Taming the People: Comparing Protests and Populism in Arab and American Politics

The rise of populism has been an uncontested global reality in recent years. However, it is unclear exactly how culturally distinct populist movements imitate or mirror each other, especially given the different rhetorical, political, ideological, and cultural contexts within which they operate. This article addresses this issue by comparing recent manifestations of populism across contemporary Arab and American contexts, with a special focus on former United States President Donald Trump’s response to the George Floyd protests and Egyptian President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s handling of demonstrations in his country. We argue that each leader deployed common rhetorical tactics as a populist strategy to undermine the protestors’ attempts to articulate the people’s will. At the same time, our analysis shows how the different contexts in which Trump and Sisi operate also impact their ability to successfully translate their populism into political effectiveness. By conducting this analysis, our article shows how similar populist tactics across different cultural contexts may lead to divergent outcomes, revealing the importance of institutional as well as popular bases of support for would-be populist politicians.

Between Revolutions

This chapter considers the tumultuous period of political turmoil following the 1905 Revolution. During this period, autocracy came under increasing pressure, and many conservatives either positively or grudgingly accepted the need for representative institutions or at least consultative ones. Anti-bureaucratic sentiment continued to grow and many conservatives pursued apparently paradoxical goals of strengthening autocracy while simultaneously limiting it. Meanwhile, the idea of the Russian nation remained very strongly associated with Orthodoxy, but a strand of conservatism that rested on ethno-nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism gained ground. Divisions among conservatives, furthermore, limited their political effectiveness. The defeat of the 1905 Revolution left liberalism and socialism in retreat. There was an opportunity for conservatives to take the lead and direct Russia along a new path, but they proved unable to unite around common projects.

Like Any Other Job?

This chapter explores some of the challenges that organizers of domestic workers in Ecuador face. Its discussion of domestic worker organizing touches on the three major themes of this book: social reproduction, informal arrangements that render domestic work invisible, and class relations that degrade and dehumanize workers. Workers' engagement in long hours of paid and unpaid social reproduction makes them difficult to reach and organize. Informal arrangements, and lack of political will and political effectiveness to change these arrangements, combine to make the enforcement of existing laws difficult. Moreover, relationships with the left-leaning state, embedded in traditional assumptions about who constitutes the working class—assumptions that leave out women and informal workers—have been fraught. The chapter then shows how domestic workers and their advocates have been organizing, what strategies they have used to demand the rights of these workers, and what the implications of these strategies are for political action and change.

“A and B”

Chapter 10 focuses on Breckinridge’s relationship with Edith Abbott. Breckinridge and Abbott’s long-term relationship was a remarkable partnership, advancing both women’s careers and activism as well as providing them with emotional sustenance and practical support. Acknowledging the shifting definitions of female sexuality that make it difficult to categorize this same-sex relationship as lesbianism, this chapter explores the dynamics and the significance of this lengthy relationship from the women’s first meeting in 1903 to Breckinridge’s death in 1948, demonstrating that Breckinridge and Abbott’s personal relationship fostered their professional success and their political effectiveness.

Terrorism Success Stories Revisited

This chapter revisits the most commonly cited examples in history of terrorism paying politically. If even these cases fail to illustrate the political effectiveness of terrorism then that would further undermine the evidentiary basis of the Strategic Model. Many scholars point to the political successes of the Irgun, African National Congress, and Hezbollah as evidence that terrorism is an effective instrument of coercion. Yet these campaigns did not coerce the occupying powers to withdraw by attacking their civilians. Instead, the groups focused their attacks on military and other government targets. This chapter shows that people overestimate the value of terrorist campaigns by lumping them together with guerrilla campaigns that have been far more successful.

My West Bank Discovery

This chapter presents some preliminary evidence that terrorism does not pay politically in terms of pressuring government concessions. The author first came to this realization in the West Bank during the Second Intifada, when Palestinian terrorism backfired politically. His experience in the West Bank led the author to question and then probe whether terrorism helps the perpetrators to redress their grievances, as proponents of the Strategic Model assume. Although many scholars believe that groups turn to terrorism because of its political effectiveness, the author shows that this common assumption rests on a shaky empirical basis. His evidence that terrorism is a losing political tactic lays the basis for Rule #1 in the book—that aggrieved groups should refrain from targeting civilians.

In, Against and Beyond Precarity: Work in Insecure Times

In this Foreword to the special issue ‘In, Against and Beyond Precarity’ the guest editors take stock of the existing literature on precarity, highlighting the strengths and limitations of using this concept as an analytical tool for examining the world of work. Concluding that the overstretched nature of concept has diluted its political effectiveness, the editors suggest instead a focus on precarization as a process, drawing from perspectives that focus on the objective conditions, as well as subjective and heterogeneous experiences and perceptions of insecure employment. Framed in this way, they present a summary of the contributions to the special issue spanning a range of countries and organizational contexts, identifying key drivers, patterns and forms of precarization. These are conceptualized as implicit, explicit, productive and citizenship precarization. These forms and patterns indicate the need to address precariousness in the realm of social reproduction and post-wage politics, while holding these in tension with conflicts at the point of production. Finally, the guest editors argue for a dramatic re-think of current forms of state and non-state social protections as responses to the precarization of work and employment across countries in both the Global ‘North’ and ‘South’.