Life as Politics

"Asef Bayat has penned a remarkable study. Life as Politics should be a mandatory read for any journalist, scholar or politician who has never been to the Middle East." -- <I>Arab News</I> "Life as Politics offers a brilliant alternative perspective on public life by taking seriously the daily lives and the social agency of ordinary people." -- <I>Middle East Book Reads</I> "When Life as Politics was published..., Asef Bayat's arguments on grassroots dynamism as the harbinger of democratic transformations in the Arab world seemed a utopian hope. Barely a year later, as events of the 2011 Arab Spring continue to unfold, his critical insights on everyday forms and spaces of political activity in the region have become prescient." -- <I>Contemporary Sociology</I> "In Life as Politics Asef Bayat offers up a historically rich, analytically rigorous and conceptually innovative account of Middle East oppositional movements . . . [A] tour de force that will inspire as well as inform scholarship on Middle East social movementsmost importantly by moving beyond a preoccupation with 'exceptionalist' tendencies. Above all, this work establishes Asef Bayat as a virtuoso of the sociological imaginary. Specialist and non-specialist readers alike will find themselves transported to the streets of the Middle East and afforded a first-hand view of social and political activism in the making." -- Navid Pourmokhtari * <i>Against the Current</i> *

Asef Bayat is the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, 2007).