A Comparison Between Hobsbawm’s and Bayat’s Views on Non-Western Social Movements

Abstract

Until the 1960s, literature on social movements had been limited to such movements that emerged in the West in the modern period-. These movements had organizational structures and leaders and contributed to a revolution. This narrow framework contained parallelisms to the progressive theory of history and modernization theory. Researchers such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel de Certeau and James Scott, and approaches such as ‘history from below,’ subaltern studies and post-colonial theory played a key role in expanding and enriching views on social movements. Eric Hobsbawm’s studies on social movements in both pre-modern Europe and contemporary Latin America and Asef Bayat’s studies on contemporary Middle Eastern social movements have contributed to the expansion of the field by going beyond the boundaries of the social movements’ literature inspired by modernization theory. In this article, Hobsbawm’s and Bayat’s studies on social movements are discussed comparatively, though the continuity between them is emphasized., Both their philosophical and theoretical foundations as well as their concepts and typologies are examined in the context of their contributions to the literature. Especially in Latin America and Middle East countries, where legal practices and regulations are insufficient and the existing political and bureaucratic mechanisms cannot represent the public, there are social movements that create a ‘passive revolution’ in Gramscian sense. Indeed, both Hobsbawm and Bayat studied non-Western social movements that were unorganized, leaderless, without a manifesto and non-revolutionary in the first place. Thus, by emphasizing different forms of social movement and opposition, they contributed to the critique of Eurocentric and modernist prejudices in the literature of social movements.