Artists And The Arab Uprisings

Examines art by over twenty-five artists to enable a greater understanding of the 'Arab Uprisings' and of the term 'revolution'.

Regional artists can play a positive role in shaping public debate and supporting democratic transition in the Middle East. This report explores the challenges artists have faced since the Arab uprisings, U.S. government programs to support arts in the region, and the wide array of nongovernmental activities to engage Arab artists, offering recommendations to improve support for these artists.

The book aims to explore the foresight of prominent Middle Eastern authors and artists who anticipated the Arab Spring, which resulted in demands for change in the repressive and corrupted regimes. Eventually, it led to cracking down on the protests with excessive force, which caused tremendous human suffering, destruction, and also escalation of extreme insurgency. The author analyzes major literary and artistic works from Egypt, Syria and Tunisia, and their political context. This monograph will be helpful to scholars and students in the growing field of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and everyone who is interested in the politics of MENA.

After decades of authoritarianism, a wave of political change and unrest began to sweep across the Middle East and North Africa in early 2011. Successful democratic transitions will not be easy and will require change in multiple spheres. This report focuses on one sphere whose power and importance is often underestimated: the artistic arena. Regional artists have the potential to positively contribute to democratic transition by shaping public debate in ways that support tolerance and nonviolence. But Arab artists are often squeezed between the bounds of acceptable discourse, set by rulers who fear freedom of expression and conservative societal groups that seek to control acceptable behavior. Although the Arab uprisings lifted some previous barriers to artistic expression, new limitations and challenges have emerged. Moreover, artists continue to lack sound funding models to support their work and face limited markets and distribution mechanisms. This research explores the challenges posed by both the state and society in the region, as well as the policy shifts that may be necessary to better support regional artists. It also suggests new strategies in which regional actors and nongovernmental organizations take leading roles in supporting these artists and their work.

In 2011, as the Arab uprisings spread across the Middle East, Jordan remained more stable than any of its neighbors. Despite strife at its borders and an influx of refugees connected to the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS, as well as its own version of the Arab Spring with protests and popular mobilization demanding change, Jordan managed to avoid political upheaval. How did the regime survive in the face of the pressures unleashed by the Arab uprisings? What does its resilience tell us about the prospects for reform or revolutionary change? In Jordan and the Arab Uprisings, Curtis R. Ryan explains how Jordan weathered the turmoil of the Arab Spring. Crossing divides between state and society, government and opposition, Ryan analyzes key features of Jordanian politics, including Islamist and leftist opposition parties, youth movements, and other forms of activism, as well as struggles over elections, reform, and identity. He details regime survival strategies, laying out how the monarchy has held out the possibility of reform while also seeking to coopt and contain its opponents. Ryan demonstrates how domestic politics were affected by both regional unrest and international support for the regime, and how regime survival and security concerns trumped hopes for greater change. While the Arab Spring may be over, Ryan shows that political activism in Jordan is not, and that struggles for reform and change will continue. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with a vast range of people, from grassroots activists to King Abdullah II, Jordan and the Arab Uprisings is a definitive analysis of Jordanian politics before, during, and beyond the Arab uprisings.

Examining a diverse body of art by over twenty-five artists including photography, sculpture, graffiti, performance, video and installation, in galleries, online and in the street, this book reveals a new way of understanding the Arab Uprisings, their profound cultural impact, and of the meaning of the term 'revolution' itself.

A holistic and cross-disciplinary approach to understanding why a regional democratic transition did not occur after the Arab Spring protests, this accessible study highlights the salience of regime type, civil society, women's mobilizations, and external intervention across seven countries for undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars.

Popular culture serves as a fresh and revealing window on contemporary developments in the Muslim world because it is a site where many important and controversial issues are explored and debated. Aesthetic expression has become intertwined with politics and religion due to the uprisings of the “Arab Spring,” while, at the same time, Islamist authorities are showing increasingly accommodating and populist attitudes toward popular culture. Not simply a “westernizing” or “secularizing” force, as some have asserted, popular culture now plays a growing role in defining what it means to be Muslim. With well-structured chapters that explain key concepts clearly, Islam and Popular Culture addresses new trends and developments that merge popular arts and Islam. Its eighteen case studies by eminent scholars cover a wide range of topics, such as lifestyle, dress, revolutionary street theater, graffiti, popular music, poetry, television drama, visual culture, and dance throughout the Muslim world from Indonesia, Africa, and the Middle East to Europe. The first comprehensive overview of this important subject, Islam and Popular Culture offers essential new ways of understanding the diverse religious discourses and pious ethics expressed in popular art productions, the cultural politics of states and movements, and the global flows of popular culture in the Muslim world.

During the uprisings of the Arab Spring, oppositional movements used political humor to criticize political leaders or to expose the absurdities of sociopolitical conditions. This comprehensive study of political humor in the uprisings explores the varieties and functions of humor as a creative tool for resistance.

Why did Tunisian protests following the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi lead to a massive wave of uprisings across the entire Arab world? Who participated in those protests, and what did they hope to achieve? Why did some leaders fall in the face of popular mobilization while others found ways to survive? And what have been the lasting results of the contentious politics of 2011 and 2012? The Arab uprisings pose stark challenges to the political science of the Middle East, which for decades had focused upon the resilience of entrenched authoritarianism, the relative weakness of civil society, and what seemed to be the largely contained diffusion of new norms and ideas through new information technologies. In this volume, leading scholars in the field take a sharp look at the causes, dynamics, and effects of the Arab uprisings. Compiled by one of the foremost experts on Middle East politics and society, The Arab Uprisings Explained offers a fresh rethinking of established theories and presents a new framework through which scholars and general readers can better grasp the fast-developing events remaking the region. These essays not only advance the study of political science in the Middle East but also integrate the subject seamlessly into the wider political science literature. Deeply committed to the study of this region and working out the kinks of the discipline, the contributors to this volume help scholars and policymakers across the world approach this unprecedented historical period smartly and effectively.