shops, and pavement restaurants) and a sidewalk life (of pavement homes, street children and outdoor places of entertainment, recreation, and celebration and mourning) to be a space for the urban poor (dispossessed of indoor versions of work, housing, and community by the neoliberal economy) to engage in incremental claim-making on the growing number of enclosed and exclusive spaces of the rich (in the form of gated communities, private beaches, and exclusive neighborhoods). While...