DOI: 10.1002/johs.

12334

RESPONSES AND REJOINDERS

The Arab Spring and Revolutionary Theory: An

Intervention in a Debate

Asef Bayat*

Abstract
The so‐called Arab Spring of the 2010s that toppled six dictators has spurred productive debates
about the character of these political happenings and their implications for revolutionary theory
broadly. One such debate that appeared recently on the pages of Historical Sociology questions
whether or not we are moving into a fifth‐generation revolutionary theory. This essay is an attempt
to partake in this conversation, not only because my work is under discussion but because I wish to
engage with some of the key arguments in the debate to clarify some misunderstandings and
suggest ways that the Arab Spring allows for a new thinking about revolution and revolutionary
theory. Whether or not new perspectives have emerged may be contested, but there is surely a
need for them.

INTRODUCTION

The so‐called Arab Spring, the waves of revolutionary uprisings that engulfed nearly twenty Arab states during the
2010s, followed far‐reaching domestic and geopolitical consequences. Six dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen,
Algeria, and Sudan were toppled; the Lebanese Prime Minister was forced to resign, and the Syrian President
Bashar al‐Asad barely managed to survive. Sudan negotiated a transition to a civilian rule while the uprising in Iraq
faced severe crackdown. Protests in Lebanon, Algeria and Iraq continued into early 2020 until being abruptly halted
by the global outbreak of the Covit‐19 pandemic. The uprisings shook the region's monarchies, sheikhdoms, and
autocracies in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirate, Oman, Iran and Turkey, pushing them to appease their citizens
through handouts or reforms while tightening their grip on dissent and building regional counter‐revolutionary
alliances. By the end of the decade, none of these revolutionary uprisings resulted in social justice or democratic
transitions, two key demands of the protestors. Whereas Tunisia achieved a kind of procedural democracy, things
remained uncertain in Sudan and Libya, Yemen, and Syria were turned into the theatres for regional proxy wars and
a grim refugee crisis. In other cases, counter‐revolutionary forces moved to restore their control, re‐establish (neo)
liberal economies, and intensify surveillance of the opposition.
This extraordinary episode has produced a library of literature and prompted lively debates about the
theoretical implications of this wave of revolutions. One such debate has begun recently on the pages of this very

J Hist Sociol. 2021;34:393–400. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/johs © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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*Asef Bayat is Professor of Sociology, University of Illinois, Urbana‐Champaign. He is the author of Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring,
Harvard University Press (2021). Email: abayat@illinois.edu

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journal, Historical Sociology, on whether or not we are moving into a fifth‐generation revolutionary theory. This
essay is an attempt to participate in this conversation, in part because my own work is a subject of the discussion,
but more importantly to engage with some of the key arguments in the debate (in which I believe George Lawson's
recent work Anatomies of Revolution is an absent participant), clarify misunderstandings and suggest that the Arab
Spring warrants a new thinking about revolution and revolutionary theory. Whether or not any new perspectives
have thus far emerged may be a matter of discussion, but there is certainly a need for them.

EARLIER PERSPECTIVES

Thus far, scholars have identified four generations of revolutionary theory. The first‐generation theorists
represented by the works of historians Pitirim Sorokin and Crane Brinton writing before WWII, basically disliked
revolutions. In a Parsonian structural functionalist paradigm, Brinton likened revolution to an illness or fever in the
body of society which after a period of delirium and convalescence would return to normality. He assumed that all
revolutions would go through this set of stages, an assumption that historical reality disputed.
Second‐generation theorists from the post‐WWII period, notably James Davies and Ted Gurr, pointed to
modernization processes as being at the core of revolutions in developing countries. According to this perspective,
as modernization advances and economies grow, a down‐turn in growth would likely cause a sense of ‘relative
deprivation’, a gap between what people expect to have and be, and what they actually have and are. In this view,
revolutions emerge as the result of an aggregate of individual behaviors rather than the consequences of large
structures and processes. In reaction, the third‐generation theorists—particularly Barrington Moor, Theda Skocpol
and Eric Wolf—argued that structural factors—capitalism, class relation, international wars—generated conditions
for the rise of generalized discontent and revolutionary sentiments. The third‐generation thinkers, who put forward
a more structuralist paradigm, fell short of explaining why certain revolutions erupted in places with unhospitable
conditions and didn't occur in societies which were supposedly fertile ground for revolution.
The fourth‐generation theorists, notably John Foran, Misagh Parsa, Eric Selbin, and Jack Goldstone writing in
the 1990s and 2000s, largely substituted bold meta‐theories of revolution with multi‐causal and more complex
models. They brought elements such as identity, ideology, gender, network, and leadership in the analysis. These
scholars combined structural, agentic, domestic, international, political, and economic factors to account for the rise
of revolutions. Their work, in a way, shifted the focus from the ‘why’ of the revolution to ‘how’, focusing more on the
conditions under which revolutions take place. Yet, analysts such as George Lawson have argued that the fourth‐
generation theorists have in fact failed to realize their promises in their actual theorization. In other words, theirs
are more assertions than actual advancement in theory.1 In a similar vein, Benjamin Abrams suggests that these
analysts factor far too many variables to be able to handle in a coherent theoretical framework. The result is that
their scholarship remains devoid of bold theorizing. Abrams calls for a new, fifth, generation of revolutionary
theory.2

NEW DEBATE

In an essay published in the Journal of Historical Sociology (2019), the political scientist Jamie Allinson argus that a
fifth generation of revolutionary theory has already emerged in such works as Donatella Della Porta's Where did the
Revolution Go; Daniel Ritter's The Iron Cage of Liberalism: International Politics and Unarmed Revolutions in the Middle
East and North Africa; and my own study, Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab
Spring.3 According to Allinson, these authors have highlighted a new object of inquiry, namely “nonviolent political
revolutions”. They have treated revolutions as being process‐oriented rather than possessing fixed features. They
similarly identified a paradox consisting of burgeoning political revolutions on the one side, and a dearth of social
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revolutions on the other. Allinson's reflections may well echo the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe and those in
central Asian Republics that the fourth‐generation theories have already tackled. But Allinson suggests that the
works of these new authors are at the same time an “immanent critique” of the fifth generation—that is, they
critique both the reality of these revolutions and the categories that represent them. In other words, they are part
of a new generation of revolutionary theory and yet critical of it. In his own critique of this “fifth generation”,
Allinson suggests that the fifth generation is already over. For unlike the negotiated liberal revolutions of 1990s in
Eastern Europe, the Arab revolutions turned out to be both violent and class‐based revolts. He concludes that what
we need more to investigate is not the failed revolutions but successful counterrevolutions.
Benjamin Abrams, the editor of Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, responded to Allinson's
claim by contending that the works of the authors on which Allinson draws do not constitute a new fifth‐generation
perspective. Rather, they are more or less a continuation of the fourth‐generation theories. In fact, Abrams em-
phasizes the need for a new set of fifth‐generation theories, which have yet to come to fruition. Abram's position in
some ways reflects George Lawson's ideas in his Anatomies of Revolution, arguably the best synthesis of the theories
and practices of revolutions to date. Even though Lawson has not been a direct party to the debate, I believe that
many of the analyses presented in his book are already present in the conversation.
In my view, Lawson's Anatomies of Revolution represents an important leap in revolutionary theory beyond the
fourth generation. His ‘relational approach’, the idea that revolutions always trigger reactions on the part of the
adversaries to which they have to respond, means that revolutions are constantly evolving, process‐oriented, and
unpredictable. Key to this approach is the notion of the ‘international’ as an integral element of any revolution. His
argument that “revolutions are international all the way down” can lead to an over‐reading of the ‘international’ at
the expense of local, indigenous, or national dynamics. Nevertheless, his point about the incessant effects of the
international on national dynamics deserves serious attention.4 His concept of the “inter‐social” is even more useful
in that it tells us that relational effects are not limited only to the level of the state/nation but may occur in the civil
society and non‐state domains. Moreover, we should take note of Lawson's historicizing the revolutions, whether it
is a single revolution within a country, or series of revolutions in different national geographies. It is crucial to
examine revolutions in motion, as dynamic happenings, constantly in process. This approach particularly helps us
understand how in a span of time, the incidence of one revolution may impact ones coming after it. Just consider
how the occurrence of revolution in Tunisia may have contributed to the outbreak of the Egyptian revolution, and
that of Egypt may have injected a different outcome in Syria—where the regime of Bashar al‐Assad continues to
wield power.
Yet Lawson persists in speaking of “revolution” in Syria even if it did not materialize. This is precisely because
he views revolution as “collective mobilization that attempts to quickly and forcibly overthrow an existing regime in
order to transform political, economic, and symbolic relations”.5 But in my view this definition conflates revolution
and revolutionary movement. In other words, what Lawson is referring to is not revolution per se but a revolutionary
movement, or a collective mobilization, which may or may not entail a revolution. For revolution in its modern usage
is primarily and essentially about change, highlighting certain transformation associated with the birth of something
new, as in ‘scientific revolution’ or ‘industrial revolution’ and the like. To emphasize the centrality of change, I have
defined revolution as societal changes that begin with the rapid and radical transformation of state/political power
pushed by popular movement from below. This understanding, as I have discussed in Revolution without Revolu-
tionaries, means that revolution has two essential facets: ‘revolution as movement’ and ‘revolution as change’. While
‘revolution as change’ refers to revolution per se in terms of those societal (political, economic, and symbolic)
transformations, ‘revolution as movement' points to the revolutionary movement, to mobilization or uprising, that
ultimately pushes to bring those transformations. Let me emphasize that revolution as movement is not, strictly
speaking, the same as Tilly's “revolutionary situation” or Trotsky's “dual power”, i.e. a situation that may end up in
the defeat of one party, or negotiation and possible compromise between the parties. Rather, revolution as
movement is the force which together with other indeterminate actors (domestic or international) may generate a
“revolutionary situation”. Thus, Algeria, Lebanon, and Iraq in the late 2010s did not experience a revolution per se
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but rather uprisings, or ‘revolution as movement’. I realize that the very incidence of an uprising or revolution as
movement may well produce an “event” in the sense of Alain Badiou, meaning a rupture in the routine of life and
politics that may be followed by change in certain social domains, even if it may fail to overthrow an existing regime.
This consideration of rupture is bound to further nuance the meaning of revolution, an issue to which I will return.
However, for the purpose of this discussion, the analytical distinction between ‘revolution as change’ and ‘revo-
lution as movement’ or ‘uprising’ remains useful.
Almost all revolutions begin with ordinary protests, but only a few become an uprising, or ‘revolution as
movement’. Popular protests become an uprising, or ‘revolution as movement’ when various sectors of society
(workers, women, youth, ethnic minorities, etc.) come to eclipse their sectoral claims in favor of broader and greater
claims for all citizens; when those social groups cease to be workers, women or ethnic minorities but merge into a
united entity they may call ‘the people’. For instance, in 2017‐2018, tens of thousands of Iranian protestors
(including workers, students, farmers, creditors, and those concerned with water shortage) took to the streets
simultaneously in more than 85 cities throughout the country for ten consecutive days before the government
crackdown sopped them. Many observers thought of them as the outset of a revolution, more precisely ‘revolution
as movement’. It was not. These protestors even though they appeared protesting simultaneously, were making
differentiated particularistic claims. Most of their claims had roots in the government policies or repression, but
these concurrent and countrywide protests did not amount to what transpired in the Arab Spring in the 2010s.
But how do we interpret those spectacular political happenings that came to be known as the Arab Spring?
Were they uprisings, peaceful revolutions, or failed revolutions? For Daniel Ritter, these political happenings meant
a shift from “armed” to “unarmed revolutions”. This certainly is a more accurate characterization than the
misleading term ‘nonviolent' revolutions. Ritter explains this shift through a rich analysis of how the establishment
of the international regimes of Human Rights after the WWII, notably the 1975 Helsinki accords, empowered the
liberal opposition and entrapped authoritarian regimes that were allied either with the US or in the case of the
Eastern Europe with the USSR, in the “iron cage of liberalism”. Even though such US allies as Bahrain or Saudi
Arabia were hardly constrained by any commitment to liberalism, nevertheless, Ritter's emphasis on the ideological
shift in favor of liberal opposition is well‐taken. Yet, I think there was still more to that ideological shift than mere
“iron cage of liberalism.” As I will show later, the end of the Cold War followed the rise of new ideas that disparaged
the very ideal of revolution altogether.
Moving away from ideology, Della Porta's Where Did the Revolution Go, takes a more structural approach. She
develops an innovative analytical schema that navigates through revolution, social movement, and democratic
transition, bringing their disparate scholarly literatures into a singular analytical frame. Della Porta examines the
Arab revolutions in terms of extraordinary mobilization that generated an ‘historical event’ in the sense of William
Sewell, which in turn shaped the path of post‐revolutionary transition to democracy.6 She compares the experi-
ences of Tunisia vs Egypt on the one hand, and Czech Republic/East Germany vs Poland/Hungary on the other, to
show how the quality of social movements/uprisings affects the quality of transition to democracy, and how the
trajectories of democratic transition factor into the quality of democratic outcome. In this fashion, she tries to
explain the democratic outcome by assessing the weakness or strength of revolutions.
But how to account for the quality and character of the Arab revolutions in the first place? Were they new
political entities or something similar to what we have seen before? Many observers seem to see little novelty in
these political happenings. Rather, they see them as “the norm” and in the family of “peaceful” or “negotiated”
revolutions. George Lawson, for instance, suggests that the Arab revolutions “share a familiar revolutionary
heritage [...] in terms of wider currents of revolutionary theory”, claiming that they “sit largely within the framework
established by the 1989 negotiated revolutions that ousted socialism in Central and Eastern Europe”.7 Similarly,
both Benjamin Abrams and Erica Chenoweth question the novelty of Arab revolutions suggesting that they “may, in
fact, be the norm” historically speaking.8
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NEW REVOLUTIONS

My view is different. I think that even though the Arab revolutions displayed certain similarities with the “nego-
tiated revolutions” of 1989—for instance in being largely liberal, unarmed, or in terms of some sequences of
revolutionary build‐up—they departed from their 20st Century counterparts including those of the 1989 Eastern
Europe in some significant respects. First, the Arab revolutions were famously “leaderless”. Of course, there were
many local leaders or coordinators (“leaderful”?) on the ground. But no charismatic spearheads like Lech Walesa or
Vaclav Havel, Cori Aquino or Ayatollah Khomeini emerged to guide their direction. Secondly, these revolutions
barely developed a solid organization with a command structure and distribution of responsibilities to articulate
strategy, envisage next steps, and speak with one voice. Rather, they pursued “horizontalism” involving multiple
ideas and voices structured in a vast and lose networks of mobilization that the new digital technologies, notably
social media and mobile phone networks, had mostly facilitated. Thirdly, the absence of a trusted leadership and
organization clearly made the possibility of representation and negotiation untenable. Unlike the Eastern European
revolutions, there was little in the Arab revolutions by way of negotiation with the regimes. Who were to negotiate
in the absence of an entity that could represent the revolutionaries? Precisely for this reason, we saw later how the
Sudanese uprising of 2019 tried to avoid this bottleneck by utilizing the leadership and organization of the old‐time
Professional Unions as well as the organizing skills of the Communist Party to successfully negotiate a civilian
transition following the ouster of General Bashir. Fourthly, these uprisings carried no clear ideological articulation,
be it nationalism, Marxism, Islamism, or even liberalism. Indeed, there was not any intellectual vision to articulate
and advocate a revolutionary transformation. In that juncture of Arab history, intellectuals were not thinking,
writing or debating about ‘revolution’ as a fundamental change in the way that their earlier counterparts such as
Frantz Fanon, Ali Shariati, Sayyed Qutb, Vaclav Havel, or Adam Michnik did in the 1960s, 70s or 80s. In sum,
revolution “was not in”, so to speak, in the lexicon of the Arab intellectuals prior to the uprisings. And finally, unlike
the Eastern European revolutions that followed a fundamental transformation of the state, ideology, elites and
economy, Arab revolutions caused little break from the old order. Key institutions of the state, old media, old ruling
classes with their interests and networks of patronage, remained more or less unaltered and intact. Hannah Arendt
once stressed that the collapse of authority and power becomes a revolution “only when there are people willing
and capable of picking up the power, of moving into and penetrating, so to speak, the power vacuum.”9 In Tunisia
and Egypt, for instance, neither did there develop a real power vacuum—because state power did not really
collapse—nor were there any insurgent group willing and capable of picking up the power. The protagonists, those
who had initiated and pushed the uprisings forward, mostly remained on the margins of the governmental power,
because they mainly were not planning to ascend to power. But when some realized later that they should have
taken over the governmental power, they lacked the necessary resources—powerful organization, leadership,
strategic vision, and some sort of coercive force—to wrest power from the old elites.
In Revolution without Revolutionaries, I suggest that the Arab Spring represents a new generation of 21st Century
revolutions that are rich as movements but poor in terms of change. In this sense, they depart drastically from their
20th Century counterparts, such as those in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, or even the ‘negotiated' anti‐Communist
revolutions of 1989. What transpired in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen were not revolutions in the sense of societal
changes that begin with the rapid and radical transformation of the state pushed by popular movements from below.
Rather, they were ‘refolutions,’ that is, revolutionary movements that emerged to compel the incumbent regimes to
reform themselves—to hold new elections, write a new constitution, and develop a new mode of governance. The
protagonists did not wish nor had the means to take power but wished to see the power changed. Refolutions in
this sense may not cause fundamental transformation, because regimes when left to themselves, may not undertake
meaningful change of their own structure unless they receive effective political pressure or coercion. In the case of
the Arab spring, for instance, the post‐uprising Arab states largely resisted reforming their personnel, culture, and
relations and thus broadly kept the status quo.10
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The form of government that emerges out of refolutions is marked by an inherent contradiction. Unlike the
radical ideological revolutions of the 20th Century, refolutions naturally give rise to non‐hegemonic and fairly
pluralistic regimes, because the persistence of multiple power centers including those from past regimes as well as a
resurgent civil society prevent these regimes from monopolizing power. This is well illustrated in post‐revolution
Tunisia as well as Egypt until 2013 when the military coup led by General Sisi ended its pluralism. In other
words, refolutions have the potential to establish pluralist polity and procedural democracy. But precisely the fluid
and feeble structure of such new pluralistic regimes make them vulnerable to counter‐revolutionary sabotage, slow
and superficial change, or possibly an eventual restoration.
Abrams and others point out that my notion of ‘refolution’ “is in fact derived from the analyses of the
post‐Soviet revolutionary wave” and therefore remains within the fourth‐generation theoretical frame. This is not
accurate. While it is true that the term ‘refolution’ was used first by Timothy Garten‐Ash to describe the
anti‐communist upheavals of 1989 in Eastern Europe, it meant to highlight the peaceful and negotiated character of
the otherwise full‐fledged Eastern European revolutions where, unlike the Arab world, the state, ideology,
economy, and mode of governance underwent a profound transformation.11 Unlike Garten‐Ash's perspective
where refolution refers to the peaceful and negotiated full‐fledged revolutions, for me it highlights the revolutionary
movements that emerged to compel the incumbent regimes to reform themselves (which oftentimes they would
not) but did not aim to seize power nor were they effectively involved in establishing a new order. This repertoire is
not limited to the Arab revolutions per se but characterize most of the political uprisings that have burst onto the
global stage since 2010—from Haiti and Hong Kong to Burkina Faso and Gambia, not to mention Iraq, Lebanon, and
Algeria in the late 2010s.
This new generation of revolutions, or refolutions to be precise, emerged in particular ideological and
technological conditions worldwide, that is, the post‐Cold‐War global condition wherein all of the key revolutionary
traditions of the 20th century—i.e., anti‐colonial nationalism, Marxism‐Leninism, and militant Islamism—were
undercut in favor of the global growth of the (neo)liberal ideas. Thus, instead of the earlier ideals of equality,
welfare state, popular control, and transformative revolution, the world saw the spread of the ideas of the
individual, human rights, NGOs, market, and (neo)liberal reform. Many of these viewpoints informed and were
reproduced by the neoliberal paradigm—the new ideological orthodoxy that simultaneously entailed the dissent of
the marginalized and de‐radicalization of the political class. The Arab Spring emerged against the background of such
a post‐socialist, post‐Islamist, and neoliberal climate where the ideas of revolution in terms of fundamental break,
distributive justice, social rights, and class politics had been dispelled in favor of the pervasive idioms of civil society,
NGOs, individual rights, identity politics, democracy and liberal reform.
While such an historical backdrop conditioned the post‐ideological inclination of the new revolutions, the rise
of new social media marked their mobilizational features. The spread of digital technologies played a crucial role in
the refolutionary character of these new non‐radical revolutions in that they enabled activists to generate out-
comes that often went beyond their expectations and abilities to handle. The new technologies enabled the pro-
tagonists to mobilize spectacular crowds which they had little idea what to do with or where to take. Refolutions,
in sum, were the product of a paradoxical global episode when the prevalence of new communication technologies
(e.g. social media) had greatly eased political mobilization on massive scales. Yet when the very idea of revolution as
a deep change had been dissipated. In other words, there developed the possibility of spectacular mobilization and
mass uprisings, but there was little strategic, let alone utopian, vision about how to transform the status quo and
achieve an alternative social order. I suggested that this global (post‐colonial, post‐socialist, and post‐Islamist) era
had, in short, created conditions for the rise of revolutions without revolutionary ideas: in short, refolutions.
The refolutionary character of the new revolutions is by no means static. It can change. First, if it is true that
revolutions are highly relational political happenings, then it is possible that the future ones may alter their tra-
jectories as they learn from shortcomings and strengths of their predecessors (this learning process applies also to
the counter‐revolution). In fact, currently there is a debate in the Arab world about the pros and cons of the earlier
phase of the Arab Spring. Activists of the late 2010s uprisings in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, or Iraq have been
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reflecting on and debating about how to avoid the pitfalls of the Egyptian or Yemenis or Syrian revolutions. Some
segments of Hirak in Algeria went so far as to deny being part of the Arab Spring, meaning that they ‘do not want to
fail’. The protagonists in Sudan became acutely aware of the necessity of organization and representation in pursuit
of a strategy of mobilizing intensely at the base while negotiating their terms with the military at the top.
Secondly, refolutions marked by remarkable mobilization tend to generate “event” in the sense of Alain
Badiou—a revolutionary rupture that may open new possibilities for imagining different order of things. Even if they
may not be able to cause radical break at the top, refolutions may still instigate radical thoughts and practices on
the ground, in the social domain, among the grassroots. This social and grassroots side of revolution has been
mostly overlooked by the dominant literature. The prevailing revolutionary theories, including those of the fourth‐
generation, are invested invariably in macro‐structural, institutional, political, and state‐centric perspectives. Such
macro‐structural outlooks are certainly indispensable to understand and examine any revolution including those of
the Arab Spring. But they are not sufficient. In the book Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (2021), I
take a micro grassroots perspective to understand what revolution means on the ground in the everyday life—in
farms, factories, families; in ideas, norms, and in popular subjectivities.12 Looking from this prism, one would get
a wholly different understanding about the questions of outcome, ‘failure’/‘success’, and continuity and change in
the revolutionary trajectories. My investigation into the everyday of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt shows
protracted popular struggles over redistribution, property norms, and self‐rule. It reveals powerful quests for
grassroots democracy, gender parity, and recognition of social difference. These radical practices—pursued mostly
by the urban and rural poor, marginalized youth, women, and other subaltern groups—stood apart from the pre-
vailing preoccupations of the political class that centered on human rights, democracy, and social inclusion. To build
a more comprehensive analytical schema, we need to integrate the dynamics of the revolutionary social world and
everyday life into the macro‐structural and political perspectives on regime change and state transformation. My
hope is that Revolutionary Life serves as a prelude to rethink revolution in these new terms.

E NDN OT E S
1
George Lawson (2019), Anatomies of Revolution, Cambridge University Press, p. 53.
2
Benjamin Abrams (2019), “A Fifth Generation of Revolutionary Theory is Yet to Come”. Journal of Historical Sociology. 32
(3).
3
Jamie Allinson (2019), “A fifth generation of Revolutionary Theory?” Journal of Historical Sociology. 32:142–151.
4
It is fair to recall that there are other scholars who have already emphasized the 'international' character of revolutions;
see for instance Kamran Matin (2015), Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change,
Routledge.
5
Lawson, Anatomies of Revolution, p. 5.
6
William Sewell (1996), “Historical Events as Transformation of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille”. Theory
and Society. 25: 841–881.
7
George Lawson (2015), “Revolutions and the International”. Theory and Society. 44 (4): 466.
8
Erica Chenoweth (2019), “Reform, Resistance, and Revolution”. Journal of Human Rights. 22: 3; https://doi.org/10.1080/
14754835.2019.1570093
9
Hannah Arendt (2017), “The Lecture: Thoughts on Poverty, Misery and the Great Revolutions of History”. New England
Review, June, p. 12; https://lithub.com/never‐before‐published‐hannah‐arendt‐on‐what‐freedom‐and‐revolution‐really‐
mean/
10
Here I focus primarily on Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. I do not speak of Syria and Libya where the extraordinary inter-
vention of foreign forces radically altered the nonviolent trajectories of these revolutions turning them into devastating
armed conflicts. See Assad Achi (2020), “How the Syrian Civil Society Lost its Independence in a War of Conflicting
Agendas”, in Maha Yahya, ed. Contentious Politics in the Syrian Conflict, Carnegie Middle East Center, 15 May 2020.
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11
Indeed, one may claim that these peaceful or negotiated and yet fundamental revolutions of 1989 were perhaps an
exception, precisely because they fell on the ‘right side’ of the Cold War, on the Western side, which was too eager to
see these revolutions to succeed.
12
Asef Bayat, Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring, Harvard University Press, November 2021.

How to cite this article: Bayat, A. (2021). The Arab Spring and revolutionary theory: An intervention in a
debate. Journal of Historical Sociology, 34(2), 393–400. https://doi.org/10.1002/johs.12334