ASEF BAYAT, Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2021) 336 p.
Critical reflections on the Arab Spring reveal a second epistemic shift in the analysis of revolutions and their relationship to political elites and ordinary people. This shift has developed a critique of the analytical paradigms of failure and success that were initially used to understand the revolutionary processes of the Arab Spring. It presents an attempt to analyse these historical moments from different perspectives and using different methods.
Here emerges Asef Bayat's trilogy: Life as Politics, which examines ordinary people in their everyday life; Revolution without Revolutionaries, which elaborates on large-scale uprisings; and Revolutionary Life, which connects these two contributions, seeking to understand the Arab Spring from the perspective of the popular grassroots' action. Bayat's intellectual project claims that the everyday, the social movements, and the subaltern should be the main domain of analysis while studying what he calls the "refolutions". In the last book of his trilogy, Bayat shifts his approach from the analysis of revolution within the realm of high politics, which entails looking through the paradigm of failure or success, to the scrutinization of "what happened in the social realm, in the everyday life, and among the grassroots" (p. 1).
* This study was published in the 12th issue of AlMuntaqa, a peer-reviewed academic journal for the social sciences and humanities. You can read the full paper here.
