Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Asef Bayat, who is a professor of sociology and the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been studying revolutions and how they affect people. His work has focused on countries in the Middle East and North Africa, where the revolutionary process has evolved over decades.
What started with his influential book ‘Life as Politics’, which was published in late 2009, continues today with ‘Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring’. In this book, Bayat takes a new approach to studying revolutions, looking at them not from above – but in how they affect the everyday lives of general population. In this interview, we discussed his new book and how his understanding of revolutions has changed over the past two decades.
Tugrul Mende: It’s been over a decade since you published ‘Life as Politics’, and now you publish ‘Revolutionary Life’, in what way did your own thinking about your research and the definition of revolution change over this period? Is ‘Revolutionary Life’ the final part of this quest?
