The past decade has witnessed unprecedented global uprisings, from Latin America to Asia, and from Europe to Africa. Yet these uprisings have brought little meaningful change to structures of power, macroeconomic policies, plutocratic rule, or autocratic regimes. If anything, repression has become even more severe. While this has been particularly evident in the Middle East, similar processes appear to be unfolding in some liberal democracies as well. What does this moment mean for state–society relations in these democracies? What are its implications for popular struggles for democracy and justice?
Asef Bayat, is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, and Catherine & Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is also an Associate Member of Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research (BIM) at Humboldt University, Berlin. Before joining Illinois, he taught at the American University in Cairo for seventeen years; and served as the director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) holding the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research areas range from social movements and social change to religion and public life, urban space and politics, and contemporary Middle East. His recent books include Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (Oxford University Press, 2013); Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2013. 2nd edition), Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford University Press, 2017), Global Middle East: Into the 21st Century (ed. With Linda Herrera) (University of California Press, 2021), and Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (Harvard University Press, 2021).
Myriam Ahmed is a researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Peace and Conflict Research (INTERACT) at FU Berlin where she is part of the research group “Radical Spaces”. She is currently pursuing her PhD on the role of space and spatiality in the negotiation of power with a focus on Sudan’s December revolution. Prior to that Myriam Ahmed gained practical experience in the field of peace mediation at swisspeace, CMI and at the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, with a main focus on the MENA region. Her research interests include contentious politics, resistance and repression dynamics, and (urban) spaces. She holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.