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The Ends of Revolution: Rethinking Ideology and Time in the Arab Uprisings

It is difficult to believe the level of disruption and despair that we are witnessing in the Middle East, from a broken Gaza, to a ruined Syria, a Yemen being bombed, a Libya in disintegration, and an Egypt on the slide toward state-centric fascism. These developments seem to be distantly removed from the days of Tahrir Square in early 2011, when people with elated spirits poured into the streets to demand a better political future. If the large-scale social mobilization back then provided the best refutation of Francis Fukuyama’s the-endof-history thesis then the failure to translate mobilization into structural change has made the current moment a liminal, open-ended situation lingering between hope and despair, action and inaction, exhaustion and revolutionary belief. Was this the end of revolution, a stillborn moment that caught fire but transformed and today has lost its radical potential? Or does the end goal of revolution still call forth actions to establish a new and different world, a better one? What, in other words, are the ends of revolution? The aftermath of the 2011 uprisings opens a number of pertinent questions for researchers of revolution in the Middle East and beyond. What is failure for a revolutionary movement? What is certainty and what is doubt? How is a sense of direction created and dismantled in global times when the very possibility of historical direction is circumspect? Can critique create ideological innovation, or does it become a symptom of permanent crisis—crisis of critique as well as crisis of social change? Has the temporality of revolution changed, or can we use previous post-revolutionary situations, from France to Russia and to Iran, to mirror current concerns? Are radical new horizons of possibility emerging from the last six years’ experience with revolution, and if so, in which directions do they point? These are the questions we address in this Introduction as well as in the individual articles that follow.