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New Patterns of Mobilization for and against Democracy

Youssef El Chazli

Contact: y.el(at)uniandes.edu.co

Associate Professor of Sociology, Head of the Social Sciences of the Mediterranean Worlds Department, Paris 8 University

Youssef El Chazli is associate professor in political sociology at the University Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis, where he also heads the department of Social Sciences of the Mediterranean Worlds. He holds a dual Ph.D. in political science from the Universities of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Lausanne. El Chazli’s main research interest over the past decade and a half has been the study of contention in authoritarian contexts. He has more specifically studied the emergence and decline of the « Arab uprisings », both at the individual level of participants and looking at the collective dynamics of mobilization and demobilization. More recently, El Chazli has shifted his interests towards issues of infrastructural projects, authoritarian consolidation and the ecological crises in North Africa. Finally, he has had a running interest in alternative arts and cultural scenes in the Arab region. During his Global Forum Fellowship, Youssef El Chazli will be working on a book based on his research on the Arab Revolutions and will also be invested in south-south exchanges and discussions around the ecological crises.

Research project

The Foam of Revolutionary Days. An Experiential Study of Revolutionary Emergence and Decline

Mass waves of protests, upheavals, revolts, uprisings… all these forms of popular collective contention have become a major feature of world politics in the past decade and a half. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the “Arab spring” protests radically transformed political landscapes that had been in place for decades. While some of these movements led to the downfall of long-standing regimes, others initiated sequences of political violence and authoritarian backsliding—and at times, both. Owing to their spectacular quality, mass waves of protests attract the attention of observers, the media, and the general public alike. Nevertheless, they also tend to be quickly set aside. Portrayed as ephemeral eruptions of anger, they are rarely studied in and of themselves. Indeed, they are seen either as the outcome to be explained: Why did people protest? Why didn’t they protest until now? Or as the starting point for other phenomena to explain: What were the consequences, if any, of those waves of contention? Both series of questions are of great importance and have yielded numerous substantial results. However, both perspectives tend to obfuscate two central aspects. First, how do (ordinary) people who participate in those waves of mass protests experience them? Second, does this participation affect their subsequent lives? This project offers a renewed insight into the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and what remains of it, and more generally, promotes a novel way of looking at large-scale waves of protests and upheavals that we have witnessed in other countries, both in the Arab region and beyond. The project follows how individuals engage in revolutions and how, in turn, revolutions affect those individuals. It thus makes two important interventions: on the one hand, it promotes an alternative (dynamic and non-deterministic) interpretation of revolutionary emergence (and a methodological approach to study it). On the other, it suggests looking beyond narrow readings of failure/success of revolutionary episodes to understand the long-standing, usually unintended consequences of participation in these episodes, even once they seem to be over.