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The Arab uprisings: an appraisal

Comparing the Arab uprisings with the revolutions of the 1970s like the ones in Yemen, Nicaragua and Iran, social theorist Asef Bayat, pinpoints some crucial differences between them. The Arab revolutions, he rightly, argues, lacked an intellectual anchor. In contrast also to the ideas and visions behind the English revolution, the American revolution, the French revolution, and more recently, the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Arab uprisings lacked  leadership strategies. 

Moreover, the Arab revolutions lacked that radicalism that marked the twentieth-century revolutions: anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, social justice, etc. Instead, the prevailing voices from Tunisia to Yemen, from Libya to Syria, were the voices of legal reform, accountability and human rights. The predominant secular and Islamist currents took the free market and neoliberal capitalism for granted and uncritically. 

Property relations and structure of power went unchallenged, except in Libya. The apparatuses of the state either restructured itself and survived or re-emerged largely intact. There was no plan to take over the social and economic institutions that shaped people's collective lives and reorganise them.

The context is one of "the end of history", "revolution is an outdated phenomenon", "capitalist realism", "there is no alternative",  and "globalisation"; a context in which "identity politics", "the politics of recognition", "individual rights" and "human rights" have become dominant and as substitution for class politics, exploitation, solidarity, real freedoms, etc. 


"The key issues raised by the Arab political class seemed to be with government accountability, democracy, and human rights," says Bayat. "I have to say these demands are very significant in our region, indeed. But they are often used and manipulated also by the authoritarian regimes and their western allies, who speak similar language. This language is often used to hide the ruling class linkages with social exclusion, economic deprivation, terrible inequality, and the regime of property." I would add the strive to co-opt and and contain the Arab revolts and at most to use them as an opportunity for social engineering. One of the roles was payed by Western imperialism, international institutions and media in confining the voices to the language of "human rights" "democratic institutions", "political freedoms" and channeling the anger into electoral processes. Thus extending the life of or resurrecting the dying regimes, maintaining the existing property and power relations through reform or without it. Relations which are in the interest of both the local bourgeoisie and its international backers.

Contra Jack Goldstone (Foreign Affairs, 2011), for instance, who believes that there have been "struggles for power between radicals and moderates", Bayat asks, "Did the notion of radicals and moderates have any meaningful relevance in the experiences of Egypt, Tunisia, or Yemen? Where were the radicals, and was the role played similar to those played in the French, Russian, or Iranian revolutions? —See Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries, 2017, pp. 11-15

Eight years later, the protests are having a come back (in Tunisia, Sudan, Iraq, Algeria), and the similarity of the protesters' demands and strategies echoes the Tunisian and the Egyptian ones. Peaceful, but not radical and of no threat to the structures of power.