Asef BAYAT: Life as Politics: How Ordinary people Change the Middle East

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, I argue that such presumptions fail to recognize the routine, yet important, ways in which ordinary people make meaningful change through everyday actions. The book shows how the subaltern groups in the Middle East such as the urban poor, Muslim women, the youth and others strive to enhance their life chances in the everyday life by resorting to discreet and dispersed activities that I call 'non-movements'. While the non-movements-- the collective action of non-collective actors -- constitute the salient feature of subaltern politics in normal times, they may assume collective and audible forms when the actors find fitting opportunities. They may even coalesce and merge into much broader political movements and uprisings. Life as Politics navigates from the politics of ordinary people in communities, courts, and on the streets to the eruption of mass uprisings and revolutions in the Middle East. Drawn on over a decade of research and reflections, the book's geographical scope extends from Iran to the Arab world, in particular Egypt.

Life as Politics: How Ordinary people Change the Middle East, Stanford University Press, 2103