This chapter presents a micro-sociological re-theorization of nonviolent resistance as shaped by dynamics of rhythms, destabilization of domination, energizing and de-energizing repression, and emotional feedback loops. The chapter shows how an occupying power can be understood as a tightly organized musical ensemble with dominating interactions and rhythmic coordination, and how nonviolent resistance can disrupt the rhythmic coordination and domination by a regime; hence, de-stabilizing and potentially challenging the power relation. The chapter discusses how concrete nonviolent actions can defy domination and the degree to which they can be useful for challenging violent repression. In conflicts of nonviolent resistance, the battle is determined by whether the protesters or the regime are able to dominate the situation and challenge the tight, rhythmic coordination and unity of the opponent. If neither party is able to dominate, the situation will escalate. Finally, the chapter discusses how nonviolent resistance can foster long-term change.

Only a few weeks after Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, Ennahda returned to Tunisia from exile. The same year Ennahda won Tunisia’s first free and fair elections in its history. On the night of the election, Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Ennahda, vowed to uphold the revolutionary goals of building a free and prosperous Tunisia. And his party kept this promise to build Tunisian democracy with other stakeholders. Why did Ennahda adhere to democratic principles in power and became a force for compromise, deliberation, and engagement? This chapter shows that competing political visions have coexisted within the party organization since its establishment in the 1980s, and since the 1990s liberal Islamists pulled Ennahda towards democratic commitments not only when they were in opposition but also after coming to power in 2011. To explain this process, the chapter first turns to the origins of the Islamist movement in Tunisia and its political and ideological evolution over time including Ghannouchi’s philosophical contributions. Then it explores the shifting balance of power among factions and factors, determining this balance with a specific emphasis on organizational resources and implications for Tunisian democracy.

The modern history of Saudi–Iranian relations (dating back to the formation of the Saudi state in 1932) can be characterized broadly into five distinct phases. The first is between 1932 and 1979, which is characterized by regional distrust yet a willingness for the two states to engage with each other. The second is the period after the revolution until three years after the end of the Iran–Iraq War – where a catastrophic earthquake provided an opportunity to reset relations – which was driven by existential concerns about the nature of political organization and competition over Islamic legitimacy. The ensuing period from 1991 to 2003 was one in which a burgeoning rapprochement began to unfold, driven by domestic factors across the Gulf. The fourth period ran roughly from 2003 to 2011, in which the bombastic nationalism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president (2005–13) ran up against the belligerent ‘Axis of Evil’ narrative within the US War on Terror. The fifth period emerged after the Arab Uprisings in 2011, providing the two states with opportunities to exert influence across the Middle East through the provision of support to groups across the region. The events of the Arab Uprisings provided further opportunities to increase their influence, particularly in those states where regime-society relations began to fragment. In this chapter I offer a brief genealogy of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran with a focus on the construction of competing nomoi – visions of regional order – which play out across the transnational field and resonate within states.

After 84 years of struggle, the Muslim Brotherhood rose to prominence in Egyptian politics in the wake of the Arab uprisings. On the night of his election, Mohamed Morsi promised to unite all Egyptians – Muslim and Christians, men and women – and to advance the revolutionary cause for democracy, human rights, and dignity. Over the next 365 days, rather than uniting and democratizing his country, he alienated large segments of the population through exclusionary politics, majoritarianism, and polarization. Why did the Muslim Brotherhood follow majoritarian and polarizing politics after coming to power? This chapter seeks to solve this puzzle by way of unpacking the Brotherhood’s internal power dynamics and disagreements regarding democratic politics. To that end, the chapter begins with a short historical account, tracing the Brotherhood’s changing relationship to politics and emerging splits within. Then, it turns to the shifting power balance between the old guard and liberal Islamists, and how the former sidelined the latter. The chapter discusses three critical episodes in this process: the Wasat Party initiative of 1996, the 2009–10 internal elections, and the post-2011 purge of the liberals. It concludes with a discussion of what the old guard’s perception of democracy looks like in action with details from Morsi’s year in presidency.

This chapter explores efforts to shape Bahrain’s political field and the ways in which its politically charged geographical location as the ‘epicentre’ of the struggle for supremacy between Riyadh and Tehran shapes these efforts. It explores the struggle for Bahrain’s political field and its social reality which has allowed a range of domestic and regional actors to become involved in the contestation over principles of vision and division, deploying economic, political, and religious capital in the process. Central to this is a number of networks and relationships that shape perceptions and behaviour, along tribal, ethnic, and religious lines. As Saudi and Iranian efforts to impose order on the region focused on Bahrain, they intersected with a complex set of intersectional phenomena bringing together tensions between rulers and ruled over social, economic, and political issues, all of which play out in the context of the transnational field.

In order to understand the ways in which the Saudi–Iranian rivalry plays out in Syria, it is essential to trace the evolution of the political field and its interaction with the transnational field. In doing so, the chapter critically reflects on the evolution of political life in Syria and the position of the state within broader regional currents, with a focus on Ba’athism, the Axis of Resistance, and the Arab Uprisings. Syria’s importance within such movements meant that it became a state of interest for other regional powers, particularly seen in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings.

In this chapter, I examine the evolution of US democracy aid in Egypt through the eyes of the diplomats, practitioners, and bureaucrats engaged with such efforts in Egypt. I focus on the practical construction of democracy aid on the ground and the struggles undertaken by different actors to implement aid programs in an authoritarian state. I examine how ideas, interests, and institutions engaged in such aid evolved since 1990s to shape a kind of reform more attuned to the commercial and economic interests of the US and Egyptian governments rather than those of citizens in the country. In the first section, I focus on the nature of authoritarianism in Egypt, tracing its origins since the Nasser era to describe how power has since been exercised and maintained. In the second section, I examine how US democracy aid evolved in Egypt, focusing on the debates and discussions at the inception of USAID’s programs.

Given the relative dominance of positivist epistemologies in political science, the most common mode of comparison is that of variation finding. Although such models can take many forms, the objective is to identify what factors or variables differ across the cases as a means to explain that variation. But other modes of comparative analysis are available. In particular, Charles Tilly’s notion of encompassing comparisons – examining similarities and differences across cases while recognizing that they are inextricably connected or related to some larger whole – may be a better model for explaining long-term political processes, such as state formation, colonialism, capitalism, or even the spread of massive protests across a large number of cases. In this chapter, I develop an encompassing comparison of the Arab uprisings. The approach does not see the uprisings as individual cases whose diverse outcomes yearn for explanation but rather as instances of mass resistance to larger, transnational processes, notably including securitization and neoliberalism. This is not to suggest that these processes caused the uprisings. But the idea is to explore the ways in which the different governments were connected to these larger processes and networks and the extent to which those supranational factors help explain the outcomes of the individual cases.

This chapter gives an overview of the book in how it deals with dignity in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution in the context of the Arab Uprisings. Dignity or karama in Arabic is a nebulous concept that challenges us to reflect about various issues such as identity, human rights, and faith. This chapter shows that the research to write this book was prompted by the complexity of dignity demands at a time when the region of North Africa and the Middle East was drifting in the socio-political event of the “Arab Spring” or Arab Uprisings. The main motivation in the research was to investigate understandings of karama in the specific context of Egypt during the 2011 protests. To do so, the focus was on interviews with participants in the 2011 protests and analysis of art forms that emerged during protests and in which there was an explicit expression of dignity/lack of dignity. The chapter presents the argument and contribution of the book, the importance of terminology and layers of meanings, and finally the wider context for dignity slogans. The chapter ends by presenting the book structure and the thematic chapters.

This chapter focuses on the theme of dignity as identity and particularly Arab identity. One of the important components in the construction of nationality is consolidating a sense of identity. Karama/dignity – in the sense of being an image of God with inherent worth – has supported for millennia a sense of identity for humans. In the discussion of karama as identity in the slogans of the 2011 Arab Uprisings in Egypt, the chapter shows that there is a widespread understanding of the lack of dignity in Arab contexts, mostly due to oppressive political regimes in a postcolonial setting, which can be seen through various expressions of karama as identity in arts and in the interviews. The chapter also highlights how identity politics are also essential to increasingly globalized societal contexts around the world.

This chapter focuses on the theme of dignity as a human right. There is first a brief general review of a few relevant philosophical debates about human dignity and human rights that are concerned with societal progress in the way karama as a human right, was sometimes interpreted by protesters. Then, the chapter moves on to a closer look at a postcolonial review of similar debates. After reviewing some relevant passages from interviews and other expressions of karama as a human right in Egypt, the chapter ends with an overall analysis of this specific theme in light of the material previously presented.

This chapter summarizes the overall structure of the book and reiterates how it deals with dignity in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution in the context of the Arab Uprisings. Overall, this concluding chapter looks at how the politics of dignity are used to uphold authoritarianism. This has been a blind spot in social and political theories whose authors and practitioners often speak from within a Western cultural framework that often does not understand the relevance of such politics in contexts like Egypt. The need to study karma is timely and the book brought some compelling conclusions for that end particularly regarding understanding dignity as a traumatic experience.

This chapter focuses on the theme of dignity as materialism. In this chapter, the relationship between materialism and dignity/karama suggested in the interviews and in some of the protesters’ demands during the 2011 uprisings in Egypt is first set in the context of the political and economic project of development in today’s modern and global societies. Then, the chapter provides a review of some of the critiques of this political and economic project of development in modern societies and in structural adjustments exposed in new models for socioeconomic progress, particularly to provide for an alternative to strict materialism. The chapter points to the context of a rise of human rights and human dignity discourses that support nonmaterial dimensions of wellbeing and confront it to the representations of karama related to materialism seen in the study. This rise has been seen not only in different societies but also in designing new development models that are precisely concerned with more egalitarian economic conditions for more social justice.

This chapter is not a thematic one, but a general review of the main findings from the different themes and an analysis of the suggested framing of “dignition,” which is a demand for dignity recognition. The chapter begins by showing the language dimension in articulating political demands to see how protesters may use a form of dignition at a particular time and for particular needs. The chapter presents the suggestion of dignition as one linked to dynamics of revolutionary change and populist demands. Then, the chapter looks at how discussions of identity in the Arab and Egyptian contexts have political drivers particularly in the processes of modernizing Arab states after the colonial period. This leads to emotional discussions of articulating the demand of dignity which reveals issues of identity for protesters. Lastly, the chapter exposes the dynamics of modernity and development in the context of accelerated globalization, which increase the precarity of dignity perceptions.

This chapter focuses on the theme of dignity as faith. First, the chapter attempts to clarify the use of the term “faith” as opposed to “religion.” The notion of dignity/karama is not just related to Islam, but also to a social condition that is embedded in one’s religious status and the accompanying process of socialization. The discussion of a human’s worth, central to understanding dignity/karama, is often related to religious studies. Given the broad context of this relationship, the focus here is to look only at the scholarship suggested from the interviews: notably dignity for Spinoza, for Pico della Mirandola, and for the secularists versus Islamists and in their debate with each other. The chapter gives milestones for the understanding of the discussion of karama and faith/religion in the interviews presented in this chapter.

This chapter is a conversation between book editor Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and Mohammad Al Attar, one of the Arab world’s most celebrated younger playwrights. It is based on a talk Al Attar gave at the American University of Beirut in April 2015. In the conversation, Al Attar offers valuable insights into the significance of Sa’dallah Wannous’ plays and their legacy for a younger generation of playwrights in and from the Arab world. He shares his views about how Wannous’ language, style of writing, and ideas on the politicization of theatre impacted him as a student at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus and later as a renowned playwright. Al Attar also attempts to read Wannous’ influence on the political, cultural, and literary scene of the 2011 Arab uprisings, especially the Syrian revolution.