Alice Wilson, Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023)
[This review was originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.]
How do former revolutionaries continue to reproduce revolutionary values and networks after military defeat? What investigative methods and conceptual frameworks might allow scholars to make sense of the ongoing influence, or afterlives, of those values in an authoritarian setting? Is it possible for a researcher to investigate these questions without placing her interlocutors, or herself, in harm’s way?
Alice Wilson pursues this interrelated set of concerns in her timely and powerful Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman. Just over a decade ago, Abdel Razzaq Takriti’s widely acclaimed Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965–1976 (Oxford University Press, 2013) reminded the Middle East studies field of the Arabian Peninsula’s twentieth-century history of popular movements and leftist armed struggle, and Afterlives begins with a brief foreword by Takriti. Wilson’s project is fieldwork-driven, but she also references a range of archival and other historical sources to place surviving records in conversation with her interlocutors. Building on the revisionist histories of Takriti and other Arabic- and English-language accounts that seek to denaturalize authoritarian rule in Arabia, Wilson’s study exemplifies how ethnographic methods can transform events that are typically bracketed between beginning and end dates into expansive political and social horizons with unpredictable futures.
Wilson argues that there are lasting legacies of the revolution—the “afterlives” of her title—that persist in twenty-first-century Dhufar in the form of social relationships and egalitarian values. She interweaves a close reading of documentary archives and historiography into her analysis of her Dhufar fieldwork, the bulk of which took place during five months in 2015. Chapter 1 sets the scene for the revolution by exploring how Dhufar’s local historical and geographical conditions intersected with regional and global anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and nationalist movements. She explains that the British committed to a transnational counterinsurgency operation in Oman due to its strategic location between Aden and India and the fear, typical of the Cold War era, that if Marxism were to spread from Dhufar across Arabia it would threaten oil production and shipping routes. Chapter 2 develops a conceptual framework for addressing the multitude of contradictions inherent to ideological projects of social change. Wilson employs the term “messiness” to address how individual Dhufaris who were not in positions of authority engaged with revolutionary projects. In chapter 3, Wilson argues that patronage and coercion are intertwined, and that counterinsurgency measures emerged in dialogue—and even competition—with the acts of Dhufari revolutionaries. Accounts of Oman under the rule of Sultan Qaboos (1970–2020), she contends, must move beyond the regime’s preferred narrative of enlightened modernization and generous welfare to consider violent counterinsurgency measures and their lasting impact on social relations.
While ethnographic analysis is interwoven throughout the narrative, chapters 4–6 focus on how revolutionary histories inform the twenty-first-century lives of a range of Dhufaris. The potential of kinship ties both to recover normalcy in the wake of conflict by reproducing dominant social hierarchies and, alternatively, to foster revolutionary values of egalitarianism is the subject of chapter 4. Chapter 5 examines how postrevolutionary lives are gendered differently for male and female former revolutionaries by juxtaposing everyday male socializing with an extraordinary case of a woman’s political candidacy. In chapter 6, Wilson asks how Dhufaris commemorate the revolution in the context of an Omani state that silences revolutionary history and saturates Omani public space with tributes to the legacy of Sultan Qaboos.
The fraught ethical concerns of investigating a revolutionary history in a repressive political environment rightly shape Wilson’s research methods. She develops the category of an “officially silenced revolution” to explain the interplay between “the fields of government coercion that constrained Omanis and the possibilities nonetheless for circumventing that silence, reproducing revolutionary networks and values, and creating revolutionary afterlives” (11). Wilson is to be commended for centering her research ethics in her discussion of method and fieldwork. In her opening vignette, in which she recounts a ride with a driver whom she discovers was a former member of Dhufar’s liberation movement, Wilson employs “euphemistic reference” and “purposefully open-ended language” so that her interlocutor might decide for himself whether to take up the topic of his revolutionary past. Crucially, “following his cue I did not pursue the topic” (2–3).
This scene, in which she allows her interlocutor to steer the conversation and honors his decision to avoid difficult subjects, opens a wider discussion of Wilson’s ethical concerns. She self-censored, shared early drafts with Dhufaris, and ultimately decided only to include empirical information that would already be familiar to Omani intelligence officers. Wilson relies on “noise” throughout her narrative, such as dividing information gathered from a single interlocutor into several pseudonyms, to offer further safeguards. What is the larger purpose of writing about sensitive topics if there is such palpable potential risk? For Wilson, “it is possible that the more that research about sensitive topics circulates in Oman, the more people discuss these topics in person and on social media, and the less effective censorship becomes in practice” (29).
Wilson contributes to revisionist narratives in modern Omani and Gulf history that seek to decenter the state as the dominant source of change by demonstrating that the Qaboos regime in fact pursued reform and development in dialogue and competition with the revolution. Many Dhufaris even believe “that they won the war against the government” because, as one interlocutor explains, the “government gave us everything we wanted: development, education, roads, hospitals” (31). At the same time, Wilson does not hesitate to criticize certain forms of revolutionary violence. After a mutiny in 1970, for example, the Front (Dhufar’s liberation movement) executed dissidents. Wilson notes that such internal violence drove some Dhufaris to abandon the Front and join government forces. She also critiques the tendency of some of the revolution’s contemporary supporters to avoid problematizing its contradictions. Such leftist luminaries as Fred Halliday and Heiny Srour failed to question uncomfortable realities like the Front’s conscription of Dhufari adolescents, while the Front went so far as to ban the more critical work of Fawwaz Trabulsi (84–85). Wilson’s balanced consideration of revolutionary contradictions and failures lends authority to her overall critique of the triumphalist Omani state narrative.
Another major contribution of this book is Wilson’s insistence that intimate contestations of gender and race belong at the center of political analysis. The Front idealized social egalitarianism and sought to overturn tribal, gender, and racial hierarchies by reconfiguring kinship networks. The ongoing counterinsurgency of the Omani state, in contrast, has distributed welfare services by propagating tribalism, segregation, and inequality. Wilson identifies revolutionary afterlives in marriages that challenge prevailing social hierarchies. Marriages that most signaled revolutionary egalitarianism “were those between a woman of high-ranking social background and a man of a lower social background,” such as a man descended from dark-skinned enslaved persons (149). When Wilson becomes aware of married couples that fit this description during her fieldwork, she identifies such “kinship out of place” as a revolutionary afterlife (154).
A critique of Afterlives might be that some of Wilson’s examples are so subtle as to suggest multiple meanings that might have little to do with the legacy of revolution. For example, she explains the “sight of men seated by the roadside playing chess” in the twenty-first century by referencing the fact that chess became popular in revolutionary schools (221). But the context of post-2011 Oman seems to supersede such a critique by reminding us how recent experiences alter the ways in which we find meaning in historical events. Wilson points out that demonstrators in Salalah in 2011 directly referenced the 1970s and called on the government to “think of the grandchildren of the free men” (241). When political discontent erupts into popular movements, seemingly dormant revolutionary afterlives become immediately relevant, even in the most repressive authoritarian states. The resurgent reference to the Dhufar revolution in the wake of decades of official silence offers powerful evidence to support Wilson’s core thesis, that revolutionary values and memories persist and hold complex resonance for multiple generations of Dhufaris.
Wilson has produced a skillfully crafted and nuanced study of revolutionary afterlives in Dhufar. This book positions political dissent in Oman at the center of modern Arab history and is essential reading for any scholar who seeks to make sense of the post-2011 Middle East. Afterlives will also work well in the classroom, as it models how ethnographic and historical methods can complement each other to reveal that even after military defeat and official silencing, revolutionary values persist, reproduce, and have the potential to shape future liberatory movements.