Contentious PolActivism:MENA

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course aims at investigating the role and complexities of people's agency in the Arab Middle East and North Africa through the framework of contentious politics and social movement theory. It discusses the links between contentious politics and social and political struggles, showing that the 2010-11 wave of mass popular mobilization, activism and resistance across the region was the outcome of a decades-long cumulative process built upon social, political and economic grievances. It sheds light on new emerging forces and counter-revolutionary actors, and argues that the fall of many autocratic rulers has created a paradigm shift in the ways Arab citizens are defining their future and conceiving of their relationship to power. Finally, the course problematizes the common Western-oriented frames of analysis used to examine the region's gradual process of change, questioning Orientalist assumptions that depict democratization as a linear process through the strictly binary lens of democracy or authoritarianism.