Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures)

[T]his is a serious book that compares and explains the differences between previous Middle East and global revolutions and those of the last decade. A good scholarly contribution. Recommended

Asef Bayat is in the vanguard of a subtle and original theorization of social movements and social change in the Middle East. His attention to the lives of the urban poor, his extensive field work in very different countries within the region, and his ability to see over the horizon of current paradigms make his work essential reading.

An astute analyst of the Middle East, Asef Bayat is one of the very few researchers equipped to historicize the region's contemporary uprisings. In Revolution without Revolutionaries, he deftly and sympathetically employs his own observations of Iran, immediately before and after the 1979 revolution, to reflect on the epochal shifts that have re-worked the political regimes, economic structures, and revolutionary imaginaries across the region today.

Asef Bayat provocatively questions the Arab Spring's apparent moderation, tracing its softness to decades of neoliberalism that have undermined the national state and discarded old-fashioned forms of revolutionary violence. This groundbreaking book is not an obituary for the Arab Spring but a hopeful glimpse at its future.

Asef Bayat, famed for his Life as Politics (2010, 2013), presents us with a rich theoretical and empirical study of the 2011 revolutions colloquially known as the Arab Spring in Revolution without Revolutionaries...Bayat, an Iran-born, US-based sociologist from a working-class background who has a deep observational capacity to see and remember things as they unfolded in his own - first village - and then in the working-class Tehran neighbourhood where he grew up...The book would be of great value to scholars interested in revolutions, social movements, graduate students, and researchers of the Middle East politics.

Asef Bayat's impressive Revolution Without Revolutionaries tries to explain why nearly all the exhilarating uprisings in the Middle East eventually failed...Bayat is not the first scholar to tackle this issue, the field of Middle East studies having offered up its share of autopsies, but his lucid and readable account does provide the most plausible explanation. In the end, revolutions cannot succeed without leaders who have spent decades in oppositional politics honing their ideology and sharpening their strategy.

Asef Bayat is the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, 2009, 2013) and Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, 2007).