Activism Protest: Arab MENA

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course examines the role and complexities of people’s agency in the Arab Middle East and North Africa through the framework of activism, protest, and social movements. It discusses the centrality of popular politics that includes activism, collective action, resistance, and protest as a force of change across the region. It investigates the reasons that enable ordinary people from different social backgrounds and outside of institutional, formal, and routine politics to join together in mass movements and voice their grievances in defiance of repressive political conditions. The course analyzes activists and protest movements’ claims against their respective regimes, the conditions that give rise to their movements and occurrence, the advantages of the political opportunities, the risks/threats they face, the organizational resources that shape their choice of activism, their success at particular points of time, and different factors that contribute or impede in achieving their goals. Finally, the course helps to understand the role protest movements, mass popular mobilizations, and revolts have been playing in the Arab world’s ongoing political transformations and argues that this dynamic is an open-ended process, questioning assumptions that depict socio-political changes as a linear process through the strict and narrow binary lens of democracy or authoritarianism.