Before the 2011 uprisings, the Middle East and North Africa were frequently seen as a uniquely undemocratic region with little civic activism. The first edition of this volume, published at the start of the Arab Spring, challenged these views by revealing a region rich with social and political mobilizations. This fully revised second edition extends the earlier explorations of Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and adds new case studies on the uprisings in Tunisia, Syria, and Yemen. The case studies are inspired by social movement theory, but they also critique and expand the horizons of the theory's classical concepts of political opportunity structures, collective action frames, mobilization structures, and repertoires of contention based on intensive fieldwork. This strong empirical base allows for a nuanced understanding of contexts, culturally conditioned rationality, the strengths and weaknesses of local networks, and innovation in contentious action to give the reader a substantive understanding of events in the Arab world before and since 2011.
"The second edition of their volume provides new chapters on the situations in Syria, Yemen, and Tunisia, while adding and revising the sections of Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. The editors acknowledge the complexities of the dynamic region while providing empirical analysis that seeks to provide a better understanding of the changes at hand."
Middle East Journal
"An altogether welcome addition to both the social movement literature and the growing body of work on contention in the Middle East and North Africa. In the wake of 9/11, scholars rushed to fill the gaping void in scholarly knowledge of all manner of 'Islamacist' movements, but generally without tapping into the rich body of work on contentious politics that had been produced in recent years. And
Stanford University
"Protest in the Middle East and North Africa is not just a monopoly of Islamists. This volume juxtaposes Islamist activism with movements by workers, intellectuals, feminists, human rights activists, and others that don't get much attention in the West, but which present a fuller picture of political and social upheavals in the region."
