Pomeps Conversations

"I felt paralyzed when the Arab uprising started unfolding. I saw the focus back then on on social media to be missing something and I did not know quite what I felt it was missing," said Marwan M. Kraidy. On this week's Middle East politics podcast, Marc Lynch has a conversation on creativity and the Arab Uprisings with Kraidy, the Anthony Shadid Chair at the University of Pennsylvania, . "So I did not write anything. I started thinking about it." Kraidy spent a year in Beirut, traveling the region and collecting items that showed people creatively expressing dissent, like leaflets, media, and taking photos of graffiti. From that research, he wrote his latest book, The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World, which looks at radical and gradual activism in the modern Middle East. "The main argument that I make in the book is that this kind of political creativity is nearly always collective," said Kraidy. With the tense situation in many Middle Eastern countries, Kraidy acknowledge