Insurgent Witness
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- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication date:
- 31 July 2026
- 10 September 2026
- ISBN:
- 9781009851107
- 9781009851091
- 9781009851060
- Dimensions:
- (229 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.627kg, 318 Pages
- Dimensions:
- (229 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.463kg, 318 Pages
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Book description
How do we describe the collective identity of people who make a popular revolution? Notwithstanding marked differences, most accounts understand revolutionary collectives as partisan and relegate spectators to irrelevance – or, worse, to the ignominy of cowards and traitors. Revisiting histories of the 1979 revolution in Iran, Arash Davari explores how millions of people defied expectations and joined popular assemblies to demand the fall of the Pahlavi regime. Through the lens of recent global social movements, Insurgent Witness presents an archetype of collective identity as partisan and spectator at once. Combining novel findings with a fresh methodological approach to previously considered collections, this book presents a distinct concept of revolutionary subjectivity – one that describes the terms of mass revolt in Iran and challenges prevailing assumptions about social change and popular sovereignty in contemporary political thought.
Reviews
‘Bridging history and political theory, this remarkable book delivers a fresh reading of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and an original contribution to theories of revolutionary action. Arash Davari develops the archetype of the ‘insurgent witness' in a way that is at once analytic, lyrical, and deeply moving. A rare achievement.'
Alireza Doostdar - University of Chicago
‘With ambition and tenderness, Arash Davari deftly interprets how the staggering ten percent of the Iranian masses who mobilized in the 1960s and 1970s illuminate the nature of revolutionary action in 21st-century postcolonial states opposed to US empire. In a rendering that is both theoretically important and methodologically creative, these partisan witnesses disrupt through preserving their political community with lessons for transformative possibilities writ large.'
Jane Anna Gordon - University of Connecticut
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