John Chalcraft. Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East

John Chalcraft has written a definitive account of contentious politics in the modern Middle East. The book succeeds beyond anything previously written in bringing theoretical and historical rigor to those issues. Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East seeks to answer important questions: What contributions have contentious politics made toward historical change in the region? To what extent do such mobilizations compete with more traditional structures? In response to these questions, Chalcraft seeks to show that bottom-up contestation has “mattered” in the modern Middle East and to “do justice to the role played by agency.” At the same time, he attempts to demonstrate that there are “enabling conditions in the failures and weaknesses of hegemonic incorporation, the desiccation of sites of articulation, and the contraction of existing forms of hegemony at the level of the political community as a whole” (8). To explain these conditions, Chalcraft develops a Gramscian hegemonic “model,” suggesting that “when hegemonic forms of rule are established ... there is no reason for subordinates to use them to mount contentious challenges. On the other hand, where hegemonic contraction takes place ... reasons for mobilization emerge” (35, 36).

Agency (philosophy) · Articulation (sociology) · Contentious politics · Hegemony · Middle East · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social movement · Social science · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Political Conflict and Governance