Grassroots Movements, Beyond Dichotomies
International Workshop at the Centre for Advanced Studies“Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, Leipzig University
15 March 2024
at Strohsackpassage (Nikolaistraße 8-10, 04109 Leipzig), Room 4.55

Approach
The Middle Eastern region has been undergoing a bloody skinning process for decades, ever since thefailure of centralist development dictatorships – whether of Western or Soviet provenance, secularist orIslamist. Although this process has no end, the contours of a future “order” are discernible. On the one
hand, the states in the region are transforming into neoliberal, militaristic, and securitized power
maintenance machines, integrated into this or that regional power bloc (the Abraham Peace, Axis ofResistance, and Turkey-Qatar axis) and waging their imperial (proxy) wars for regional dominance with
the involvement of rival world powers. On the other hand, we are witnessing grassroots democratic
movements, uprisings, and revolutions. Since the Green Movement (2009) and Arab Spring (2011),
regardless of their geographical scope, and concrete objectives, and despite bloody repression, they
have been constantly forming and reforming region-wide. Thus, they have become a facial feature of
the region, and its future shape is probably unthinkable to eradicate any more.
It has been rightly emphasized that these post-Islamist movements transcend both authoritariansecularism and Islamic fundamentalism in a post-secular era. Accordingly, they express social (ethnic,linguistic, religious, regional, etc.) plurality exposed to homogenizing state coercion. They represent thestruggle for survival of large segments of the population challenged in the course of neoliberal
restructuring and warlike devastation of the social and natural basis of reproduction. Their demand for
civil democracy, whether or not it is coupled with a regime change, aims at the destruction of the socalled deep state and democratic reform of the state; but the “Zan-Zendegi-Azadi” (Woman, Life,Freedom) revolution in Iran once again makes it decidedly clear that the democracy question runs
through all state and non-state social spheres as well as institutions, and can by no means be reducedto the question of the (re)conquest of the state and its liberal-democratic reformation, especially since
this form of state has long since lost its magic.
With the “leviathanization of the state” on the one hand and grassroots democratic movements andrevolutions on the other, which seem to contest the state’s monopolization of the political, the Middle
East offers a scenario that can hardly be explained by the Oriental-Islamic backwardness of a region
stagnating in a transition from tradition to modernity, but rather points most dramatically to a global
world situation. The question arises: can we approximately explain this scenery with accustomedsociological dichotomies such as state-civil society, system-lifeworld, public vs. private sphere, secularreligious, liberalism-socialism, and Orient-Occident? In the workshop, we want to exchange views oninterpretation and explanation patterns concerning country-specific experiences, how the grassroots
democratic movements and revolutions in the region are to be grasped, and what role they play inshaping the future of the Middle East.
The workshop will take place as a hybrid event. The corresponding connection data will bemade available to all registered participants shortly beforehand.

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Workshop Programme“Grassroots Movements, Beyond Dichotomies”
Leipzig University, 15 March 2024

Schedule
Friday, 15 March 2024
9:30
9:45–11:15

Registration
Session 1
Moderator: Firoozeh Farvardin (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Asef Bayat (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Humboldt University of Berlin)
Gennaro Gervasio (Università Roma Tre)

11:30–13:00

Session 2
Moderator: Firoozeh Farvardin (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Nilüfer Göle (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
Ebrahim Towfigh and Mehdi Yousefi (Independent scholars, Iran)

13:00–14:00

Lunch Break14:00–16:00

Concluding Session and Open Discussion

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