Arab Politics Beyond the Uprisings: Experiments in an Era of Resurgent Authoritarianism

by Thanassis Cambanis (Editor), Michael Wahid Hanna (Editor)

Political experimentation and invention survive in unlikely places years after resurgent authoritarianism interrupted the Arab revolts. Despite violent conflict and state repression, attempts to build new institutions and ideologies continue outside the confines of traditional opposition politics. In this volume, established researchers, new scholars, and active participants explore political initiatives in other media, artists’ collectives, rebel enclaves, neighborhood councils, fledgling citizen campaigns, and elsewhere. With rich ethnographic detail, these studies pay special attention to regional dynamics, cross-border learning, and the intellectual history of ideas central to the uprisings. They reveal an unresolved struggle between resilient authoritarian structures and alternative centers of political power. Contributors include Nathan J. Brown, Benjamin Helfand, Monica Marks, Michael Stephens, Khaled Mansour, Sima Ghaddar, Karim Ennarah, Ursula Lindsey, Jonathan Guyer, Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, Laura C. Dean, Marc Lynch, Samer Abboud, Yasser Munif, Aron Lund, Sam Heller, Cilja Harders, Dina Wahba, and Asya El-Meehy.

560 pages, Paperback

Published May 30, 2017

About the author

Thanassis Cambanis is a journalist who has been writing about the Middle East for more than a decade. His latest book chronicles the idealistic and ultimately failed efforts of Egyptian revolutionaries to build a democratic order after Mubarak. His first book, A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel, was published in 2010. He writes “The Internationalist” column for The Boston Globe Ideas section, and regularly contributes to The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Globe (where he served as a foreign correspondent in Iraq and the Middle East), and other publications. He is a fellow at The Century Foundation in New York City. Thanassis studied international affairs for a master's degree at Princeton University, and did his undergraduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Beirut, Lebanon with his wife Anne Barnard, a reporter for The New York Times, and their two children.