The recent Arab uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East have attracted scholarly attention as popular movements with novel transnational and religious dimensions. What became known as the Arab Spring can be read as part of a broader politics of normative defiance of predominant political and economic orders. From religious conflicts and indigenous sovereign claims to mobilizations of refugees and migrants in camps and urban settings, it may be possible to speak of contemporary insurrectional politics as social movements that emanate from normative positions which pose significant challenges to systemic orders. The purpose of this book is: to identify the material shifts giving rise to insurrectional politics; to reflect on key arenas of insurrection; to map/chart the impact of insurrectional movements on institutions and relations of political governance at national and global levels; and to explore analytics that will advance theorization of insurrectional politics. This volume generates new knowledge on systemic institutional transformations spanning the national and global, by bringing together scholars whose work combines theoretical inquiry with empirical analysis of contemporary insurrectional politics. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.
1. Insurrectional Politics: Theories and Practices of Contemporary Insurrections
Nevzat Soguk
2. On Insurrectionality: Theses on Contemporary Revolts and Resilience
T. W. Luke
3. Demonizing the Sensible and the ‘Revolution of Our Generation’ in Rosia Montana
Irina Velicu
4. Number Fetish: Middle-class India’s Obsession with the GDP
Sankaran Krishna
5. The End of Football and Fiesta? Social Insurrection and National Identity in Twenty-First-Century Brazil
E. Kath and J. Knijnik
6. Insurrectional Arts: Restoring a Politics and Ethics of Attention
Michael J. Shapiro
7. Insurrectional Politics in Colonial Southeast Asia: Colonial Modernity, Islamic ‘Counterplots’, and Translocal (Anti-colonial) Connectivity
Alina Sajed
8. ‘Germany Has Become Mohammedan’: Insurgency, Long-Distance Travel, and the Singapore Mutiny, 1915
Itty Abraham
9. Between Camps/Between Cities: Movement, Capture and Insurrectional Migrant Lives
Sam Okoth Opondo and Lorenzo Rinelli
10. Facebook Bras and #digitalharems: Fantasies of Mimesis and the Transgressions of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Sboui
Nicole Sunday Grove
11. With/Out a State, Kurds Rising: The Un/Stated Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq
Nevzat Soguk
Biography
Nevzat Soguk is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA. He is co-editor, with Scott Nelson, of Modern Theory, Modern Power, World Politics: Critical Investigations (2016).