More than a decade after the birth of contemporary social movements in the Middle East and North Africa scholars are asking what these movements have achieved and how we should evaluate their lasting legacies. The quiet encroachments of MENA counterrevolutionary forces in the post-Arab Spring era have contributed to the revival of an outdated Orientalist discourse of Middle East exceptionalism, implying that the region’s culture is exceptionally immune to democratic movements, values, and institutions. This volume, inspired by critical post-colonial/decolonial studies, and interdisciplinary perspectives of social movement theories, gender studies, Islamic studies, and critical race theory, challenges and demystifies the myth of “MENA Exceptionalism?.
Composted of three sections, the book first places MENA in the larger global context and sheds light on the impact of geopolitics on the current crises, showing how a postcolonial critique better explains the crisis of democratic social movements and the resilience of authoritarianism. The second section focuses on the unfinished projects of contemporary MENA social movements and their quest for freedom, social justice, and human dignity. Contributors examine specific cases of post-Islamist movements, the Arab youth, student, and other popular non-violent movements.
In the final section, the book problematizes the exceptionalist idea of gender passivity and women’s exclusion, which reduces the reality of gender injustice to some eternal and essentialized Muslim/MENA mindset. Contributors address this theory by placing gender as an independent category of thought and action, demonstrating the quest for gender justice movements in MENA, and providing contexts to the cases of gender injustice to challenge simplistic, ahistorical and culturalist assumptions.

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Peyman Vahabzadeh is a professor of sociology at the University of Victoria. He is the author of several books, including The Art of Defiance: Dissident Culture and Militant Resistance in 1970s Iran; Violence and Nonviolence: Conceptual Excursions into Phantom Opposites; and A Rebel’s Journey: Mostafa Sho‘aiyan and Revolutionary Theory in Iran. He is also editor of Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice: Economics, Agency, Justice, Activism and co-editor, with Samir Gandesha, of Crossing Borders: Essays in Honour of Ian Angus. He has published nine books of poetry, fiction, literary criticism and memoir in Persian and his works have appeared in English, Persian, German, Kurdish, French and Spanish.

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Yasmeen Abu-Laban is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. She has published widely on issues relating to the Canadian and comparative dimensions of gender, ethnicity and racialization processes, border and migration policies, and citizenship theory. She is the co-editor of Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory, and Power (with Elia Zureik and David Lyon); co-editor of Politics in North America: Redefining Continental Relations (with Radha Jhappan and François Rocher); and editor of Gendering the Nation-State: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives. She is also the co-author (with Christina Gabriel) of Selling Diversity: Immigration, Multiculturalism, Employment Equity and Globalization.

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Tariq Ali was a leading light of the New Left in the 1960s. His eloquent denunciations of American imperialism in southeast Asia were to be found in the pages of The New Left Review, which he helped to found. Since then, he has had an ever-changing career as an activist, essayist, filmmaker, editor, historian, and novelist.

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Bessma Momani is an associate professor at the University of Waterloo and Senior Fellow at CIGI, specializing on the Middle East and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). She is the author of Twentieth-Century World History (2007), IMF–Egyptian Negotiations (2005), the CIGI–CIC Special Report: The Future of International Monetary Fund: A Canadian Perspective (2009), and is the co-editor of Canada and the Middle East (WLUP, 2007). Dr. Momani has also published a dozen scholarly articles in numerous political and economic academic journals.

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Michael Frishkopf is a professor of Ethnomusicology and the director of the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology at the University of Alberta, and adjunct professor, Faculty of Communication and Cultural Studies, University for Development Studies, Ghana.

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The winner of the Peace Prize from the United Nations in Spain and an advisory board member of PEN Canada, Ramin Jahanbegloo is an internationally celebrated philosopher and currently York-Noor Visiting Chair in Islamic Studies and Associate Professor in Political Science at York University in Toronto.

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Paul Rowe is an actor and writer who lives in St. John's. His first novel The Silent Time, published in 2007 by Creative Book Publishing was inspired by his mother's experience as a deaf child growing up and being educated in early 20th century Newfoundland. The Silent Time was short-listed for the Winterset Award, the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage and History Award, and long-listed for the Re-Lit Awards. His first feature-length drama To Dare Mighty Things was produced by Rising Tide Theatre in 2003. During the summer of 2010 Paul performed in his own stage adaptation of The Silent Time at Rising Tide Theatre's Trinity Festival. He was also a founding member of Teatro, Newfoundland's only French language theatre company. He has performed with the Resource Centre for the Arts, Tramore Theatre Company, Perchance, Artistic Fraud and, in 2015, with the Stratford Festival of Canada.

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Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani is a Women and Gender Studies Assistant Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga.

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