(This event is organised by MEI’s Political Economy Research Cluster, as part of its quarterly public speakers series.)

In this lecture John Chalcraft introduces his recent book Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, an unprecedentedly wide-ranging and in-depth history of revolutions, uprisings, movements, and diverse forms of protest in the Middle East and North Africa from the eighteenth century to the present. Against the various forms of structural determinism that have dominated histories of MENA protest, the book aims to do justice to political agency. Focusing especially on transgressive mobilization – contentious collective action that breaks established political rules – the book pays attention to moral, political and intellectual leadership, the trans-local appropriation of ideas, intellectual labour, normative commitments, modes of organization, strategies and tactics, and interactions between political actors. It aims to offer a history of protest that does justice, for the first time, to political agency. The lecture will indicate some of the many ways in which contentious mobilization has been vital in the changing politics of the region, suggesting in the process a new kind of political history from below.