Much of the political science literature about the Middle East has separated the spheres of “hard politics” and “soft politics.” In many such studies of the region, the “political” is often what is present in the sites of hard politics, namely, political parties and state institutions. Parallel to this, notions of “resistance” in this literature have often revolved around armed struggle and public protest.

When the Arab uprisings happened in 2011, many political scientists wondered why the revolutions were not anticipated in advance. In pre-2011 Tunisia, there were no indications that a revolution was about to happen, as the country was closed politically under the control of an authoritarian regime that had either exiled oppositional voices or cracked down on them. In countries like Syria and Libya, there were no obvious signs that any political resistance to the governing regimes existed, as those countries were renowned for their brutal suppression of political activity outside the realm of the ruling regimes. With no significant nonstate political activity occurring in the realm of hard politics, discourse on “enduring authoritarianism” and “Arab exceptionalism” (e.g., see Samuel Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?” Political Science Quarterly 99 [Summer1984]: 193–218, and Marsha Pripstein Posusney and Michele Penner Angrist, eds., Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Regimes and Resistance, 2005) became dominant in literature about power in the Middle East. It is the very definition of what is “political” that led adherents of Arab exceptionalism to overlook the simmering resistance in countries that later witnessed the Arab uprisings.

The Power and the People by Charles Tripp provides some answers that explain why the signs of revolution were there if only one were to acknowledge their importance. The book began life well before the Arab revolutions, inspired by classes that the author taught at the University of London, and which brought together many Middle Eastern students from a variety of backgrounds who testified to the existence of resistant political movements and activities in their countries of origin, despite appearances pointing to the contrary. As such, this is not a book that was written in reaction to the 2011 uprisings but a longer-term project that attempts to reclaim the notion of the “political” and to illustrate that resistance exists even under the most draconian of authoritarian regimes. Thus, the book belongs to a new wave in political science writings on the Middle East that acknowledges the political in “soft” venues like civil society and the media (e.g., see Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo, 1995 and Marc Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today, 2006). Tripp shows that political resistance can manifest itself in forms as diverse as the body, historical narratives, and art.

A key strength of the book is that its arguments are as much historical as they are conceptual. In its presentation of the history of Middle East forms of power and resistance, it draws on a rich collection of examples from across the region, from the days of colonialism to the present, to illustrate the productive nature of power. The author writes in his introductory blurb that he seeks to show “how common experiences of violence and repression create new collective identities” (n.p.). Indeed, the book vividly illustrates how the fight against the status quo has shaped and reshaped identities in the region for decades, leading to the present time when the Arab uprisings represented a peak in popular resistance, followed by a period of more upheaval during which collective identities have continued to be shaped. In shedding light on power as productive, the book’s conceptual framing of power is of a continuous, multifaceted dynamic between authoritarian regimes and people.

To illustrate this dynamic, Tripp presents his argument through six sections, each one dedicated to a distinct path of resistance. The book starts with perhaps the most visible paths before addressing more oblique ones. Thus, in the first section, “State Capture and Violent Resistance,” the author draws a parallel between the violence of the state and that of the people as two competing methods of exercising or reclaiming power. The second section is entitled “Contested Public Space: Resistance as the Denial of Authority.” Here, the author draws on the rich literature on nonviolent resistance to argue that resistance is not only about reclaiming public space by being active in that space but also about simply being present in that public space. As Tripp writes, “the very existence of an assembly that is unauthorized, even forbidden by the state authorities, asserts the citizens’ right to be there and to act as they, not the government, see fit” (p. 74). In this, he is aligned with the writings of Asef Bayat on the politics of presence in his 2010 book Life as Politic, in which he argues that citizens resist when they use public space in a way that is not sanctioned by the state. In the third section of his book, “Imposition and Resistance in Economic Life,” Tripp turns his attention to the economic dimension of resistance, especially in the contexts of colonialism and global capitalism.

It is in the last three sections that the book veers from a discussion of what can be termed “conventional” paths of resistance in political science discourse to not “unconventional” paths but, rather, to paths that had always existed but that had often been excluded because of the dominant focus on hard politics. In these sections, the author addresses gendered strategies of resistance, the use of historical narratives as a tool of power, and resistance through art, whether physical or digital. Together, these three sections reveal the richness of the experience of resistance in the Middle East. The last section on art, in particular, illustrated with images of the work of artists in different mediums (photography, posters, installations, paintings), is poignant in its affirmation of the importance of the use of symbolism in resistance—symbolism that, of course, came to the fore during the popular protests of 2011, when all forms of resistant art flooded public as well as digital space in the region.

The Power and the People succeeds in its mission to demonstrate that power, whether through authoritarianism or resistance, is a process, and that the practices enforced by the authoritarian state throughout the modern history of the Middle East meant that resistance has followed “the lines that the state itself established. Categories . . . used to reinforce obedience . . . were at the same time to become the basis for alternative readings, subversive of the existing order” (p. 311). As such, regardless of where the Middle East currently stands, Tripp’s book is a reminder that resistance is a continuum and that power is always in flux, even if authoritarianism appears to have made a comeback.