John Chalcraft – Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East

Summary

Renowned scholar Professor John Chalcraft presents his seminal work on the role of popular politics in shaping the modern Middle East. In his lecture, he delves into the intricate history of popular protest from 1798 to 2011, emphasizing the importance of mass movements and transgressive mobilization. By challenging traditional historiographical approaches, Chalcraft offers a nuanced perspective on how ordinary people have historically engaged in and influenced political landscapes in the Middle East. His work is rich with case studies and highlights the diverse ways in which political agency has been enacted throughout the region's history.

Highlights

• The lecture covers a sweeping history from Egypt's 1798 uprisings to the Arab Spring of 2011 🌌.
• Chalcraft argues against neo-Orientalism and top-down historical narratives, focusing instead on grassroots movements 🎤.
• Transgressive mobilization is examined as a repeated historical phenomenon, not a recent development 🌍.
• Key episodes of resistance include protests against Napoleonic occupation, anti-colonial struggles, and labor movements ⛓️.
• The discourse challenges the notion of Middle Eastern exceptionalism, advocating for a globally relevant perspective 🗺️.

Key Takeaways

• John Chalcraft explores the historical role of popular politics across the Middle East from 1798 to 2011 📚.
• The video challenges top-down political narratives, advocating for a history from the ground up 🚀.
• Transgressive mobilization, or unruly collective action, is a central theme in understanding political dynamics in the region ⚡.
• Chalcraft emphasizes the importance of looking beyond Orientalist and top-down frameworks in Middle Eastern studies 🔍.
• Case studies from Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and more illustrate varied resistance forms against imperialism and centralized authority 📜.

Overview

Professor John Chalcraft brings an insightful perspective on the intricate blend of politics and popular protest across the Middle East. His book, discussed in this lecture, examines the depth and impact of popular movements from the late 18th century through the Arab Spring of the early 21st century. By dissecting these dynamics, Chalcraft makes a compelling argument for viewing political history as being significantly shaped by grassroots activism rather than solely by elites.

Chalcraft's work critiques the traditional historiography of the Middle East, which often overlooks the influence of popular movements. He argues that these movements are neither simple nor pre-modern, but instead are sophisticated reactions to oppressive political circumstances. With case studies spanning from Egyptian strikes to uprisings in Yemen, the book stresses the importance of understanding these events as integral to the larger narrative of modern Middle Eastern history.

Key to Chalcraft's analysis is the concept of 'transgressive mobilization,' whereby ordinary people engage in political action that defies established authority structures. This idea is illustrated through various historical episodes, from the Napoleonic era to contemporary protests, highlighting the enduring spirit of rebellion and its effect on political transformations. Chalcraft urges scholars to consider popular politics to fully grasp the complexities of the region's history and its ongoing transformations.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction and Speaker Biography The chapter titled 'Introduction and Speaker Biography' appears to be an opening for a lecture event known as the semi-annual Peter Green lecture on the modern Middle East. In this chapter, the speaker is introduced as Professor John Chow Kraft from the London School of Economics. The chapter also welcomes both the physical and online audience, noting that the lecture is being simulcast and recorded.
• 03:00 - 07:30: Overview of the New Book The chapter introduces the author, John Char Craft, who is an associate professor in the history and politics of empire at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The introduction avoids traditional formalities, as the audience has access to a bio and abstract. The focus is on John's titles and his first book.
• 07:30 - 19:00: Part 1: 1798-1914 The chapter discusses the historical context and social dynamics of cab drivers in Cairo from 1798 to 1914, alongside developments in crafts and guilds during that period. It references specific publications that have contributed to the discourse on these topics, such as 'The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories', which explores crafts and guilds in Egypt from 1863 to 1914. Additionally, it highlights insights from 'The Invisible Cage: Syrian Migrant Workers in Lebanon' for its impressive analysis, appreciated by students for its depth and narrative.
• 19:00 - 30:00: Part 2: 1914-1952 The section introduces a book focusing on popular politics in the modern Middle East, published by Cambridge University Press, highlighting the author's blend of theoretical insight and empirical data. This particular book is noted for its substantial size and significance, marking an important contribution to the field. The author is recognized for his impactful work and this instance signifies the first public discussion on the book, drawing attention from the academic community, particularly in a graduate class setting.
• 30:00 - 39:00: Part 3: 1952-1976 The chapter titled 'Part 3: 1952-1976' discusses the historical contributions to Middle East Studies, emphasizing the importance of transgressive actions by subaltern and other groups in driving change during this period. The content suggests a re-evaluation of modern Middle East history, highlighting the role of these groups in breaking rules and instigating change.
• 39:00 - 49:00: Part 4: 1977-2011 The chapter titled 'Part 4: 1977-2011' discusses a significant introduction presented in a book that critically examines the historiography of a particular field, likely related to the Middle East. The introduction is emphasized as a valuable contribution to understanding perspectives on the Middle East, distinct from or moving beyond traditional views, such as those outlined in Orientalism. The text suggests a shift from conventional paradigms and explores what steps can be taken after moving away from such established frameworks.
• 49:00 - 58:00: Conceptual Framework: Unruly Collective Action and Hegemonic Contraction The chapter titled 'Conceptual Framework: Unruly Collective Action and Hegemonic Contraction' focuses on bridging the gap between discursive and materialistic deterministic perspectives. It is rich with case studies spanning different regions such as Morocco and Yemen, and timelines from the 18th century to 2011. The chapter promises a deep dive into these themes, illustrated through varied historical and geographical contexts.
• 58:00 - 69:00: Conceptual Framework: Intellectual Labor and Agency Introduction and acknowledgements: The chapter begins with the speaker expressing gratitude for the opportunity to speak and acknowledging the support and funding received from various sources, including the Middle East Studies program at Brown University and the Peter Green Fund. The speaker humorously refers to emerging into the public eye after a long period of writing and rewriting their book.
• 69:00 - 80:00: Q&A: Concept of Commoning and Cycles in Politics The chapter titled 'Q&A: Concept of Commoning and Cycles in Politics' provides an introduction, mentioning gratitude for attendees gathering together. It discusses the book's coverage of the history of protests in the Middle East and North Africa from the late 18th century to present times, drawing on a wide variety of sources including secondary literature in English, French, and Arabic, and primary sources such as archival visits, memoirs, autobiographies, and treaties written by the activists themselves.
• 80:00 - 92:00: Q&A: Role of Civil Society and Popular Politics This chapter explores the diverse forms of protest and dissent in civil society, ranging from individual expressions to large-scale socio-political movements. It examines various types of movements, including Islamist, nationalist, labor, women's, liberal, and democratic movements. The chapter also discusses different strategies of political activism, including armed struggle and mass uprisings, and how these efforts aim to challenge established norms and advocate for liberty and justice.
• 92:00 - 114:00: Q&A: Migration and Displacement The chapter titled 'Q&A: Migration and Displacement' explores the concept of unruly collective action or transgressive mobilization, emphasizing how new forms of collective solidarity challenge authority. The discussion is centered around the theme of institutional disruption and persuasive movements. The book is divided into four parts, each examining episodes of contention dating back to the late 18th century through various case studies.
• 114:00 - 129:00: Q&A: Normative Commitment and Future Politics The chapter discusses opposition to neo-Orientalism, challenging its characterization of popular protests as mere obstinacy or fanaticism. It critiques Middle East Studies for cultural essentialism and exceptionalism inherent in Orientalism. Additionally, the chapter opposes top-down political narratives that overlook the importance of consent and resistance.
• 129:00 - 134:00: Q&A: Heuristic Framework and Geographic Focus This chapter delves into the intellectual lineage underpinning the book, particularly focusing on historical sociology. It critically examines and challenges cultural essentialism and exceptionalism while also addressing the limits of socio-economic determinism and modernist views inherent in traditional historical sociology. Additionally, the chapter is informed by post-colonial critiques that question modernist meta-narratives, thereby offering a more nuanced heuristic framework and exploring specific geographic focuses.

John Chalcraft – Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hello everyone welcome to the semi-annual Peter Green lecture on the modern Middle East for which we invite a distinguished lecture and in this case it's Professor John Chow Kraft who came over from England the London School of Economics to join us I would like to say hello to our online audience this is being simulcast and recorded and we have
• 00:30 - 01:00 a traditionally studies we don't do introductions all of you should have a sheet in front of you here with the bio and the abstract of the talk however I do like John's titled and as well as the titles of his book so I will mention those briefly John char craft is associate professor in the history and politics of empire slash imperialism at the London School of Economics and political science and the first book of
• 01:00 - 01:30 his that I read was called the striking cabbies of Cairo and other stories crafts and guilds in Egypt 1863 to 1914 which was wonderful and then when his second book came out which I also assigned to my graduate class the invisible cage Syrian migrant workers in Lebanon which came up from Staff University Press really impressed me and my students for its combination of
• 01:30 - 02:00 theoretical insight and empirical heft and that has become a hallmark of his work and especially of this rather hefty book that just came out that this will be the first public talk on this book so we're honored to have him here with us popular politics in the making of the modern Middle East Cambridge University Press let me just say that my graduate class
• 02:00 - 02:30 enjoyed about a three-hour discussion of this book yesterday with John so not enough can be said about it in just the lecture today but I do want to emphasize that it is a land our contribution to fill the Middle East Studies because it forces us to rethink the history the modern Middle East from the perspective of transgressive actions by subaltern groups for the most part but other groups as well we sort of break the rules and cause change and
• 02:30 - 03:00 this was theorized in the book in a really wonderful introduction that also takes a major serial look at this or Agra fee of the field and which by itself the introduction would be very important addition to the way we think about the Middle East what John does is we all do this we try to step away from the central Isabel Orientalism but then what do we do after that and he tries to
• 03:00 - 03:30 thread a needle between what he calls it discursive and my word materialist kind of deterministic perspectives and we'll hear more about that today and the book is full of case studies ranging from Morocco to Yemen and from the 18th to 2011 so I can't wait to hear more and thank you very much for coming please help me in welcoming John chakra
• 03:30 - 04:00 well thank you very much indeed for that very nice introduction it's an honor to be here thank you for coming I want to thank the Middle East Studies program at Brown University and Barbara over katha and the Peter Green Fund for the funding this it's really an honor to be here I'm coming out sort of blinking into the glare of publicity having been in the tunnel and the cave of writing and rewriting and finally this book came out
• 04:00 - 04:30 a couple of weeks ago so it's a it's a it's a privilege to be able to stand up and and thank you so many of you for coming so the book is a history of protest in the Middle East and North Africa since the late 18th century to the present it draws on a wide range of secondary literature in English French and Arabic as well as a variety of primary sources archival sources and especially I looked at memoirs autobiographies and treaties written by activists themselves the book takes
• 04:30 - 05:00 up a great variety of protest from individual and collective expressions of dissent through to more continuous forms of petitioning or socio-political movements to attempts to cease in more rugged and supple and fashioned Liberty against the law to mass uprisings and revolutions there are Islamist movements nationalist movements movements around labor women liberalism and democracy and you find in the book armed struggle other movements based around
• 05:00 - 05:30 institutional disruption and other movements that advance through persuasion at the center of the book is this idea of unruly collective action or transgressive mobilization which is this idea of how new forms of collective solidarity are formed in challenges to Authority and I'll flesh that out but the books in four parts goes back to the late 18th century and it has many case studies which are oriented around episodes of contention it's written
• 05:30 - 06:00 against neo Orientalism and the way neo Orientalism has dismissed popular protest as recalcitrance or fanaticism and the you know by now you know familiar critique in Middle East Studies of the cultural essentialism and exceptionalism that we find in the Orientalism it's also written against top-down accounts of politics and political history and their lack of attention to issues of consent and resistance on the other hand the
• 06:00 - 06:30 book stands on the shoulders of a long tradition of historical sociology and the critique that historical sociology mounted of cultural essentialism and exceptionalism but the book also takes issue with the socio-economic determinism and modernist Tilos that we find in historical sociology and I also draw a great deal from post colonialism z' critiques of modernist meta-narrative
• 06:30 - 07:00 but I take issue with the erasure of subaltern voice that we find in post colonialism the erasure of the everyday concerns than struggles and practices of in regard to civil means which we find in post colonialism the the way discourse gets treated as an overwhelming mechanism of social control and the way the subaltern is ultimately Spectra lized by this kind of treatment
• 07:00 - 07:30 and the forms and the way this ultimately leads into political disengagement so the aim instead of this is to write a rich history from below which attends to issues of hegemony consent descent contentious mobilization and the ways in which popular politics was at stake through the making and the unmaking of the region's political dispensations in this lecture I just want to do two things first to give an overview of
• 07:30 - 08:00 what's in the book and tell you what its main historical arguments are and then because there is an attempt to ground this in a certain kind of conceptual framework around popular politics I'll take the second half of the lecture to explore some of the key themes by which that conceptual framework is constructed hegemonic contraction unruly collective action intellectual labor and so on so
• 08:00 - 08:30 to begin with the overview of what's in the book and its main historical arguments first the first part of the book is called part while it goes from 1798 to 1914 it's entitled millenarianism renewal justice rights and reform it has a number of case studies it looks at the uprising against the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt 1798 to 1801 it looks at decades of struggle against French colonialism in Algeria after 1830
• 08:30 - 09:00 it looks at millenarian uprisings in Egypt between the eighteen tens and the 1860s it looks at abdelkader of Jazeera is lamech revivalist and state building project in Algeria in the 1830s and 40s and a variety of other studies the commoner uprisings against taxation in the mushrik the Arab East in the 1820s and 40s including the remark a popular Republican movement of Tanya's Shaheen the Christian mule attea on
• 09:00 - 09:30 Mount Lebanon in 1858 to 1860 it looks at tribes Sufis pretenders and millinery ins in Morocco that millenarian Madia of Sudan in the 1880s it looks at strikes between 1860 and the 1900s before unions parties and socialism and it looks at the Urabe movement in Egypt 1881 - - and the constitutional movement in Istanbul in 1908 as well as workers and peasants
• 09:30 - 10:00 in Egypt around the turn of the century the main context in the main explanatory lead device the way of thinking and situating these cases within an explanatory sort of context within circumstances transmitted from the past is in this in this period is state self-strengthening under pressure from European imperialism it's not primarily about direct colonial rule or about world economic integration instead it's
• 10:00 - 10:30 different vectors of the extraction fiscal extraction regulation and conscription or new kinds of centralization or regulation and also weakness corruption and indebtedness especially in countries like Morocco and then Egypt after 1876 which provide you know authoritative vectors within which popular mobilization is conceived in this context you have movements that sought to replace the state entirely in a revolutionary fashion with a new kind
• 10:30 - 11:00 of political community and that was done not under nationalist banners the book argues but under banners of Islamic revival and sufi and heterodox and millenarian forms of Islamism you have other kinds of movements that sought to win concessions from the state or to carve out spheres of autonomy in defense of rights or custom and these were done under the banners not of labor socialism or liberalism but under the banners of
• 11:00 - 11:30 powerful living traditions that existed in regard to the Sultan's justice notions of Ottoman statecraft notions of rights and just shares and ideas about custom both tribal and urban and there are other movements undertaken by urban reformists who sought to lodge principles of representation in the state but they lacked mass constituencies before the First World
• 11:30 - 12:00 War one of the main arguments in this section is that powerful traditions of popular protest in the 19th century were not half formed or deviant versions of more complete European models they were not brought backward pre political or archaic instead they were built around living and changing and diverse Islamic traditions Ottoman statecraft and custom now in terms of how such movements
• 12:00 - 12:30 played a role well sometimes it's not entirely a rosy picture movements could draw in colonial violence they could encounter brutal repression and they could end in sectarian conflict as did the uprising of tenures Shaheen America Lebanon in 1860 in a kind of a portent of what happened in Syria after 2011 but on the more positive side movements could blunt extraction fiscal extraction
• 12:30 - 13:00 by the powerful they could secure rights and just shares for commoners they could enact justice against local exploiters they cut against corruption they drew on and thus entrenched new forms of state centralization and bureaucratization and they temporarily at least generated new forms of stated and political community and in 1881 tutu and in 1908 in Istanbul and 1905 to 11 in Iran they temporarily
• 13:00 - 13:30 lodged new principles of representation in the state so in this part of the book against dismissal against top-down accounts against modernist condescension and post-colonial indifference the argument is that contentious mobilization and popular politics was fundamentally at stake in changing little dispensations during the long 19th century part 2 of the book runs from 1914 to 1952 it's entitled
• 13:30 - 14:00 patriotism liberalism armed struggle and ideology and the case studies include quite a lot of attention to the rugged armed struggles under banners of nation and Islam that broke out between 1911 and 1939 in Libya Iraq Syria Morocco and Palestine they include the mass insurrection in Egypt of 1919 the young Algerians and Maselli al Hajj in Algeria the labor movement in Egypt nationalist Shia workers and
• 14:00 - 14:30 peasants in Iraq the National Block in Syria women's movements in Egypt and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt here the main explanatory context has to do less with any historical escalator of socio-economic change and transformation and it has much more to do with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and direct and invasive forms of imperialism that the region encountered very dramatically after 1911 and then growing crises of the semi independent states
• 14:30 - 15:00 and their politicians and leadership these dynamics at the level of the state and of colonial power broke the existing state framework and imposed a different one they implied invasive new forms of state power whether in the Rif mountains under the Spanish in Morocco or the Jabal Druze in Syria under the French they generated powerful new forms of explosion whether scientist settler
• 15:00 - 15:30 colonialism in Palestine or Italian settler colonialism in Libya they also offered alliances to those ready to seize them such as the Arab revolt of 1916 to 18 during this period movements demanded independence above all under nationalist banners which blended and joined hands with notions of independence conceived in Islamic terms movements increasingly demanded not just the Sultan's justice but reform of the whole social system where there in terms
• 15:30 - 16:00 of Islam socialism or liberalism and new struggles drew on older organization forms and traditions of protest and forms of moral economy but they reformulated them in new terms the Sufi order and the guild were replaced by unions and mass societies I argue that the interwar period was no dress rehearsal for later independence was so much emphasized in the early part of this period not because these were
• 16:00 - 16:30 superficial political struggles that lacked socio-economic content but because political community and its radical transformation really was at stake in the early part of this period nor where I argue with these movements a kind of modernist graft onto a backward population instead nationalism came to the fore because it was able to had Gemini's diverse constituencies living traditions and ideas including religious and jihad traditions and the development
• 16:30 - 17:00 of new ideological forms drew on powerful traditions of protest and reformulated them the generation of 1919 as it were did not achieve national independence in the arabic-speaking world and the transformation of the system on socialist Islamic or liberal lines was not achieved and in many cases uprisings were brutally crushed French violence in Syria between 1925 and 27 actually resembles some of the violence
• 17:00 - 17:30 meted out by the Assad regime against the uprising after 2011 on the more positive side these movements made national independence the key state in relations with European powers they made national aspirations hegemonic in the social formation as a whole they changed the terms of colonial rule concretely on the ground in several cases from direct to indirect in Egypt in Iraq and Syria they pushed forward state centralization
• 17:30 - 18:00 in the Rif mountains and they stitch tribes into state formation in a new and innovative way in Iraq and Jordan they made social reform where there in regards to women or labor relations or the economy central issues and they develop new vehicles of mass organization syndicate unions and the Muslim Brotherhood and so on and they contributed in a major way over time to the unsustainability of the semi-colonial order but three of the
• 18:00 - 18:30 book takes us from 1952 to 1976 and it deals with national independence guerrilla war and social revolution some of the cases include NASA's revolutionary curve in Egypt in 1952 and similar coos in Iraq in 58 North Yemen in 62 and Libya in 1969 an attempted coup in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 60s my track also the armed struggles in Algeria South Yemen and among Palestinians from 1954 to the 1970s I
• 18:30 - 19:00 look at the rise of Barth ISM in Syria strikes and protests in various parts of the Arabian Peninsula and leftist movements in Lebanon until 1976 here the main explanatory context has less to do with any escalator of socio-economic change and it certainly has nothing to do with the sort of Cold War thesis about how the strains of modernization were driving Middle East populations
• 19:00 - 19:30 unable to cope with things like rural and urban migration to extremist ideologies instead the main the book sees the key explanatory context in terms of the crisis of the colonial controlled partly liberal political order that was bequeathed by the interwar years national independence and social reform were burning issues by the 1940s but the generation of 1919 had not delivered and this was a galvanizing
• 19:30 - 20:00 crisis that stirred mass mobilization so in this context movements aimed to bring about national independence and they aim to drive through social and economic reform and the distri distribution of wealth now one of the points I make in this section is that although you know this movement has this period has quite dramatic forms of mobilization but we must not miss how many of the new forms of collective action actually worked as a kind of a displacement of forms of
• 20:00 - 20:30 mass mobilization of say the Muslim Brotherhood or independent labor union organizing because well mass mobilization during the interwar period into the 50s in places like Iraq generated crises in the semi-colonial State the coup de Grasse as it were was often delivered by vanguards revolutionary coos and armed struggles were led by relatively small numbers of those committed to direct action and the gun and they had little time often for ideology or what they saw is the
• 20:30 - 21:00 bickering and the divisive nomura politicians a certain kind of Vanguard ISM was at work now on the one side this gives the lie to the idea of a kind of linear rise of mass politics on and on the kind of model that you get when you read a a Charles Tilly on popular contention in Britain and how you know you gradually have a linear growth of mass politics actually there's a way in which mass mobilization and continuous organization of civil and social groups by organized members often drawn from
• 21:00 - 21:30 intellectual or middle classes that can be shunted aside and to some extent it was and in in some respects the new authoritarianism that develops by the 1970s has an elective affinity with the Vanguard estuve it's practice that helped push through national independence and socio-economic reform on the other hand the movements of this period added major achievements they brought about national independence in a
• 21:30 - 22:00 way that their forebears hadn't and they contributed to real social and economic redistribution and those things can hardly be contested anyway from the point of view of the book for better or for worse contentious mobilization is constitutive not epiphenomena during these years the final part of the book part 4 runs from 1977 to 2011 it's entitled Islamism revolution uprisings and liberalism and it begins with the uprising in Egypt in 1977 and also
• 22:00 - 22:30 strike action and left protests in Egypt in the 70s and 80s I look at Shiism in Iraq from pamphlets to Mujahideen the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria until 1982 and then in Egypt and then the militant splinters from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt jihad movements and look at the Iranian Revolution Lebanon and Hezbollah Salafi Wahabi ISM and taking on the far enemy look at the reform movement in Iran in the 1990s the independence Intifada in
• 22:30 - 23:00 Lebanon 2005 the return of liberal and labor protests in Egypt in the 2000s the BDS movement for Palestinian rights and the Arab uprisings and the fate of liberals in Egypt here the main explanatory context has less to do with a specific trajectory of globalization or of neoliberal capitalist development instead I look at the increasing incapacity of the formerly revolutionary Republic's to win the consent of their
• 23:00 - 23:30 populations and the attempts by states such as Saudi Arabia to legitimate themselves on revamped Salafi Wahabi lines in this context the actions of authorities count they rolled back social and economic rights they drew back from pan-arabism and third-world ISM they failed to bring either democracy or prosperity in many cases especially in the formerly revolutionary republics they provoked many by violence torture and police humiliation and the
• 23:30 - 24:00 sponsorship of Salafi Wahhabism an absolutist and sectarian form of Islam by the Saudi royal house in order to justify absolutist rule promoted a previously rejected form of Islamism in many parts of the region well invasion and occupation from without Israeli settler colonization and the masa nations of other external powers notably Russia have generated major dissenting
• 24:00 - 24:30 constituencies in the region so in this context movements have aimed to replace the secular corrupted state with an Islamic state whether in sheer Sunni modernist or Salafi Wahabi colors or they sought to throw off occupation in both Islamic and secular nationalist letterings in one case that of the BDS movement aim is taken at settler colonialism by Trane's local radically democratic and post nationalist project movements such
• 24:30 - 25:00 as al-qaeda on the other hand turned their attention to targeting the far enemy ie the United States in 2011 we saw uprisings that sought to bring down corrupted regimes on the basis of universal forms of popular sovereignty bread dignity and freedom other more reformist movements aimed to reform state and society on Islamic and pious lines they sought to assert restore or recover social and economic rights
• 25:00 - 25:30 against heavy threats to push for the rights of women in very different ways or to push back against dictatorship bringing liberal representative and democratic principles and human rights norms to bear in the state so if we look at this as a glass half-empty we might say well these movements have contributed directly and indirectly to sectarian conflict in Iraq and Syria as well as in Algeria in the 1990s we might say they've often been brutally repressed at great cost they have not
• 25:30 - 26:00 halted settler colonization in Israel Palestine in many cases they've been unable to prevent the growth of the security state and they've contributed to revolutions that have devoured their children as in Iraq and the new religious politics has brought about new forms of social conservatism with all the implications this has for restrictions on sexual gender and women's freedoms more positively perhaps Hezbollah did succeed in
• 26:00 - 26:30 terminating Israel's long occupation of South Lebanon in 2000 hours from Bahrain to Egypt have kept alive the idea that human rights representative institutions and democratic forms should be promoted in the face of dictatorship corruption and monarchy other movements have contributed to the making of Islamic forms of democracy both in theory and practice and we've seen in Tunisia since 2011 positive Liberal Democratic outcomes in the wake of mass uprisings
• 26:30 - 27:00 and tenacious organized contention outcomes currently threatened by sectarianism in Salafi coloring others of course have protected public sector and industrial workers against deteriorating pay and conditions and kept the social question alive even in an age of neoliberalism in the Arab world in the present the book argues that the idea of the Islamic state has not been able to become hegemonic in the social formation as a whole either
• 27:00 - 27:30 because it's been conceived too narrowly or because there are very broad constituencies that are profoundly opposed to it and it's this difficult impasse which drives liberals and frightened minorities into the hands of authoritarian rulers and excludes and makes more militant Islamists themselves is central to the contemporary dilemmas of the region and this is a dynamic that has everything to do with the contentious mobilization and popular
• 27:30 - 28:00 politics which this book is centrally concerned so it should be clear by now that the book is aimed at getting various historiographical traditions to take popular politics seriously it's neither about fanaticism nor is it irrelevant as in top-down accounts nor is it voiceless as in much of post colonialism and nor is it as a historical materialist might say mere populism but if I'm to advance the same
• 28:00 - 28:30 I need to develop the theme of popular politics in a slightly more conceptual detail and I would like to use the last how long do I have 20 minutes or so to to do just that and the inspiration for doing this is the writings of the Italian socialists Antonio Gramsci and especially his full-throated analysis of politics of culture of hegemony in the dominant bloc subaltern social groups and projects of moral political and
• 28:30 - 29:00 intellectual leadership and Graham she's the one who in the historically materialist tradition draws on some speaks about subjectivity politics and so on and I try to push forward a political reading of Graham she but I signal at the beginning the the sort of tantalizing phrase that that gestures towards what I'm interested when I speak about unruly collective action or transgressive mobilization and
• 29:00 - 29:30 that's this thing that Palestinians said to Sonia Nimr in the late 1980s when she was researching oral histories of the uprising of the late 1930s Palestinians said to her well quick the people defied the authorities and took matters into their own hands this was to me a very provocative sort of a phrase and I wanted to gradually add analytic flesh to what that might mean and because it seems to me that whether authorities liked it or not and they usually do not ordinary people
• 29:30 - 30:00 meaning those who are excluded from the transacted and official politics of the established political field persist in seeking to participate and sometimes try to take matters into their own hands and that's and in the book I emphatically wanted to argue that this is not a gift of Europe to the world it has a long pre and early modern history this unruly collective action I mean of course it was spectacularly on display in the Arab
• 30:00 - 30:30 uprisings whereas these uprisings didn't come from nowhere that should be clear from the book but the demand for the regime to fall the mobilisation of millions the extension of slogans of bread dignity and freedom decentralized modes of organization and leader fullness the determined occupations of public space pitched battles with security forces and so on an actual success in toppling dictators these were the vectors of unruly collective action and transgressive mobilization but
• 30:30 - 31:00 what's what's so important to me about this concept is that it's there's nothing new about it it's not the result of a long trajectory of of change rooted in a principle of socio-economic development so for example if we skip back to Cairo 1798 during the uprising here's what a chronic the famous famous chronicler of the day said about the uprising this is Al Djibouti he said in Cairo a well-known cleric came forward
• 31:00 - 31:30 quote mounted on a steed in extraordinary military fashion leading crowds from the al-hussein quarter crowd became huge and full of the poor and those of low status ruffians and quote inhabitants of lodgings in the ever critical language of al-jabbar t they gathered in front of the al-hussein mosque the al-azhar seminary and the Chief judges house to demand what faith law and justice required a perfumer among them who djibouti says quote was
• 31:30 - 32:00 dressed in the guise of a cleric with a vest and a waist cloth came forward calling out to the people incited them and exclaimed Muslims God is most great the clerics have commanded you to kill the infidels make ready stalwarts and strike them everywhere unquote jabal t grumbled about a particular leader corner Mugabe and this is the part which is the striking phrase he says quote he interfered in things which do not concern him and he appeared in town like the Pasha
• 32:00 - 32:30 and the cthe ruder and the Mamluks what he what is he that he appoints himself without having been appointed by anybody it is civil strife which turns any ignoble bird into a vulture especially when the rabble riots and the mob and riffraff Rises unquote so here is a vivid if sour and conservative description of the transgressive seizure from below of political and doctrinal agency and we see this throughout the
• 32:30 - 33:00 region I mean take this case from 1821 attacks uprising on Mount Lebanon they and they were demands that the people the commoners would elect deputies who had negotiate with the authorities and they also spoke about the interests of the country masla hatun be led which was quite a dramatic thing to do in the face of Ottoman authorities who didn't think the commoners had any business in determining what the interests of the country were so and so the Ottoman
• 33:00 - 33:30 governor addresses the people in 1821 he says well the notables are corrupting the land they're using quote entry cunning and deception to disturb the peace the commoners on the other hand put themselves in a perplexing way at odds with the Auguste authority order and security of the Amir because they were ignorant base stubborn disobedient bowl and deviant they had entered a domain for which they were utterly unfit and unprepared they were easily crushed they were not quote an army ready for battle
• 33:30 - 34:00 and they should give up on folly as an ottoman official declared subjects quote held in compassion and protection should return to your villages and preoccupy yourselves with your own affairs and render what is required of you so here clearly in what Guha usefully called the prose of counterinsurgency we have another indication from above of the this moment of transgressive mobilization and we find it again say in the oil fields of Aramco in the 1950s
• 34:00 - 34:30 when Palestinians and Yemenis and Egyptians and others are studied by V tourists are deported for what the Saudi authorities called unauthorized political activity and so on and we have it right down to the present so the idea is the unruly collective action involves moments when those ordinarily excluded from political society quote quote this is I suppose it could be a quote but they cease to delegate authority to existing power holders or established
• 34:30 - 35:00 political actors they delegate political agency to new and previously unrecognized or marginal actors and they create new forms of solidarity and they become a new force to be reckoned with it's partly when Graham she writes about the long labor that brings into being a new collective will and it changes the balance of political forces and such forms are exhaust braiding to power holders precisely because they're both new and they're unexpected they're misunderstood and they offer a challenge
• 35:00 - 35:30 so that's something about unruly collective action transgressive mobilization which runs through the book and doesn't depend for its instantiation on some principle at work some modernist teleology if you will a second concept that I'd like to mention that runs also through the book is what I call hegemonic contraction and in this history throughout we find these powerful generative moments when authorities fail in major undertakings they lose consent and authority they
• 35:30 - 36:00 become mere power holders wielders of Domino without hegemony and dissent becomes widespread and this we have throughout this history from the derelictions of the Mamluks and the protection of Egypt in 1798 as so swin jingly criticized by Eligibility right through to the major blow to the authority of the Saudi state after 1990 because in 1990 to 1991 the Saudi state accepted and bin bears the senior Mohave cleric
• 36:00 - 36:30 condoned the deployment of around half a million American troops on Saudi soil as part of the operation to oust the Iraqi forces from Kuwait this factor should the status quo and divided opinion like nothing in the modern history of the kingdom forget Francois Berg at speaks of quote the collapse of the Islamic legitimacy of the Saudi guardians of the holy places of Islam immediately after the 1990 alliance with the United States against Iraq and the resulting emergence of a powerful Islamist opposition to the
• 36:30 - 37:00 monarchy in Riyadh certainly this crisis is probably the best available explanation for the timing of the Sawa contention in Saudi Arabia so well studied by Stefan Lacroix so that's one example others and I make a play in the book of how the the failures of the generation of 1919 galvanized action among the generation in 1948 as it were
• 37:00 - 37:30 I'll mention something from the memoirs of a fighter who was mobilized to join the ranks of the Palestine Liberation Organization after the defeat of the Arab states in 1967 so he was a Lebanese journalist he was sitting in Beirut he was a student and he said well the 1967 war the defeat of the Arab states at the hands of Israel was a quote major shock
• 37:30 - 38:00 to the whole Arab nation it quote woke people up to what was going on around them this defeat it's he says took me from just a general political interest to a direct political commitment he says that he had started in fact quote to conduct research in political magazines to discuss for me a rhetoric and a desire for effectiveness and direct action he writes quote everyone started trying to plan a way or a political method or an idea to find a solution here or there suddenly all eyes were riveted on
• 38:00 - 38:30 Palestine and the Palestinian resistance that rose up on the 1st of January 1965 quote I was among those young men that were greatly impressed by these fidei ie guerrilla actions and I followed the news of them in the press before I became an openly proclaimed proponent of armed struggle so we notice the politicization of this student was not through the presence of a pre-existing socio-economic grievance which then translated into political action but amid a shock at the dereliction of
• 38:30 - 39:00 existing authorities our journey into politics as a result and a subsequent adherence to a given political leadership and activism that form of activism so this is partly what I mean by hegemonic contraction it's a theme that runs through the book and it's this idea of the way in which older forms and established forms of authority are undermined and I and I argue that deserves an analysis in its own right there are several other key themes one is intellectual labor it runs through the book another has to do with how
• 39:00 - 39:30 ideas and models for collective action get appropriated in unruly ways across borders another has to do with the importance of normative commitments in mobilization and a final theme has to do with more practical forms of leadership organization strategies and tactics these themes are always to try to analyze how the sorts of active agencies that appear at moments of hegemonic construct contraction get established
• 39:30 - 40:00 and and work through the goal of course is to it makes sense of them but without explaining them away to allow for a context hegemonic contraction but to allow for the role of agency which can make a radical difference to the new kinds of mobilizing projects that come into being and you know I mean in terms of intellectual labor well this is
• 40:00 - 40:30 work done by often to begin with marginal intellectuals who develop visions who develop ways of diagnosing problems in society ways prognosticate they prognosticate courses of action for how people should behave they they define forms of oppression in very particular ways and this sort of labor plays a role from from the legal
• 40:30 - 41:00 concepts of jihad that are operative in the first half of the 19th century through to Islamic revivalism in Sufi clothes of an Abdul Kadir al jazeera through to the millenarianism of the Mafia in Sudan and right through to politicize cheers emotions of radical democracy or Salafi Wahhabism in the present I mean one of the most remarkable developments on this front is the fact that the to begin with is the trajectory if you look at the trajectory
• 41:00 - 41:30 of politicized Shiism in the region since 1958 and it's a remarkable moment when they after the coup the revolutionary coup in iraq when the political field is dominated by first of all the communist party it's the largest communist party in the arab world you have secularists you have national Democrats you have Kurds you have nationalists you have Pan Arabists but politics in Islamist clothes is nowhere to be found except there's a group of Shia clerics who decide to work out a
• 41:30 - 42:00 vision even you know without a mass base without a political extension they decide to work out what an Islamic state would look like and they include the Ayatollah Khomeini who is circulating between calm Najaf Karbala and the shrine cities you have clerics figuring out what it would look what an Islamic state would look like where you would have the rule in the jurisprudent would you have a Council of Guardians to make sure that the legislation proposed by
• 42:00 - 42:30 elected bodies would conform with the presets of Islamic law and they build up a whole idea even at a time when it seems absurd I mean think of Iran one of the richest most powerful and developing states in the region very second over the 1960s and 70s there's this intellectual labor going on which proposes an alternative and in Iran in particular you have this figure Ali Shariati you is a schoolteacher who goes to Paris in the nineteen nineteen
• 42:30 - 43:00 sixties he encounters revolutionary Marxism and third-world ISM and he redefines in many ways what she ISM is he says well actually the essence of shi ism is revolutionary activism against injustice and so and this body and this can have an appeal beyond the constituencies that might listen to the clerics anyway this is a pattern of intellectual labor that then informs it provides a basis of cohesion it can
• 43:00 - 43:30 motivate it can prognosticate but it plays a role in the Iranian Revolution of 78 to 79 so you'll be pleased to hear I'm gonna go on five minutes but so this is one of the themes that you have through the book and there's another one that has to do with how activists apropriate in quite an unruly way models for collective action across borders perhaps I'll just give one example I
• 43:30 - 44:00 mean one quite dramatic example it's simply the idea of the revolutionary coup because this is what come on Abdul Nasser in the Free Officers pull off on the 23rd of July 1952 well that that just the fact that they do that gives the idea to other free officers would be free officers in other parts of the Arab world and I won't quote you here but there's one of the
• 44:00 - 44:30 figures who begins the planning in Iraq for the revolutionary coup that takes place in 1958 he begins and he says in his memoirs it was NASA's inspiration and we started planning in September two months after NASA's coup in 52 for such a coup in Iraq and and then of course the same model informs that North Yemen in 62 and it emphatically informs what happens in Libya 69 which is this idea of how you could
• 44:30 - 45:00 seize power within the state but the book is also I found that I found ultimately it's very difficult to even define a movement without some notion of normative commitment it seems that if a movement becomes merely opportunistic if it becomes merely an interest group if it becomes merely self-interested and movements are very often accused of being just that but if that really comes
• 45:00 - 45:30 to be the case then in some ways it's not a movement anymore I found normative commitment to be quite fundamental but especially in sustaining activists at moments of high risk and at moments of great danger or at moments when the temptations or seductions of power are present and let me just give you one example because I I think it's very dramatic and it's this you have the the Mardy of Sudan I mean he's well
• 45:30 - 46:00 known figure but he discloses his mission in 1881 that he is the expected deliverer and he will bring about a reign of justice on earth he's the son of a boatbuilder he's been an ascetic he's been a Sufi but he's someone from humble origins he's supported by a tribe of cattle herders and he receives a letter from a representative of the largest empire in the world the British Empire he receives a letter from General Gordon himself
• 46:00 - 46:30 March 1884 and it says ok we will appoint you the sultan of court affair and he urges him to release the european prisoners it sends him a red robe of honour and at our bouche and this is the reply from the expected deliverer Mohammed Ahmed of dongle er he says quote now that I am the expected Mahdi the successor of the apostle of God thus I have no need of the Sultanate nor of the kingdom of Kordofan or elsewhere nor
• 46:30 - 47:00 of the wealth of this world and it's vanity I am but the slave of God guiding unto God and to what is him as for the gift which you have sent us may God reward you well for your good will and guide you to the right it is returned to you here with so that's the kind of thing I mean by how a normative commitment can provide a kind of transcendent morale to a movement meaning a determination that would then
• 47:00 - 47:30 overcome various obstacles and issues and I won't go into what I say about more practical forms of leadership organization strategies and tactics but it's another thing that's important in the book and I want to evaluate and show how it varies and how it matters in the fate and fortunes of movements so overall the book obviously makes a pitch for the importance of popular politics in the history of the region and in changing forms of hegemony and
• 47:30 - 48:00 domination and I've tried to lay out some of the main historical arguments in the book to tell you a bit about what's in it and to begin to flesh out what it means to talk about popular politics but what I assert is that we need to write this history with the protest left in we can't dismiss it as in the Orientalism we can't ignore it as in top-down power institutional accounts that only look at the elites and institutional power we must challenge the post-colonial indifference to the protests and
• 48:00 - 48:30 passions and lives of the many and it's also unsatisfactory to try to explain this history through a linear materialist version of capitalist development it doesn't do justice to agency culture and politics itself the attempt therefore here is to recover a more engaged and political form of history writing in a context where cultural and discursive histories have had the initiative and the problem is that these have led to a kind of detachment and the possibilities for
• 48:30 - 49:00 understanding and analyzing resistance have been occluded one might say well widely that protest is often about real problems of ordinary people and it can hold out the hope for positive transformation but it can be the worst of times as well as the best of times and it's nice an angel nor a devil but it's a human construction and thus regularly flawed this finally is a popular politics it's
• 49:00 - 49:30 not about populism it's about the persistent attempts by ordinary people excluded from the political realm to refuse such a situation of exclusion and attempt to play a role in the policies rules and forms of coercion that they find themselves dominated by it's a vital and enduring theme and it will be for many years to come thank you very much okay you work
• 49:30 - 50:00 through this charting of politics and
• 50:00 - 50:30 wondering even despite the fact that you're pushing against certain types of materialist histories to what extent you actually see a continuous history of the Commons as either both an idea or notion of the Commons or as actual demands for or against certain forms of enclosure particularly as those who are engaged in these popular politics are struggling with identities as commoners subjects of
• 50:30 - 51:00 Empire and citizens of emerging nation state okay well thank you no I mean that's an important question this whole very important and vital feature of I mean it's especially important in in British history since the late 16th century isn't it following the history of enclosures and the question of commenting and it has there's a lot of interest isn't there in it right now in terms of how people have seen
• 51:00 - 51:30 neoliberalism in terms of accumulation by dispossession and to to push against that by asserting a common right two forms of I suppose it's above all about forms of property held in common and then collective ownership well the the the the the language of commoning of in that tradition isn't you
• 51:30 - 52:00 know an evident or a leading feature of this history as I've read it but I mean the way I use the word common in the 19th century it's it refers to those who are excluded from military administrative and fiscal functions those who are according to the Ottoman authorities are supposed to be productive subjects who from whom taxes will be extracted but it's just
• 52:00 - 52:30 interesting to note that that that designation is often they attempt to transcend it so that is a rather different sort of instantiation it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of struggles over but often more hidden over the seizure an acquisition of private wealth and property I mean you see this in in Mount Lebanon right in the 1920s in a grandiy ball when the French tried to prevent foraging in
• 52:30 - 53:00 forests for example they say it's unproductive they say you know we can't have this that the land has to be the the domain has to be meson villa and by a kind of a form of private ownership and so it excludes attempts to gather firewood and this I mean there are these issues are alive in the region but in terms of movements that as their explicit project of of announcing an attempt to reclaim the Commons
• 53:00 - 53:30 well that history might be there I haven't I haven't been able to to to to find you know I'm a major sorts of examples of that yes
• 53:30 - 54:00 is popular I don't use that term but I
• 54:00 - 54:30 mean there's so many cognate possibilities out there I mean among conservative City Muslim clerics the
• 54:30 - 55:00 idea of fitna or chaos chaos that is unleashed either by sexual corruption or transgression of lines and normal lines of authority I mean there's a there's a section of the automat the religious authorities in 1882 that refused to support or arby's patriotic and constitutional uprising on the basis that he doesn't he simply doesn't he isn't appointed to be a leader by the
• 55:00 - 55:30 Sultan and so and the fact that he's usurped that line of authority is enough for them to say this will open the door to chaos so as you say it's a very powerful aspect of the language of order is too I I think it comes up doesn't it in the first negative appraisals of 2011 and the kind of you know that were written very early the idea that it opens a Pandora's box and and of course it's it can be a seductive language
• 55:30 - 56:00 chaos insecurity in the language of fear etc etc so there are so many there's a very developed Pro of counterinsurgency around those issues I mean my I mean what I found to two sorts of languages there's the language of purity we and the enemy of purity is corruption and then there's the language
• 56:00 - 56:30 of freedom and the enemy of freedom is constrained and I mean those sorts of languages they echo through all the evaluations of contentious mobilization and popular politics is what's happening disorder will it corrupt the social order or will it free the social order and you know there's a seduction there's a seductive view that says oh well freedom and constraint is a Western Epis theme and corruption and purity is a
• 56:30 - 57:00 kind of an Eastern devasting well I refuse I think that binary is totally bogus there are so many socially conservative languages around corruption and purity in the West as well as elsewhere so but but there I think that it's very important to bury much quite difficult to reconcile those opposition's or I mean they they have a very powerful valence across that history
• 57:00 - 57:30 I'm interested in in the history city I sense almost a cyclical I get a cyclical experience and similar returns I'm
• 57:30 - 58:00 wondering about the role of human agency how much you see this okay well yes the cyclical in terms of the the rise establishment maintenance reform and then collapse of forms of political hegemony that indeed has a kind of
• 58:00 - 58:30 cyclical moment I mean I don't really refer to even khaldoon in the book but there is something of that kind of idea for sure in how political hegemony is established and then how it might come to pieces so I think I think it makes sense I mean if we're not dealing in teleology z-- then perhaps we're dealing in cycles but having said that history doesn't repeat itself exactly but there
• 58:30 - 59:00 are lots of interesting similarities between I mean especially the latest period and actually the late 19th century it's quite interesting I mean the late 19th century had liberals without constituent mass constituencies and it had attempts to form Islamic states against empires and regional opponents and so does the early 20th century as liberals without masks constituencies and it has attempts to form new Islamic states so early 21st
• 59:00 - 59:30 century sorry yes so you know there is something about that but in terms of agency my concepts I use to try to grasp the sorts of active agencies that at work in the positive construction of mobilizing projects have to do with intellectual labor and intellectual leadership the appropriation of trans local norms and ideas forms of practical leadership
• 59:30 - 60:00 organization strategies and tactics and different modes of organization and things - and factors having to do with normative commitment but so at a range of features but I try to insert that sort of social constructionism while paying attention to circumstances transmitted from the past in the foot in the terms of the forms of political hegemony and especially their D structure and contraction that can generate enabling conditions within
• 60:00 - 60:30 which those sorts of active agencies can operate yes I'm trying to understand the way that you're using Germany Gramsci's formulation Germany is coordinated through civil society the
• 60:30 - 61:00 term civil society is a relatively expansive term but referring a whole set of institutions and organizations that exist outside of this state itself wondering if you can there's so many cases that you're dealing with someone don't know how much you can really generalize but what is the historical trajectory of the civil society sphere that kind of outer ring grouchy's sense
• 61:00 - 61:30 of civil society that essentially structures the type of hegemony yeah no I mean that's absolutely important projects a moral political intellectual leadership they happen in what Graham she called the you know the earthworks and readouts and fortresses of civil society and he did seem to
• 61:30 - 62:00 refer to all the different institutions churches billion schools etc clubs organizations the unions that exist between the individual and the state but the important thing about Graham she's concept is that civil society isn't conceived as this fundamentally autonomous liberal place in which resistance the state power can happen it's in fact the arena of struggle right so that's very important the thing is I
• 62:00 - 62:30 slightly duck the discussion about civil society in the book because it's a long discussion because since the 1980s that term has been used so extensively to mean something which isn't what Graham she had in mind starting in Middle East Studies we had it beginning with Oh Justice Richard Norton and others but it's all around you know Larry diamond democratization studies it's and then on and on David
• 62:30 - 63:00 held Mary Kaldor global civil society it became it's a whole cottage industry so I thought what can I try to say look I mean something completely different or should I not actually have that debate so but the point is there are install variety of institutions between the individual and the state that are always at stake in in hegemonic strategies and you know from sufi orders to guilds to unions to syndicates to France to
• 63:00 - 63:30 committees to newspapers to press and they they're present throughout the book they don't they don't play this kind of active shaping role in and of themselves I'm much more in the agencies that work in those earthworks and fortresses as it were but so civil society as an analytic concept it doesn't have a kind of a purchase now I'd like to think that's reasonably faithful to grab she given that he sees
• 63:30 - 64:00 it as an arena of struggle rather than as a thing that causes other things to happen I mean I mean one of the striking features of the strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood in the interwar period is its it looks like a war of position a war of position in the way made by grouchy that you can't carry out a seizure of state power is landing in Russia you have to first begin at the
• 64:00 - 64:30 level of civil society and create a historic bloc which will then accede to power and the Muslim Brotherhood sets out quite clearly a strategy which says to begin with you perfect the individual it's the stage of knowledge and then there's a stage of outreach where you go out you create organizations you create clinics you write in the press and you persuade everybody else to be a good Muslim like you and then the third stage is called execution and and and that's
• 64:30 - 65:00 and actually I mean one of the strengths of this strategy is you can do lots of pious good works and be part of it and without any over confrontation with the state without demonstrating without protesting but but there's a weakness in the strategy which is actually the phase of execution is never very clearly defined how is it supposed to happen that this becomes a historic block which takes power in the state's not clear the Muslim Brotherhood is it going to be an armed struggle or not and it's it's not
• 65:00 - 65:30 and so there's you can clearly see a kind of civil society based strategy there and that happens with other movements but I don't as I say I avoid the use of the term just to avoid getting entangled in those debates just to clarify on hegemony itself I mean there are really three sorts of readings of graham shaving one is that a Germany is it's it requires a fundamental class which is linked to the means of
• 65:30 - 66:00 production it's either the proletariat of the bourgeoisie and they had Gemini's others a Bolton social groups lump and proletariat petty bourgeoisie the peasantry in the name of the nation and a project either of liberalism if it's the bourgeoisie or the socialism if it's the proletariat that's one reading and and that's and that's probably most faithful to gram sheet but that but then he was reread in a much more discursive way starting in the 1960s and 70s and then with what the clown move did in the
• 66:00 - 66:30 80s to a halt and others and they they read hegemony in terms of cultural hegemony in terms of discursive construction and that had a link to Foucault do an analysis and on and on well my mind I prefer the third version of gram sheet not the economistic version not the discursive version but the political version and there's this book by John Sanborn Epps's called the postmodern prince and he tries to recover a kind of political gram shoe
• 66:30 - 67:00 which is much more about leadership about domination the dominant block its articulation with support and social groups and their strategies forms of organisation so that's the kind of what that's when I'm secure about hegemon to Germany and hegemonic contestation it's that political gram machine that I have in mind verifies or sidesteps or both
• 67:00 - 67:30 one of the features of the world is that
• 67:30 - 68:00 well of course that's such a vitally important issue and I myself I did this
• 68:00 - 68:30 study of hundreds of thousands of Syrian migrant workers who moved from Syria to Lebanon backwards and forwards especially since the 1960's doing work in low-income and semi an unskilled labor and and that was a books book length study and so I was I have been attuned to this important issue of displacement and migration and I have written a an article in 12 2011 on how my circulations of migrants and others brought activist ideas to the to into
• 68:30 - 69:00 the Arabian Peninsula Palestinians Egyptians Yemenis and others they played a role in circulating activist ideas pan-arab ideas and ideas about Arab socialism Barth ism and so on so but what that so my answer is to say is to say there's no determinate analytic direction I mean it that I discerned in this book is that it could be one or the other I mean displacement it can circulate
• 69:00 - 69:30 ideas that can feed in to political projects or it can cause people to keep their heads down and enter what I characterized in Lebanon kind of an invisible cage whereby you concentrate on sending goods back home to your domestic communities of production and you thereby getting entangled inadvertently in larger structures of accumulation and a kind of a politics that you it you completely ignore over confrontation with but the
• 69:30 - 70:00 other the other interesting thing though is another vector is shakeout don't explore in the book but it's this thing about even a displaced population when it comes to make claims politically who does it make claims to it often has to make claims against its own state I mean one example being this underexplored issue of Bangladeshi workers in Kuwait in 2005 when they were protesting they went on strike hospital workers they appealed to the Bangladeshi embassy they didn't appeal to the Kuwaiti authorities
• 70:00 - 70:30 but because they're the insert in terms of one can understand that partly in terms of how they share of a political community with a Bangladeshi authorities they feel completely excluded from Kuwait and they don't have a route to citizenship and therefore the instantiation of their rights occurs in interaction with Bangladeshi authorities or at least that's the attempt so that could be another interesting feature that again I don't I don't explore in the book but there are I mean there but
• 70:30 - 71:00 I do I do I mean they're a bit pops up I mean with the the cattle herding tribe that is so important in the m'dear in Sudan they they they they they migrate through from West Africa across to Khartoum and back again and and and some of it may be that they some some of the tactics that the Mahdi uses are very similar to what the West African Jihad movements that did for example he he
• 71:00 - 71:30 announces the he's going to undertake a Hydra you know an emigration from the land of corruption and unbelief in order to establish a a pure form of community in order to return and this was a very marked feature of West African jihad funny people think that side could have sort of invented idea but he didn't there are these others back in the nineteen eighteenth century who were thinking in those terms of course you have those in South Asia
• 71:30 - 72:00 as well hitter a movement there was one in temps and in 1911 as well but so yeah I mean there's probably a whole rich field of things to be said about displacements that tackled in a book that's probably full of other sorts of sins of omission yes and then towards
• 72:00 - 72:30 the end of the talk you spoke about the importance of commitment in these but I'm wondering if there is you might have back a certain tension in the way in which you've described them and whether to link that to the the question about whether that there might be an alternative to the political Gramsci and not my being handi popular politics works is interesting I mean I do I've
• 72:30 - 73:00 been recently and one of the interesting features of what Gandhi was up is a very deeply articulated project of intellectual labor I don't want to colonize Gandhi with my own terms I mean it's very highly developed the
• 73:00 - 73:30 ideas of what it means to engage in a kind of resistance that doesn't involve it's not just sort of nonviolent resistance is near marvelous it's a kind of a whole developed area about how you you acquire dignity and how you I can't articulate the whole thing right now but it but it struck me that it's there's a lot of it today labor going on in terms of Gandhi
• 73:30 - 74:00 enunciated so I don't necessarily see that as because I'd have to do more study but it doesn't seem to be private fresh air is a sort of a contradiction but on the other side I think you do sort of point to something important which is on that there's a vector of transgressive and unruly mobilization and there's another vector which I which I borrow this term from macadam territory which is contained mobilization which has to do with what
• 74:00 - 74:30 happens when patterns of mobilization become more routinized what happens when you know the political subject is more established and you expect a strike you expect a letter-writing campaign you expect a petition or even something else you expect you might even expect a certain pattern of crowd action for example so that's there you know and I do try to distinguish that throughout the book and it's not necessarily the case that
• 74:30 - 75:00 unruly and transgressive mobilization it can be quite ephemeral and there are lots of examples of that I mean one is the Cairo fire of January 1952 it's interesting because they people that do it do very particular in structured things some of the people what happens is the main symbols of colonial power and wealth in downtown Cairo have burned by the crown when it becomes apparent that King Farouk is not going to do anything about the death of the 50
• 75:00 - 75:30 Egyptian policemen in the barracks in his Mallya and so the crowd goes to current palace he's banqueting and he has his troops shoot on the crowd and in response to that they start this burning but it's forensic they remove goods from shops pile them in the middle of the street deliberately leave them on one side and then burn the shops and to show they're not looters so it's spontaneous but very are then but then there are looters who show up at the end of the day but but it's
• 75:30 - 76:00 Pandora's box I suppose but they but-but-but so even in those vectors of a grueling this you get patterns as well so it's a tricky business but that the way I've been the Intifada in Egypt in January 19th 20th 1977 it rises up it lasts two days and then it subsides that nothing happens and so yes it was unruly but then there wasn't the continuity there wasn't the organization and there else wasn't much intellectual labor around the either either from Islamists
• 76:00 - 76:30 or leftists leftists tried to wash their hands of it yes the mists weren't very interesting quite unlike algeria in 1988 where following the crowd actions of the young men the Islamists show up and they start to Gemini's the crowds according to their own sorts of projects so there's lots of there's an intermeshing of unruly and transgressive vectors and then more contained vectors that are quite difficult to to sort of
• 76:30 - 77:00 empirically verify or put apart in practice but I think we have to also on the other so I find ways to analyze the unruly vectors because they have to do with creativity and unexpectedness and how that can create the change whereas the more contained forms are more anticipated and so on but of course it doesn't mean that there's a conclusion about which worm is as it were more effective more successful and so on and
• 77:00 - 77:30 so forth I don't try to conclude that debate I know that we're running out of time but the million-dollar question is so now what well now what it's definitely multiple crises of authority I mean that place regimes that are still in place in
• 77:30 - 78:00 places like Syria or Egypt or Algeria insofar as they are I mean they're not distinguished by the strong forms of consent or Germany so the expectation is that there will be projects which you know both unruly and then contained in that context that's the expectation as far as I'm concerned but and you know for all the character revolutionary capacity of the CC state in Egypt the
• 78:00 - 78:30 fact that it's locked up tens of thousands of Islamists and thrown in the revolutionary youth as well and carried out some of the largest massacres in civilians that Egypt has seen in August 2013 you have to go a long way back in history before you find something similar as what was done on August the 14th 2013 but for all those powers it was the case that domestic regimes were overthrown in in four cases or at least
• 78:30 - 79:00 dictators were toppled and quite decisively in two cases Tunisia and Egypt at least for a time and that's quite a dramatic event and that doesn't the the the memory of that or the the what that indicates is not something that will just sort of disappear anytime soon so but but a lot depends on on leadership depends on agency depends on intellectual labor depends on people's
• 79:00 - 79:30 commitments so it's open-ended and we have to also expect the unexpected and that's also unless on them unruly collective action is that it hopeless to to predict suddenly something will happen I mean if I mean if if it's true that there are comparisons between this period and the period that just preceded the first world war if it's true then but the first world war sort of intervened and any but it meant that reformist liberal nationalists were able to then had Gemini's much wider constituencies at
• 79:30 - 80:00 least in egypt and but who could have predicted and that was what would happen and and so there could be intervening exogenous factors that then create whole new alignments which are generative I mean think of Charles Anderson's 1100 page PhD on resistance in Mandate Palestine he speaks about the uprising of nineteen thirty six to thirty nine is a generative alignment I think it's a very eloquent way of putting it and
• 80:00 - 80:30 there can be new generative alignments that create unpredictable constellations that it's hopeless to sit here and try to imagine what they would be but that's which is you know part of the fascination of the topic whereas we can I think we can specify enabling conditions for how action can find propitious circumstances but I don't think we know what shape it takes I
• 80:30 - 81:00 don't think I'm not an app you know I'm not someone who says it's absolutely unpredictable in the way of kurzon and I think we can expect in this context new sorts of projects but I suppose one has to remain suitably cautious about about what they would be it's tricky yes well that's an important question I
• 81:00 - 81:30 mean I take the I look at the history of the Ottoman Empire until the First World War and then the focus of the book is on is on the Arab states and the main reason for that has to do with my linguistic capabilities so that that's that's how but but but it's an important question because Turkey it is part of the picture and especially now more so than ever before and someone else will
• 81:30 - 82:00 have to take on the task well thank you very much and for that engagement those important questions