Conducts research and collects data on the global history of labour, workers, and labour relations

Second Sadighi Annual Lecture

Date: 
26 May 2011
Location: 
Amsterdam

For the Second Sadighi Annual Lecture, Prof. Asef Bayat (University Of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) presents his paper Revolutions Gone Viral: From Iran's Green Wave To Arab Revolts.

The Dr Sadighi Research Fund was established with support from the Centre for Iranian Documentation and Research (CIDR) at the International Institute of Social history (IISH). This Fund provides funding to scholars undertaking projects on the social history of Iran.

Lecture

The lecture will discuss underlying structural and political processes - including a new environment, actors, and means of mobilization - that shape the current popular uprisings in the Arab world, and explore through comparison their relevance to Iran's political contestation and its deceptive calm.

How do we explain the spectacular wave of revolts and revolutions in the Middle East - the region that had until recently been identified as exceptionally stagnant or otherwise imbued with the fundamentalist Islamist politics? How can we account for this dramatic turn-around? Why is this wave spreading through the Arab world and not Iran - a country reputed as a 'nation of revolutions'?