The 2011 Arab uprisings sparked renewed protests in neighboring Iran where protesters called for political freedoms, a continuation of the earlier 2009 “Green Movement” against the dubious reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A protest slogan heard in 2011 after the fall of Mubarak and Ben Ali testifies to the impact of the Arab uprisings on the Iranian protests: “Mubarak, Ben Ali, next in line is Seyyed Ali [Khamenei].” Since 2011, however, Iranians have engaged in two more nation-wide uprisings: the 2017-2018 “Dey mah” protests and the 2019 “Aban mah” protests, named after months in the Iranian calendar during which they took place. In my paper, I examine parallels between these later revolts and the 2011 Arab uprisings. While the 2009 protests emphasized political grievances over economic grievances, the plunder of public wealth became an increasingly prominent feature of public discourse in Iran throughout the 2010s. This anti-elite sentiment laid the groundwork for the “Dey mah” and “Aban mah” uprisings, which differed from the 2009 revolt in terms of the more visible participation of working-class people. As seen in the 2011 Arab uprisings and the later 2019 uprisings in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, and Iraq, a crisis of global capitalism forms the conditions for the Iranian revolts. To illustrate this, I discuss oral histories I conducted with the Center for Workers’ Defense, a Tehran-based organization of independent unionists and labor organizers. I explore their work organizing a major 2015 teachers’ strike, as well as their writings on precarious labor conditions in Iran including the temporary contracts imposed upon the majority of the work force. I argue that these worker activists have participated in conversations around the plunder of public wealth by domestic elites, sentiments which led to the 2017/2018 and 2019 revolts. They further spoke of bearing the brunt of US sanctions while decrying domestic elites who escape sanctions unscathed and in fact grow richer. What complicates the Iranian uprisings in relation to some of the Arab ones is Iran’s position in the global order as an adversary of the United States. This means that US state actors hope to co-opt protests for the benefit of the US agenda for the region. Yet I show that a growing number of Iranian activists condemn both Iranian state repression and US sanctions and warmongering. Their double-edged condemnation prompts us to imagine different social conditions than the ones made available by the Iranian and US states.

We often look at the 2011 protests that swept the region as monumental events that changed the Middle East and North Africa. Yet those protests also showed the intransigence of repressive forces, the staying power of old elites, and the doubling down of imperial interventions. It is in the midst of this context that 2019 and 2020 saw a new wave of protests and uprisings in Iran, Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, and most recently in Tunisia. In all but Iran and Tunisia, the uprisings were able to achieve quick initial victories by removing key political leaders, but they remain entangled in a prolonged and bloody struggle to achieve their full demands including the overhaul of the state. As in 2011, the 2019 protests are facing some of the similar challenges: pressure from the global economy, intervention from regional governments, and imperial intervention in the form of political, economic, and cultural meddling. In the face of these obstacles we also witnessed the emergence of new political cultures and subjectivities, which have undermined the credibility of the state. Indeed, in many countries ruling elites face an enduring crisis of legitimacy. In Iraq, they have responded by seeking foreign patrons to bolster their position. Using Iraq as the main case, this paper argues “proxy wars” are in part a response to political crises of legitimacy and have in many instances elicited nationalist sentiments from protestors. In the context of violent state responses, there is less patience for regionalism and transnationalism amongst protest movements as they become preoccupied with self-defense. Nationalist sentiments are more pronounced amongst the Iraqi diaspora, especially for those in the West. These trends are not specific to Iraq or the region, but part of global trends of increased nationalism in the context of a crisis of global capitalism. This paper explores these alarming trends by looking at Iraq both regionally and also situating Iraq and the region within larger systemic trends globally. Based on this analysis, the paper asks how do we grapple with the reassertion of nationalism in the context of a long history where sovereignty and self-determination has only ever been a façade for those that suffered through colonial and imperial aggression? What can we learn from the protest movements’ new language as well as strategies for moving beyond what seems at times to be an impasse of strategy and imagination?

Arab authoritarianism exceptionality ceased to exist in 2011 when massive popular mobilizations broke out in many countries across the region calling for the fall of the regime – the captivating chant in most demonstrations. Some scholars were inspired to coin a particular term, the Arab Spring, while others argued that we are witnessing a fourth-wave of democratization. Positive sentiments, however, were soon eclipsed by civil wars, foreign military interventions, and counterrevolutions. Tunisia is a stark exception to this commonality. It continues today to consolidate the democratic concession it secured in the early days of the uprisings. Comparatively, Egypt was abruptly ejected from a similar democratic opening by a military coup. Morocco witnessed a transformation in its state governance structure, albeit less revolutionary than the one in Tunisia. Jordan trembled for a while only to settle for nothing. Other states that witnessed mass mobilizations descended into civil wars as in the cases of Syria, Libya, and Yemen. And despite that the second wave of uprisings in 2019 projected even larger popular participation in Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Algeria, those movements failed at achieving any lasting transformation. The question we are left to contend with today, post-spring, is why do we have different outcomes? Not only do we have to account for the different setbacks, but also more importantly, why do we have different breakthroughs on the path towards democracy? I suggest that approaching these questions through structures of capitalism, its agents, and its mechanisms accounts for a whole range of outcomes. I argue that Tunisia’s industrial relations were more conducive of a transition to democracy than anywhere else in the region. Tunisia shows how capital abandons state elites under popular pressure when tight profit margins disallow a concession at the workplace, making that same capital support calls for political reform in pursuit of a restoration to steady business operations. This finding is based on archival newspaper research and fieldwork conducted in Tunisia in 2019 where I interviewed 35 capitalists, unionists, and activists. Tunisian trade unions extract political outcomes primarily by commanding concessions from the capitalist class due to historically hard-won industrial arrangements, not the ability of commanding the largest protest. Alternatively, higher profit margins, allow capitalists and state elites to reach a dual concession that adheres to both of their interests. I show this dual concession in this paper as a counterfactual based on similar research focusing on Jordan and Morocco.

As ten years of Arab Uprising have passed us by, this paper reflects on various formations of power and intellectual debates that have emerged through the past decade. In particular, this paper centers the question of how we understand and define anti-imperialism and revolution in the 21st century, particularly in the post-cold war era. The context of empire has drastically changed since the fall of the Soviet Union, however, I argue that the cold war framework continues to inform political stances on regional and global manifestations of power. This presentation offers analyses of such politics, speaking to popular and tense debates on the question of anti-imperialism in the region in relation to the Arab Uprising, particularly among those who identify as the left. As such, I stratify and analyze the various tropes and understandings of left identity, arguing that there are multiple lefts being conflated or disregarded in this debate. The Syrian Uprising has been a particular source of tension reflecting the broader schisms in the anti-imperialist agenda. This context in conjunction with left frameworks necessitates a deeper exploration of the economic workings of self-proclaimed socialist regimes and neoliberalization in anti-western formations. I argue that anti-western neoliberalization, similarly imparts economic disparity among the masses, even as it faces challenges within global configurations of power. The debate about Syria among the left has been a source of fragmentation across various social movements, particularly Palestine and anti-war movements. This paper delineates the fragmentation and analyzes its roots exploring ideological currents, divergent characterizations, and myopic representations. I argue that this debate is not actually exclusively about the question of Syria, but rather that the question of Syria is illuminating this political crossroads that I am identifying across diverging lefts. I deconstruct the various frameworks of left currents in this debate to recategorize various approaches that fall under the category of “left” by disaggregating Marxist, nationalist, Arab nationalist and liberal ideologies and extracting the contradictions that are cause for conflict and turmoil in the debates around the Arab Uprising, revolution, regimes, and power. This paper is particularly interested in exploring state forms of anti-imperialism and movement allegiances to those states alongside liberal notions of revolution, both of which I argue are insufficient for imagining a material, people-centered liberatory future. The bulk of these analyses draw from (activist) ethnographic methods as part of Palestinian, Arab, and left movement spaces alongside historical studies and critical theory.

What does probing the engagement of the uprisings through pop culture reveal about the enduring story of the “Arab Revolutionary Decade”? While big Hollywood studio pictures and independent documentaries alike almost exclusively zeroed in on sensationalizing ISIL terror and sentimentalizing Syrian refugee war porn, pop culture interventions emanating from geographies of resistance offered divergent creative storytelling pathways and possibilities. The pop culture interventions I examine in this paper offer larger social commentaries about intersecting systems of domination. I engage popular visual culutres, iconic pictures of “women’s work” from below and the first season of Hulu series Ramy, to analyze the Arab Revolutionary storyworlds built through photography and filmmaking. Sudanese Woman Protest Chanter. Lebanese Kick queen. Queer Egyptian Flag-waver. These images proceeded the names of women who became emblems of revolution: Alaa Salah., Malak Alaywe, and Sarah Hergozy. The stop-action photos punctured social media ecosystems, were re-shared across borders and fiber optic systems, and transformed to digital art pieces with warp-speed virality. What story do these images, in the later years of the “Arab Revolution decade,” tell us about the political, economic, social forces that preceded them? And what is the state of women’s movement work after the intervention of globally circulated images and the imaginaries they carry? Are they fleeting, enduring, and/or a culmination of decades of women and gender labor? The spectacle of iconizing women in revolt harnesses a larger story and longer history of women’s movement work in the uprisings and challenging state repression I conclude with a case study on “The Before and After Life of the Egyptian Uprising in Hulu series Ramy.” Surfacing from a childhood confrontation with the devastating effects of neoliberal structural adjustment programs in a 9/11 flashback episode, we begin to see the building of a Ramy storyworld attuned to the historic political, economic, and social roots of revolution. In the last two episodes of season 1, we become witness to, through the lens of show creator Ramy Youssef’s storytelling and Jehane Noujaim’s directing their post-uprisings Egypt; an Egypt with youth burdened by persistent repression, financial insecurity, trauma of re-entrenched military authoritarian rule, a Sisi-ism animating Trumpism, and a glamorizing of revolution from Arab diasporic eyes. As a creative advisor on the first season of Ramy and writer on the second season, I offer a critical media studies analysis invigorated by a participant-observer positionality on the series.