More than a decade after the birth of contemporary social movements in the Middle East and North Africa scholars are asking what these movements have achieved and how we should evaluate their lasting legacies. The quiet encroachments of MENA counterrevolutionary forces in the post-Arab Spring era have contributed to the revival of an outdated Orientalist discourse of Middle East exceptionalism, implying that the region's culture is exceptionally immune to democratic movements, values, and institutions. This volume, inspired by critical post-colonial/decolonial studies, and interdisciplinary perspectives of social movement theories, gender studies, Islamic studies, and critical race theory, challenges and demystifies the myth of "MENA Exceptionalism". Composted of three sections, the book first places MENA in the larger global context and sheds light on the impact of geopolitics on the current crises, showing how a postcolonial critique better explains the crisis of democratic social movements and the resilience of authoritarianism. The second section focuses on the unfinished projects of contemporary MENA social movements and their quest for freedom, social justice, and human dignity. Contributors examine specific cases of post-Islamist movements, the Arab youth, student, and other popular non-violent movements. In the final section, the book problematizes the exceptionalist idea of gender passivity and women's exclusion, which reduces the reality of gender injustice to some eternal and essentialized Muslim/MENA mindset. Contributors address this theory by placing gender as an independent category of thought and action, demonstrating the quest for gender justice movements in MENA, and providing contexts to the cases of gender injustice to challenge simplistic, ahistorical and culturalist assumptions.

This interdisciplinary volume offers a range of studies spanning the various historical, political, legal, and cultural features of social justice in Iran, and proposes that the present-day realities of life in Iran could not be farther from the promises of the Iranian Revolution. The ideals of social justice and participatory democracy that galvanized a resilient nation in 1979 have been abandoned as an avaricious ruling elite has privatized the economy, abandoned social programs and subsidy payments for the poor, and suppressed the struggles of women, workers, students, and minorities for equality. At its core, Iran's Struggles for Social Justice seeks to educate and to develop a new discourse on social justice in Iran.

At a time of growing state control, censorship and wholesale crackdown on opposition in post-1953 Iran, intellectuals and artists began to produce works that defied the Shah's dictatorship and the regime's "Great Civilisation" propaganda. With the emergence of urban guerrilla warfare in 1971, dissident artists - spearheaded by Marxist People's Fadai Guerrillas (PFG) - created symbolic works that popularised the militants' ideas through artistic depictions and tropes, while portraying the militants as immortal freedom-fighters. The arts of defiance thus swayed young educated Iranians, as well as certain layers of the public, to perceive the state through the eyes of its most radical critiques: militant dissidents. By closely examining and interpreting the poetry, fiction, songs and films of the 1960s and 1970s, this book uncovers how militant action was translated into artistic expressions and vice versa. It also explores how the PFG militants - who were few in number - were able to acquire a 'heroic' dimension in the eyes of the public, portraying a symbolic image of defiance far beyond their actual militant existence.

Through an original and close reading of the key literature regarding both revolutionary violence and nonviolence, this book collapses the widely-assumed concepts of violence and nonviolence as mutually exclusive. By revealing that violence and nonviolence are braided concepts arising from human action, Peyman Vahabzadeh submits that in many cases the actions deemed to be either violent or nonviolent might actually produce outcomes that are not essentially different. Vahabzadeh offers a conceptual phenomenology of the key thinkers and theorists of both revolutionary violence and various approaches to nonviolence. Arguing that violence is inseparable from civilizations, Violence and Nonviolence concludes by making a number of original conceptualizations regarding the relationship between violence and nonviolence, exploring the possibility of a nonviolent future and proposing to understand the relationship between the two concepts as concentric, not opposites.

Through an original and close reading of the key literature regarding both revolutionary violence and nonviolence, this book collapses the widely-assumed concepts of violence and nonviolence as mutually exclusive. By revealing that violence and nonviolence are braided concepts arising from human action, Peyman Vahabzadeh submits that in many cases the actions deemed to be either violent or nonviolent might actually produce outcomes that are not essentially different. Vahabzadeh offers a conceptual phenomenology of the key thinkers and theorists of both revolutionary violence and various approaches to nonviolence. Arguing that violence is inseparable from civilizations, Violence and Nonviolence concludes by making a number of original conceptualizations regarding the relationship between violence and nonviolence, exploring the possibility of a nonviolent future and proposing to understand the relationship between the two concepts as concentric, not opposites.

Mostafa Sho'aiyan (1936 1975) was a leading Marxist intellectual in twentieth-century Iran and a prolific author of theory, history, fiction and poetry. In an era of repressive politics following the 1953 coup that toppled the democratically elected government of Mossadeq and restored the rule of the Shah, he became a key figure on the militant left. From a life underground Sho'aiyan contributed significantly to the study of Iranian history and politics, and developed a unique theory of revolution one specific to Iran and yet also international in reach.

With A Rebel s Journey, Peyman Vahabzadeh provides the first intellectual biography of this singular theoretician, offering fascinating insights into his life and work. Vahabzadeh not only sets Sho'aiyan s thought in the context of their time and place, but offers an ambitious reconstruction of his revolutionary theory for the twenty-first century, setting out how it might contribute to today s expanding movements for social justice and liberation.

More than a decade after the birth of contemporary social movements in the Middle East and North Africa scholars are asking what these movements have achieved and how we should evaluate their lasting legacies. The quiet encroachments of MENA counterrevolutionary forces in the post-Arab Spring era have contributed to the revival of an outdated Orientalist discourse of Middle East exceptionalism, implying that the region's culture is exceptionally immune to democratic movements, values, and institutions. This volume, inspired by critical post-colonial/decolonial studies, and interdisciplinary perspectives of social movement theories, gender studies, Islamic studies, and critical race theory, challenges and demystifies the myth of "MENA Exceptionalism". Composted of three sections, the book first places MENA in the larger global context and sheds light on the impact of geopolitics on the current crises, showing how a postcolonial critique better explains the crisis of democratic social movements and the resilience of authoritarianism. The second section focuses on the unfinished projects of contemporary MENA social movements and their quest for freedom, social justice, and human dignity. Contributors examine specific cases of post-Islamist movements, the Arab youth, student, and other popular non-violent movements. In the final section, the book problematizes the exceptionalist idea of gender passivity and women's exclusion, which reduces the reality of gender injustice to some eternal and essentialized Muslim/MENA mindset. Contributors address this theory by placing gender as an independent category of thought and action, demonstrating the quest for gender justice movements in MENA, and providing contexts to the cases of gender injustice to challenge simplistic, ahistorical and culturalist assumptions.

The six reflections and conceptualizations of "Exilic Mediations" explore the relationship between exile and emigration, the (im-)possibility of return, accent and foreignness, multiculturalism and sovereignty, trauma and memory, and a life lived poetically in an unhomely world. Situated subtly between reflections on personal experiences and post-Heideggerian philosophy, these exilic meditations show how a life lived as an exile enables a journey into the very concepts that we hold so dear to our hearts: home, belonging, justice, and the future. Vahabzadeh wishes to find a place where the singular experiences of the exiles and emigrants can be heard. This requires, he argues, a poetic life-one of creative responses to the very conditions of injustice, a life of making and crafting a new world. "Exilic Meditations" calls for attending to the common wounds of the banished and marginalized, displaced and abandoned, exiles and refugees, in these inhospitable times of ours.

Emerging in the early 1970s, the Organization of Iranian People's Fadai Guerrillas (OIPFG) become one of the most important secular leftist political organizations in Iran. Despite their lasting influence and the way in which their efforts helped shape the history of Iran for decades to come, little is known about the group. ""A Guerrilla Odyssey"" presents the first comprehensive examination of the rise and fall of the Fadai urban guerrilla movement in Iran. Drawing on exhaustive analyses of the published and unpublished works of the Fadai Guerrillas, as well as of archival material and interviews with activists, the author demonstrates historically and sociologically the conditions that surrounded the debut and demise of the urban guerrilla warfare that defined Iranian political life in the 1970s Vahabzdeh offers a critique of various aspects of the Fadai's theories of national liberation in an attempt to reconsider the painful relationship among modernization, secularism, and democracy in contemporary Iran. In addition, the author makes a compelling case explaining why older revolutionary social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have transformed into the new democratic social movements that emerged from the 1980s onward in the form of today's women's, student, and youth movements in Iran. ""A Guerilla Odyssey"" is a meticulously researched and engrossing narrative that promises to be a major contribution to the field of Iranian history.