Conventional representations of contentious politics in the Middle East and North Africa tend to oscillate between extremes. Caught in a sort of Catch-22, political activism in the region is, in the words of the Iranian scholar Asef Bayat, “damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t—either it is..
Patrick Snyder
Patrick Snyder is a political science PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota studying social movements, resistance, and co-optation in authoritarian regimes. His research focuses on the MENA region in general and Morocco in particular. You can follow him on Twitter @P_S_Snyder