Life as Politics: Asef Bayat on Street, Society, and the Ordinary in the Middle East

A photograph of squatters in Tehran. (Wikimedia Commons)

Histories of Middle Eastern politics have long privileged spectacular events and formal institutions. Political science has emphasized revolutions, coups, and organized movements; Middle East studies has foregrounded Islamism, authoritarianism, and elite maneuvering. Yet these accounts often neglect the dispersed, everyday practices through which millions of ordinary people shape urban life. Asef Bayat challenges this paradigm. From his studies of squatters in post-revolutionary Iran to his analyses of Islamism, street politics, and neoliberal cities, Bayat insists that politics is enacted not only in parties or parliaments but in ordinary practices of survival and dignity. His project is to render visible these practices and theorize them as central to understanding the Middle East.

This blog post reconstructs Bayat’s contributions across six key essays. It situates his work historiographically, examines four case studies—quiet encroachment in Iran, street politics in Cairo and Amman, imagined solidarities in Islamist movements, and the city-inside-out under neoliberalism—and then turns to his synthesis in the concept of non-movements. It concludes by assessing Bayat’s impact on global debates about activism and the ordinary.

1990s scholarship celebrated NGOs, syndicates, and voluntary associations as vehicles for democratization. [1] Bayat’s “Un-Civil Society” (1997) critiqued this narrowness: informal squatters, vendors, and migrants, he argued, engaged in politics no less than lawyers’ syndicates or NGOs. North American theories of resource mobilization, political opportunities, and collective identity [2] assumed open societies with structured organizations. Alberto Melucci and Alain Touraine theorized “new social movements” in post-industrial contexts. [3] Bayat showed these theories faltered in authoritarian settings. James Scott emphasized peasants’ hidden transcripts. [4] Bayat built on this but emphasized that urban poor often acted offensively, not defensively: seizing land, connecting illegally to utilities, and appropriating sidewalks. Castells, de Soto, and Abu-Lughod offered insights into urban informality. [5, 6, 7] Bayat’s twist: informality is not entrepreneurial dynamism but contested politics — the poor repossessing life against state and elite.

Between 1976 and 1986, Iran’s urban population grew by 72 percent. In Tehran, migrants built illegal settlements, connected clandestinely to electricity, and transformed farmland into neighborhoods. [8] The Islamic Republic praised the mustazafin while demolishing squatter homes. Bayat terms this contradiction a “space of toleration”: tolerated until too visible. [9] Mashhad in 1992 illustrates this. When authorities demolished homes in Kouy-e Tollab, protests erupted, two boys were killed, and riots left six police dead. [10] For Bayat, the riots were “the noisy surface of a largely silent movement.” Squatters acted offensively, unlike Scott’s defensive peasants. Compared to Latin American barrios, Iranian encroachment was less organized, more episodic. Yet the transformations were profound. [11]

In “The ‘Street’ and the Politics of Dissent in the Arab World” (2003), Bayat critiques Western clichés of the “Arab street” as irrational or impotent. The street, he argues, is the “urban theater of contention par excellence.” [12] Cairo’s vendors colonized sidewalks; Amman’s 1989 and 1996 bread riots spilled into streets. Protest gained force when it left campuses or factories, where strangers could join and visibility intensified [13] Passive networks—tacit solidarities of proximity—explain these sudden mobilizations. Vendors recognize each other’s pushcarts; veiled women recognize one another in public. [14] These solidarities, latent but real, allow protests to erupt without organizations. Bayat’s street politics parallels Chatterjee’s “political society,” Holston’s “insurgent citizenship,” and resonates with Latin America’s plazas. Yet its Middle Eastern specificity lies in authoritarian policing of public space.

Islamism, Bayat argued in “Islamism and Social Movement Theory” (2005), mobilizes not through cohesion but through imagined solidarities. Like Anderson’s “imagined communities,” broad slogans — “Islam is the solution” — allow divergent groups to project their hopes. [15] Iran in 1979 exemplifies this: secularists, clerics, and workers united under Khomeini but fragmented after victory. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood mobilized under Islam huwa al-hall but fractured over programmatic details. Turkey’s Refah and AKP forged cross-class coalitions through ambiguity, which later unraveled. [16] Islamism is thus not archaic regression (contra Huntington and Lewis) but modern mobilization under authoritarian constraint, where imagination substitutes for deliberation. [17]

Structural adjustment in the 1980s–90s cut subsidies, shrank public employment, and privatized housing. [18] Bayat describes the result as the city-inside-out. In Cairo, vendors proliferated, and the “City of the Dead” cemetery housed hundreds of thousands. Elites fled to gated compounds. [19] In Tehran, women drove taxis; in Amman, bread riots and informal minibuses exemplified out-door economies. Here, street politics became structural. Daily encroachment countered neoliberal “accumulation by dispossession” with “survival by repossession.” [20] Bayat’s city-inside-out resonates with Holston’s insurgent citizenship, Chatterjee’s political society, and Mbembe’s improvisational postcolonial cities. [21] The Arab uprisings of 2011 — sparked by a street vendor — confirmed how politicized public space had become. [22]

In “Activism and Social Development in the Middle East” (2002), Bayat links activism to development. [23] Everyday practices — squatter housing, vendor markets, women’s education — produced welfare and change as much as NGOs or state programs. He terms these practices non-movements: “the collective action of non-collective actors.” [24] Millions act individually but produce cumulative transformations. Youth and women exemplify this. Millions of Iranian women entered universities, reshaping professions. Youth asserted new styles and leisure, reconfiguring public culture. [25] Critics argue non-movements dilute the concept of politics. Bayat responds that dispersed practices are harder to repress and may be the only viable activism under authoritarianism. The Arab uprisings validated this: non-movements foreshadowed revolutions that were “leaderless” and “networked.” [26]

The arc of Asef Bayat’s scholarship consistently points us toward a different way of understanding politics in the Middle East. His work demonstrates that the struggles of squatters, vendors, women, youth, and Islamists cannot be reduced to coping mechanisms, cultural eccentricities, or ephemeral unrest. Instead, these are forms of political practice that unfold in everyday life, quietly transforming cities, reshaping social norms, and, at times, erupting into moments of dramatic upheaval.

In his early writing on post-revolutionary Iran, Bayat showed how migrants and the poor altered the urban order through incremental encroachment, appropriating land and utilities in ways that forced the state to respond. His subsequent studies of Cairo and Amman reframed the street as an arena of contention, where bodies, gestures, and the sheer fact of presence constituted political expression, even in the absence of parties or unions. In his reflections on Islamism, Bayat extended this argument to ideological movements, demonstrating that solidarity often rests not on unified doctrine but on shared imagination—a sense of belonging conjured through broad symbols and slogans. His account of neoliberal urbanism revealed how structural adjustment and privatization not only dismantled welfare systems but also transformed the very spatial logic of politics, pushing millions into public spaces where survival and dissent became inseparable.

Out of these strands Bayat forged the concept of “non-movements,” the paradoxical form of activism in which millions of ordinary people, acting separately but in similar ways, collectively produce far-reaching transformations. What unites these ideas is the conviction that politics is not confined to parliaments, manifestos, or marches. It resides in the pursuit of dignity and survival, in the stubborn presence of bodies in streets and cemeteries, in the quiet accumulation of small encroachments that eventually reshape entire societies.

For historians and social scientists, Bayat’s work is both a challenge and an invitation. It challenges us to move beyond the familiar focus on elites and organizations, and to recognize the agency of those whose actions are dispersed, ordinary, and often invisible. At the same time, it invites us to broaden the very meaning of politics, to see it in practices that are ambiguous, fragmentary, or even contradictory, yet no less consequential. The Arab uprisings of 2011, which erupted from years of such dispersed practices, dramatize the stakes of this reorientation. Bayat’s enduring contribution is to show that in the Middle East, as elsewhere, life itself is political — and that it is in the textures of everyday life that the contours of social change are most powerfully drawn.


Notes

  1. Norton, Civil Society in the Middle East (1995).

  2. McCarthy & Zald, Social Movements in an Organizational Society (1987).

  3. Melucci, Challenging Codes (1996); Touraine, The Return of the Actor (1988).

  4. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (1985).

  5. Castells, The City and the Grassroots (1983).

  6. de Soto, The Other Path (1989).

  7. Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (1971).

  8. Bayat, “Squatters and the State,” MERIP 191 (1994).

  9. Bayat, “Un-Civil Society,” Third World Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1997).

  10. Bayat, “Squatters and the State,” 11–12.

  11. Perlman, The Myth of Marginality (1976).

  12. Bayat, “The ‘Street’ and the Politics of Dissent,” MERIP 226 (2003).

  13. Andoni & Schwedler, “Bread Riots in Jordan,” MERIP 201 (1996).

  14. Bayat, “The ‘Street’ and the Politics of Dissent,” 13–14.

  15. Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983).

  16. Bayat, “Islamism and Social Movement Theory,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 6 (2005).

  17. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations (1996); Lewis, “Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic Monthly (1990).

  18. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2007).

  19. Bayat, “Politics in the City-Inside-Out,” City & Society 24, no. 2 (2012).

  20. Harvey, The New Imperialism (2003).

  21. Holston, Insurgent Citizenship (2008); Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed (2004); Mbembe, On the Postcolony (2001).

  22. Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries (2017).

  23. Bayat, “Activism and Social Development in the Middle East,” IJMES 34, no. 1 (2002).

  24. Bayat, Life as Politics (2010).

  25. Herrera & Bayat (eds.), Being Young and Muslim (2010).

  26. Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries (2017).

Keanu Heydari

Keanu Heydari is a historian of modern Europe and the Iranian diaspora.

https://keanuheydari.com
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