John Chalcraft – Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East

Between people power uprisings and armed jihadism, how can we best understand transgressive mobilization in the Middle East and North Africa? Scholarship on protest has traditionally been based either on Orientalism, or on theories of capitalism, modernization or globalization. Drawing on his new history of protest in the MENA, and engaging critically with social movement studies, John Chalcraft offers a glimpse in this lecture of an alternative view rooted in the dynamics of hegemonic contestation. This view stresses both hegemonic disarticulation on the one hand, and the contingent construction of mobilizing projects on the other. It points to the importance in the contemporary period of the crisis of the post-colonial state, and the roles of both intellectual labour and mass mobilization. John Chalcraft is an Associate Professor in the History and Politics of Empire/ Imperialism at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Previous posts include a Lectureship at the University of E