Well-known for his Marxological work, Kevin B. Anderson’s empirical A Political Sociology of Twenty-First Century Revolutions and Resistances drips with insights. It is made up of revolutionary journalism, a series of short essays originally penned for myriad purposes — some under the pseudonym “Kevin A. Barry.” While the pieces are arranged into thematic chapters, they are not revised, which means some repetition arises when reading through an entire chapter. Still, the individual essays would serve well in undergraduate courses.

The book’s main focus is the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Given space constraints, I focus here on Tunisia, Egypt, and Sudan. (Anderson also covers Arab-world reverberations in Algeria, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, and Syria; includes similar material on Iran, Kurdistan, and Turkey; and discusses recent uprisings in France, South Africa, and Ukraine.) Across these cases, the author focuses on three main actors: “the streets,” Islamists, and the military (see pp. 46, 89, and 107–109). He argues that youth unemployment played a central role in precipitating the Arab Spring. His narratives thus portray revolutions driven by youth-led street revolts, sometimes channeled by organized labor, which reshaped the political dynamics of the two elite groups. He borrows this threefold cast and the focus on youth from Achcar (2013).

The revolt began in Tunisia after vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated in December 2010. Some say corrupt cops demanded a bribe and his suicide was an act of protest. Regardless, it touched a nerve, and the ensuing youth-led revolt was strong enough to topple dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. The General Union of Tunisian Workers broke with the government to support the protests. This helped the moderate Ennahda Party position itself as the leading Islamic force. In the October elections, Ennahda won a plurality, and Hamadi Jebali became prime minister. The 2014 constitution enshrined several progressive principles but omitted class concerns. Youth unemployment remained high, keeping disaffection alive post-revolution. Thus, Kais Saied was able to win the presidency in 2019, promising to address poverty and corruption. His initiative, however, was a revanchist constitution, passed in 2022, signaling the revolution’s failure to consolidate its earlier gains.

Meanwhile, the Arab Spring had spread to Egypt—its epicenter—where massive street protests shook the country starting in 2011. Popular mobilization attracted the conservative but ambitious Muslim Brotherhood. The military, seeing the writing on the wall, withdrew support for dictator Hosni Mubarak, who resigned and passed power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Henceforth, the streets, the Brotherhood, and the military tussled, with the latter two competing for power. Initially, the streets—centered in Tahrir Square and expanding to neighborhood committees and workplaces—were the tiebreaker. But they were never the agenda-setter, and thus they were eventually outflanked.

Anderson notes that the Egyptian uprising “created a new consciousness, . . . a new form of pan-Arabism” (p. 32). But the streets never sought power and were ultimately marginalized. After forcing the military to defect, they briefly supported the Muslim Brotherhood, which won a near-majority in the 2012 parliamentary elections. The Brotherhood then allied with Islamic fundamentalists like the Salafists before the presidential elections. Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood’s candidate, narrowly won the first round, with Ahmed Shafiq (a representative of the old regime’s military) narrowly coming in a close second (and the left-nationalist Hamdin Sabahi a close third). The runoff round was thus a showdown between the military and the Brotherhood, two right-wing forces. The left (despite Sabahi’s reasonably good performance) was left with no choice.

While the military gained significant political influence through the Brotherhood-backed 2012 constitution, the streets’ tie-breaking role ended in a blind alley. When the Tamarod (rebel) protests erupted in 2013 (exceeding those of 2011), signaling growing discontent with Morsi’s Islamist government, the streets allied with the military, backing its ouster of Morsi but also paving the way for a military coup installing Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. In power, Sisi turned to repressing the Brotherhood and the streets. Under the Brotherhood, the Morsi government had done nothing to address unemployment; after the coup, the Sisi government added insult to injury by cutting fuel subsidies. Strikes continued initially, but by November, protests were banned, and many revolutionary leaders were quickly imprisoned. The streets had been outflanked—or, worse, used to support revanchism.

The Arab Spring eventually reverberated in Sudan. Widespread protests erupted after the Omar al-Bashir government cut subsidies for fuel and food in December 2018. Bashir’s ethnic cleansing of non-Arabs had discredited both the government and Islamism, leaving space for the politically independent Sudanese Professionals Association, a middle-class union, to channel discontent. After the military deposed Bashir, mass mobilization continued, with neighborhood committees emerging to counteract the military’s initiative (p. 180). The military agreed with the Forces of Freedom and Change coalition to a transitional government and a progressive and secular constitutional declaration. This pact put social demands to rest, but that only freed the military to reassert itself, staging another coup in 2023. Anti-coup demonstrations followed, putting social demands back on the political agenda and prompting the military to agree to another civilian-military pact. Discontent with the whiplash soon manifested, with the military and Islamists turning against one another. As the official Sudanese Armed Forces and the militia-like Rapid Support Force clashed militarily, mass demonstrations ebbed. Caught in the crossfire, social demands again ceded to revanchism.

On balance, Anderson reveals remarkable convergence on a single outcome: after the uprisings increased political appetites, the new governments failed to satisfy them, allowing revanchist forces to retake power (in Tunisia and Egypt) or obstruct revolutionary consolidation (in Sudan). Youth unemployment—born of dependent capitalist (under)development—provided fertile ground for political discontent, which revanchist political elites successfully exploited.

Those seeking a deeper analysis of the Egyptian (counter)revolution should consult Said (2024). The strength of Anderson’s essays lies elsewhere: in their concision and synthetic reach, as well as in their methodology, theoretical agenda, and historical sweep.

Methodologically, Anderson is attentive not just to objective conditions but also to subjectivity, focusing on how racial, national, and gender oppressions shape revolutionary processes. And, in contrast to recent trends in the sociology of revolution, Anderson emphasizes socio-economic demands at least as much as formal-political ones. Despite lacking firsthand information, he probes revolutionaries’ perspectives, particularly youth and women (in Egypt and Iran) and ethnic minorities (in Kurdistan and Sudan).

Theoretically, Anderson advances a neo-Hegelian, dialectical interpretation, at least for the Egyptian case. He contends that the repression under the new Sisi military dictatorship was even more intense than that under old Mubarak military dictatorship, because this intensity was necessary to put the revolutionary genie “back into the bottle” (p. 76). That is, the revolution culminated in its opposite: counterrevolution.

Historically, Anderson observes that the Arab Spring diffused both inside and far beyond the Arab world, inspiring Wisconsin’s capital occupation and Occupy Wall Street in the United States, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, and, more recently, the 2023 women-led uprising in Iran. Arabic became the “language” of the twenty-first-century revolution (p. 133), taken up by people beyond the Arab world to express themselves, just as Marx said French was the language of revolution in an earlier era.

Beyond the book’s many merits, Anderson’s political sociology is less well-developed in the essays. First, he shows empirically that mass mobilization can create divisions among elites (e.g., pp. 26–28, 150, 162, 252), which is crucial to revolutionary processes (cf. Hobsbawm 1977:83). But these observations are left conceptually underdeveloped. Second, he notes that the Arab Spring uprisings were powerful enough to topple regimes but were insufficiently powerful to advance an alternative political agenda (e.g., pp. 49, 113–14). This too seems like a fundamental insight—when a government is toppled, “you have to pay attention to who will rush into the vacuum” (Bevins 2023:279)—but it also remains underexplored.

References

Achcar Gilbert. 2013. The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crossref.

Bevins Vincent 2023. If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. New York: PublicAffairs.

Hobsbawm Eric. 1977. The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848. London: Abacus.

Said Atef Shahat. 2024. Revolution Squared: Tahrir, Political Possibilities, and Counterrevolution in Egypt. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crossref.