Political Transformations, Protests, (Counter)Revolutions, and Body Politics in the Middle East

Abstract

A focus on the protests and upheavals in 2010 and 2011 without historicizing social and political transformation risks the presentism that characterizes much of media and policy discourses and that tends to distort the longue durée (long duration) of social and political transformation. Women’s agency and resistance have long predated the more recent protest movements, while wider demands for political, social, and economic change also need to be contextualized within specific histories of resistance to authoritarianism, neo-colonialism, and neo-liberalism in many contexts in the region, particularly in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon. This chapter makes the argument for the need of a historical lens to understand and analyze the varying trajectories, triggers, and developments of protest, upheaval, and transformation. A more nuanced reading allows us to recognize women’s agency and active participation and their achievements in terms of challenging specific previously constraining gender norms but simultaneously recognize the systematic and structural marginalization of women in the context of institutionalizing change and in the violent backlashes that have led to the reestablishment of authoritarian regimes in most countries across the region.