A revolution without revolutionaries

v/Asef Bayat

The revolutionary wave that swept the Middle East in 2011 was marked by spectacular mobilization, spreading within and between countries with extraordinary speed. Several years on, however, it has caused limited shifts in structures of power, leaving much of the old political and social order intact.

Asef Bayat is Professor of Sociology at University of Illinois and the author of several books, amongst these the work ‘Revolution without Revolutionaries – Making Sense of the Arab Spring' (Stanford University Press).

Setting the 2011 uprisings side by side with the revolutions of the 1970s, particularly the Iranian Revolution, Bayat reveals a profound global shift in the nature of protest: as acceptance of neoliberal policy has spread, radical revolutionary impulses have diminished.

Noa Kjærsgaard Hansen moderates.

Photo: L. Brian Stauffer

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