Synopses & Reviews
Treating rhetoric and symbols as central rather than peripheral to politics, Lisa Wedeenandrsquo;s groundbreaking book offers a compelling counterargument to those who insist that politics is primarily about material interests and the groups advocating for them. During the thirty-year rule of President Hafiz al-Asadandrsquo;s regime, his image was everywhere. In newspapers, on television, and during orchestrated spectacles. Asad was praised as the andldquo;father,andrdquo; the andldquo;gallant knight,andrdquo; even the countryandrsquo;s andldquo;premier pharmacist.andrdquo; Yet most Syrians, including those who create the official rhetoric, did not believe its claims. Why would a regime spend scarce resources on a personality cult whose content is patently spurious?
Wedeen shows how such flagrantly fictitious claims were able to produce a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens acted as if they revered the leader. By inundating daily life with tired symbolism, the regime exercised a subtle, yet effective form of power. The cult worked to enforce obedience, induce complicity, isolate Syrians from one another, and set guidelines for public speech and behavior. Wedeenandlsquo;s ethnographic research demonstrates how Syrians recognized the disciplinary aspects of the cult and sought to undermine them. In a new preface, Wedeen discusses the uprising against the Syrian regime that began in 2011 and questions the usefulness of the concept of legitimacy in trying to analyze and understand authoritarian regimes.
Review
Praise for the first edition
"Asef Bayat has penned a remarkable study. Life as Politics should be a mandatory read for any journalist, scholar or politician who has never been to the Middle East."Arab News
Review
"When Life as Politics was published..., Asef Bayat's arguments on grassroots dynamism as the harbinger of democratic transformations in the Arab world seemed a utopian hope. Barely a year later, as events of the 2011 Arab Spring continue to unfold, his critical insights on everyday forms and spaces of political activity in the region have become prescient."Contemporary Sociology
Review
"Life as Politics offers a brilliant alternative perspective on public life by taking seriously the daily lives and the social agency of ordinary people."Middle East Book Reads
Review
and#160;andldquo;Wedeen conveys with great force and intimacy the strategies, dilemmas, and paradoxes of authoritarianism in a very particular, very distinctive, cultural context.andrdquo;
Review
"In Life as Politics Asef Bayat offers up a historically rich, analytically rigorous and conceptually innovative account of Middle East oppositional movements . . . [A] tour de force that will inspire as well as inform scholarship on Middle East social movementsmost importantly by moving beyond a preoccupation with 'exceptionalist' tendencies. Above all, this work establishes Asef Bayat as a virtuoso of the sociological imaginary. Specialist and non-specialist readers alike will find themselves transported to the streets of the Middle East and afforded a first-hand view of social and political activism in the making."Navid Pourmokhtari, Against the Current
Review
"Asef Bayat has penned a remarkable study. Life as Politics should be a mandatory read for any journalist, scholar or politician who has never been to the Middle East."Arab News
Synopsis
An updated and expanded look at how under the shadow of authoritarian rule, ordinary people can make meaningful change through the practices of everyday life in the Middle East.
Synopsis
Prior to 2011, popular imagination perceived the Muslim Middle East as unchanging and unchangeable, frozen in its own traditions and history. In
Life as Politics, Asef Bayat argues that such presumptions fail to recognize the routine, yet important, ways in which ordinary people make meaningful change through everyday actions. First published just months before the Arab Spring swept across the region, this timely and prophetic book sheds light on the ongoing acts of protest, practice, and direct daily action.
The second edition includes three new chapters on the Arab Spring and Iran's Green Movement and is fully updated to reflect recent events. At heart, the book remains a study of agency in times of constraint. In addition to ongoing protests, millions of people across the Middle East are effecting transformation through the discovery and creation of new social spaces within which to make their claims heard. This eye-opening book makes an important contribution to global debates over the meaning of social movements and the dynamics of social change.
About the Author
Asef Bayat is the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, 2007).
Table of Contents
Preface, 2015
Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration
1. Believing in Spectacles
2. Killing Politics: Official Rhetoric and Permissable Speech
3. Acting andldquo;As Ifandrdquo;: The Story of M
4. Signs of Transgression
5. Complicating Compliance
Notes
Bibliography
Index