With this post, Jadaliyya's NEWTON page launches an entirely new segment, the monthly NEWTON bouquet. Each bouquet will feature approximately six to ten previously published NEWTON interviews, all of which will relate to that month’s chosen theme. Our inaugural NEWTON bouquet, featured below, runs in concert with Jadaliyya’s “Summer of Coups” theme. The editors have broadened the scope of the “Summer of Coups” theme to include other major instances of social and political upheaval and unrest, including the Arab uprisings as well as the Iranian Revolution of 1979, major events that continue to influence the region’s social, political, and economic trajectories.
[This article is a part of Jadaliyya's Summer of Coups Series.]
“Iran gaining its independence from colonist Britain, the nationalizing of its oil by Mohammad Mossadegh, and then the MI5/CIA overthrow of him. I felt this is a story Americans deserve to know and Iranians deserve to have told, and I wanted to help do that…”
2) Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye, Lissa: A Story of Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution
“We ultimately decided to create a fictional narrative in which there were two main characters, each based on our research, whose worlds were deeply intertwined through proximity and friendship, and whose life trajectories reflected the broader medical dilemmas we wanted to explore. Fiction gave us the freedom to craft an absorbing, relatable character-driven narrative, and the flexibility to adapt the narrative in ongoing conversation with the illustrators, Caroline and Sarula, as well as with our interlocutors in Egypt.”
“Our impetus to put this project together came full circle in the aftermath of the horrific massacre of protestors gathered in Rab‘aa Square in 2013, which gave rise to a narrative of a bifurcated Egyptian society, in which undesirables needed to be outright eliminated to cleanse the Egyptian nation. The role of the intelligentsia in promoting that exclusionary narrative remains a key motivating factor in pursuing this project; their complicity ultimately gave rise to anti-democratic values undermining the democratic process they purport to uphold, and to the dismantling of the very civil society on which years of their work was based.”
4) Nimer Sultany, Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism After the Arab Spring
“The book seeks to centralize the role of law in the Arab Spring, and to centralize Arab Spring to major legal and constitutional debates. While much has been written about the political and economic aspects of the Arab Spring, the role of law remains understudied and insufficiently theorized. Thus, the book seeks to contribute to the emerging scholarship on the Arab Spring by scrutinizing and highlighting the role of law and constitutions during societal upheavals and revolutions.”
5) Ayca Cubukcu, “The Responsibility to Protect: Libya and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity”
“Proposals for the use of international military force against the Qaddafi regime led to passionate disagreements, even among familiar proponents of humanitarian intervention. Such proposals also divided those traditionally opposed to military interventions along anti-imperialist lines. This article emerged as an effort to make sense of these disagreements and to identify some of the conflicting (as well as common) political and ethical dispositions grounding them.”
6) Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism
“Here in this book I work with a number of ideas, among them the ideas of delayed defiance; open-ended (as opposed to total) revolutions; the articulation of the public sphere; and the notion of revolutions unfolding like a Bakhtinian novel rather than a Homeric epic. There are also, of course, classical sociological question of race, gender, and class that I raise, particularly in the globalized context of labor migration. But perhaps the most important idea is that of the end of postcolonialism, which I treat in detail.”
“Each contribution in its own way seeks to understand why contestation and regime reaction to contestation differed from country to country. There were large-scale protests in some places, less important ones in others; here they were more sustained, there less; some of them took place in smaller towns, others in capital cities; even the protesters themselves were not the same–I mean sociologically speaking.”
8) Joel Beinin, Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt
“The book empirically catalogs and classifies strikes and other forms of workers’ collective action going back to the 1970s, their escalation in the 2000s, during the uprisings against the autocrats, and their continuation into the next period at an even higher pitch. In fact, such struggles are continuing to this moment. Its most important conceptual contribution is to situate the movements in Egypt and Tunisia in the framework of the imposition of neoliberal economic reform and structural adjustment programs (ERSAPs) on Tunisia, from the mid-1980s, and Egypt, from 1991.”
9) Behrooz Ghamari, Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution
“Rather than a memoir, I think of Remembering Akbar as an autobiographical novel, very similar in terms of genre to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. The main narrator of the story, Akbar, takes the reader through different moments of imprisonment and introduces different characters with intimate details. Although the circumstances are all real in the story, sometimes the characters are based on composite real people. Writing in the form of a novel also gave me the ability to move with more ease between different planes of reality and imagination.”
10) Ala'a Shehabi and Marc Owen Jones, Bahrain's Uprising: Resistance and Repression in the Gulf
“Given the contentious politics of the Arab uprisings, and Bahrain`s own history of it, we thought resistance and repression would work as a more appropriate lens through which to frame a study of Bahrain. This concept-driven approach allowed us to study Bahrain from numerous disciplinary angles and methods, ranging from historical analysis to cultural studies and communication approaches. Across the book, the chapters generally reflect themes of social justice, postcolonialism, the role of foreign actors, human rights, and social media.”
