Pomeps Conversations

On this week's podcast, Asef Bayat talks about his new book, Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring, (Stanford University Press, 2017) a comparative analysis on the 2011 revolutions and those of the 1970s. "These [2011] revolutions happened at a time when the very idea of revolution, the very concept of revolution had dissipated," says Bayat. "The activists were not thinking in terms of revolution in the way that the activists in the 1970s or earlier during the Cold War had been thinking about revolution. They were reading about revolutions, about the experiences, having groups, and so forth." Asef Bayat is the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, 2009, 2013) and Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, 2007). "In the case of say Iran, wo