Arab Spring: A Decentring Research Agenda

Abstract

This article calls for a decentring research agenda and serves as a reminder to look beyond the centres when seeking to understand attempted or accomplished processes of transformation. The Arab Spring is not a unitary whole but part of a variety of processes which differs in terms of space (diverse countries, diverse areas in countries), time (the Ghedim Izik protests in Western Sahara started in October 2010, while protests in the Rif are still ongoing), substance (demands for civil and political rights, equality rights, material claims, autonomy), strategies (from violence to apathy), involved actors (social movements, civil society organizations or individual actors) and outcomes (from regime repression to empowerment of peripheries).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this point.

^2. As noted by Thierry Hentsch (1992: xiv), ethnocentrism is very often the ‘precondition of our vision of the Other’ (1992: xiv).