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In January 2020, US President Donald Trump announced his 'deal of
the century'. Supposedly intended to 'resolve' the Palestine-Israel
conflict, it accepted Israeli occupation as a fait accompli. Azmi
Bishara places this normalisation of occupation in its historical
context, examining Palestine as an unresolved case of settler
colonialism, now evolved into an apartheid regime. Drawing on
extensive research and rich theoretical analysis, Bishara examines
the overlap between the long-discussed 'Jewish Question' and what
he calls the 'Arab Question', complicating the issue of Palestinian
nationhood. He addresses the Palestinian Liberation Movement's
failure to achieve self-determination, and the emergence of a
'Palestinian Authority' under occupation. He contends that no
solution to problems of nationality or settler colonialism is
possible without recognising the historic injustices inflicted on
Palestinians since the Nakba. This book compellingly argues that
Palestine is not simply a dilemma awaiting creative policy
solutions, but a problem requiring the application of justice.
Attempts by regional governments to marginalise the Palestinian
cause and normalise relations with Israel have emphasised this
aspect of the struggle, and boosted Palestinian interactions with
justice movements internationally. Bishara provides a sober
perspective on the current political situation in Palestine, and a
fresh outlook for its future.
On Salafism offers a compelling new understanding of this
phenomenon, both its development and contemporary manifestations.
Salafism became associated with fundamentalism when the 9/11
Commission used it to explain the terror attacks and has since been
connected with the violence of the so-called Islamic State. With
this book, Azmi Bishara critically deconstructs claims of
continuity between early Islam and modern militancy and makes a
counterargument: Salafism is a wholly modern construct informed by
specific sociopolitical contexts. Bishara offers a sophisticated
account of various movements-such as Wahabbism and
Hanbalism-frequently collapsed into simplistic understandings of
Salafism. He distinguishes reformist from regressive Salafism, and
examines patterns of modernization in the development of
contemporary Islamic political movements and associations. In
deconstructing the assumptions of linear continuity between
traditional and contemporary movements, Bishara details various
divergences in both doctrine and context of modern Salafisms,
plural. On Salafism is a crucial read for those interested in
Islamism, jihadism, and Middle East politics and history.
Azmi Bishara’s seminal study of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution
chronicles in granular detail the lead up to the momentous
uprisings and the subsequent transition and coup. The book
critically investigates the social and economic conditions that
formed the backdrop to the revolution and the complex challenges
posed by the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Part
One, ‘From July Coup to January Revolution’, goes back to what
is called the ‘1952 revolution’ or the ‘1952 Coup d'état’
and traces events until 2011 when Hosni Mubarak stepped down as the
president of Egypt after weeks of protest. It highlights the
relationship between the presidency and the army to show that,
contrary to popular belief, the presidency grew gradually stronger
at the expense of other institutions, especially the army, and
reached its apogee under Mubarak. Part Two ‘From Revolution to
Coup d'Etat’, covers the critical stages from when the military
junta took over the governing of Egypt as the Supreme Council of
the Armed Forces (SCAF), and the election of Morsi, up until the
coup to overthrow his presidency. Using a democratic transition
theory perspective, Azmi Bishara explains the failure of the
democratic transition and how it has impacted on Arab revolutions
ever since. Written while the revolutions were taking place, this
book conveys a sense of immediacy and urgency as Bishara makes
wide-ranging assessments with many of his forecasts corroborated in
later years. The book is renowned for its use of primary source
material - including interviews, statistics and public opinion
polls – thus preserving the memory of the revolution and
remaining one of the most comprehensive reference books on the
subject to date.
Based on empirical and theoretical investigation, and original
insight into how a local protest movement developed into a
revolution that changed a regime, this book shows us how we can
understand political revolutions. Azmi Bishara critically explores
the gradual democratic reform and peaceful transfer of power in the
context of Tunisia. He grapples with the specific make-up of
Tunisia as a modern state and its republican political heritage and
investigates how this determined the development and survival of
the revolution and the democratic transition in its aftermath. For
Bishara, the political culture and attitudes of the elites and
their readiness to compromise, in addition to an army without
political ambitions, were aspects that proved crucial for the
relative success of the Tunisian experience. But he distinguishes
between protest movements and mass movements that aim at regime
change and discerns the social and political conditions required
for the transition from the former to the latter. Bishara shows
that the specific factors that correspond to mass movements and
regime change are relative deprivation, awareness of injustice,
dignity and indignation. He concludes, based on meticulous
documentation of the events in Tunisia and theoretical
investigation, that while revolutions are unpredictable with no
single theory able to explain them, all revolutions across
different historical and conceptual contexts be seen as popular
uprisings that aim at regime change. The book is the first of a
trilogy, the Understanding Revolutions series by Bishara, seeking
to provide a rich, comprehensive and lucid assessment of the
revolutions in three states: Tunisia, Syria, and Egypt.
Azmi Bishara's book on the Syrian Revolution is one of the most
comprehensive and profound works on the subject published to date.
Translated here into English for the first time, the study examines
the complex roots of Syria's political and sectarian conflicts from
the day revolution erupted on 15th March 2011 to its descent into
civil war in the two years that followed. The book unearths and
discusses the very first signs of protests from across Daraa, Hama,
Aleppo, Damascus, Raqqa, Deir El Zour, Edlib and Homs, and it deals
with Syria's ruralization process and the subsequent economic
'liberalization', which eventually led to the revolt against the
Baath party. The work is based on high-level interviews, analysis
of the country's socio-economic background, and examination of the
Syrian regime's strategy and its political and media discourse.
Syria's revolution is chronicled in two stages: the peaceful civil
stage and the armed stage. Bishara's analysis first centres on the
regime's strategy, unveiling despotism, massacres, kidnapping,
sectarian tendencies, jihadist violence, the emergence of warlords,
and the chaotic spread of arms. He then turns to the role of the
opposition to narrate in detail the events that broke out and
exactly how a peaceful protest turned into an armed struggle. The
book provides a roadmap to how revolution broke out and is a
comprehensive analysis of what drove those early events. Its
publication brings renowned Arabic-language scholarship to the
English-speaking world.
Azmi Bishara's seminal study of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution
chronicles in granular detail the lead up to the momentous
uprisings and the subsequent transition and coup. The book
critically investigates the social and economic conditions that
formed the backdrop to the revolution and the complex challenges
posed by the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Part
One, 'From July Coup to January Revolution', goes back to what is
called the '1952 revolution' or the '1952 Coup d'etat' and traces
events until 2011 when Hosni Mubarak stepped down as the president
of Egypt after weeks of protest. It highlights the relationship
between the presidency and the army to show that, contrary to
popular belief, the presidency grew gradually stronger at the
expense of other institutions, especially the army, and reached its
apogee under Mubarak. Part Two 'From Revolution to Coup d'Etat',
covers the critical stages from when the military junta took over
the governing of Egypt as the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces
(SCAF), and the election of Morsi, up until the coup to overthrow
his presidency. Using a democratic transition theory perspective,
Azmi Bishara explains the failure of the democratic transition and
how it has impacted on Arab revolutions ever since. Written while
the revolutions were taking place, this book conveys a sense of
immediacy and urgency as Bishara makes wide-ranging assessments
with many of his forecasts corroborated in later years. The book is
renowned for its use of primary source material - including
interviews, statistics and public opinion polls - thus preserving
the memory of the revolution and remaining one of the most
comprehensive reference books on the subject to date.
Based on empirical and theoretical investigation, and original
insight into how a local protest movement developed into a
revolution that changed a regime, this book shows us how we can
understand political revolutions. Azmi Bishara critically explores
the gradual democratic reform and peaceful transfer of power in the
context of Tunisia. He grapples with the specific make-up of
Tunisia as a modern state and its republican political heritage and
investigates how this determined the development and survival of
the revolution and the democratic transition in its aftermath. For
Bishara, the political culture and attitudes of the elites and
their readiness to compromise, in addition to an army without
political ambitions, were aspects that proved crucial for the
relative success of the Tunisian experience. But he distinguishes
between protest movements and mass movements that aim at regime
change and discerns the social and political conditions required
for the transition from the former to the latter. Bishara shows
that the specific factors that correspond to mass movements and
regime change are relative deprivation, awareness of injustice,
dignity and indignation. He concludes, based on meticulous
documentation of the events in Tunisia and theoretical
investigation, that while revolutions are unpredictable with no
single theory able to explain them, all revolutions across
different historical and conceptual contexts be seen as popular
uprisings that aim at regime change. The book is the first of a
trilogy, the Understanding Revolutions series by Bishara, seeking
to provide a rich, comprehensive and lucid assessment of the
revolutions in three states: Tunisia, Syria, and Egypt.
This volume analyses the transformation of social sectarianism into
political sectarianism across the Arab world. Using a framework of
social theories and socio-historical analysis, the book
distinguishes between 'ta'ifa', or 'sect', and modern 'ta'ifiyya',
'sectarianism', arguing that sectarianism itself produces
'imaginary sects'. It charts and explains the evolution of these
phenomena and their development in Arab and Islamic history, as
distinct from other concepts used to study religious groups within
Western contexts. Bishara documents the role played by internal and
external factors and rivalries among political elites in the
formulation of sectarian identity, citing both historical and
contemporary models. He contends that sectarianism does not derive
from sect, but rather that sectarianism resurrects the sect in the
collective consciousness and reproduces it as an imagined community
under modern political and historical conditions. 'Sectarianism
Without Sects' is a vital resource for engaging with the sectarian
crisis in the Arab world. It provides a detailed historical
background to the emergence of sect in the region, as well as a
complex theoretical exploration of how social identities have
assumed political significance in the struggle for power over the
state.
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