In the decade preceding World War I, Henri Bergson was arguably the most popular and controversial philosopher in Western Europe and North America. The New York-based news monthly Current Opinion reported on the “Bergson Boom” in May 1914, describing how Parisian society ladies commissioned specially designed gowns in case the College of France professor accepted their dinner invitations (Current Opinion 56 [1914]: 371–72). Students, tourists, and dilettantes arrived early for Bergson's lectures, often by interrupting preceding classes, and several of the aforementioned society ladies allegedly sent their coachmen in advance to secure a coveted seat. The thrill of listening to the metaphysician in person likely compensated for his obfuscating writing style, but today the Bergson boom is mostly of interest only to intellectual historians. Concepts and theories tend to travel in waves, sometimes resurfacing under different guises, other times disappearing altogether.

As in other fields, scholarship on the Middle East is currently experiencing its own boom, this time focused around the phrase “power and resistance.” There are nearly three hundred English citations found in Google Scholar with the term in the title alone, and one hundred of them have been published in the past four years. A full-text search of “power and resistance” along with “Middle East” pulls up 1630 citations, with six hundred published since 2011. (Very few of these pertain to electrical engineering.)

In Arshin Adib-Moghaddam's book, the term is not just fodder for an academic subtitle, but the centerpiece of an attempt to construct “a truly comparative and critical theory of contemporary power and resistance” (p. 147). At one level, On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution expands and recombines the eclectic essays contained in Adib-Moghaddam's four earlier books. He excels in subjecting well-worn concepts from international relations, postcolonial studies, and political science to a vigorous theoretical scrubbing. Chapter 3 nicely discusses how assessments of the effectiveness of violent and nonviolent mobilization strategies have changed over the 20th century. Chapter 6 makes the astute point that the 1979 Iranian revolution, while achieving political independence, gave rise to a new sort of a dependency wherein nearly every political claim about Iran—made by those either in the Iranian state or society—hinges on “invented images of the United States” (p. 169). The text is elliptical enough that one never is sure what or who is coming on the next page, but Adib-Moghaddam clearly revels in overturning shibboleths. He takes a lot of swings, including at Max Weber, Georg Hegel, Slavoj Žižek, and Edward Said, but the author is no more pugilistic or pellucid than the typical critical theorist writing today.

At another level, however, this collection goes beyond criticism to intersperse a single claim through all the chapters, or as Adib-Moghaddam labels them, interregnums. If we can understand the relationship between power and resistance, we can understand the contemporary Middle East, especially in the post-2011 era. As a result, “the conventional study books about the region have to be rewritten” (p. 4).

Adib-Moghaddam's argument is as follows. Notions of power as completely encompassing or dominating, such as Said's vision of an Orientalist gaze, are getting ontology wrong. They are also getting Michel Foucault wrong, as this book's many pages written in his defense amply document. People innately engage in resistance to dominating and unjustly perceived forms of power (p. 22). There is such a thing as human agency, even though it is always bound in and responding to existing structures of domination (pp. 112, 138). To wit, “Power and resistance are everywhere” (p. 82). In highlighting this “latent subliminal resistance drive” (p. 98), whereby disparities between organized or individual oppositions do not rule out a commonly shared purpose of improving human livelihoods, Adib-Moghaddam unintentionally echoes Vivek Chibber's heated rebuke of subaltern studies (Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital [London: Verso, 2013], Chaps. 7–8).

I agree, but I also wonder who, other than sparring critical theorists, would disagree. The power and resistance boom in Middle East studies ensures that most students agree as well, since this is the main finding of the entire genre. To be clear, the problem is not with the identification of a dialectic between structure and agency. This is not just a Foucauldian discovery but one shared throughout much contemporary social theory. Jack Barbalet argued the same with a critique of Weber, in a 1985 British Journal of Sociology article entitled “Power and Resistance” (British Journal of Sociology 36 [1985]: 531–48). The problem is that, by itself, this theoretical turn flattens out historical social change instead of explaining it. Adib-Moghaddam is at pains to stress the “empirical” foundations of his arguments throughout (pp. 11, 86, 102, 116, 150) but descriptive renditions of episodic contention—whether in 1979 or 2011—can only draw attention to the basic truism that social resistance exists. Given the wide variation in the denouement of the Arab uprisings, this affirmation alone is not sufficient for teasing out a historical or comparative patterning of events. Without a theory to explain transformation of social structures by collective social action, and why it occurs at particular places and times but not elsewhere, the passionate tale of power and resistance in Middle East studies relies on a tacit functionalism which, against its own protestations, is ahistorical in effect.

Perhaps the power and resistance boom, like the Bergson boom, is an intellectual bubble. We have richly benefited from the ruthless criticism of all preexisting theory spouted forth with the cresting of its wave. Nevertheless, if works such as Adib-Moghaddam's are indeed an interregnum—an interval between the reigns—this also implies that a different theoretical and conceptual framework is needed which can reinsert new dimensions into our flattened image of the region and the world.