Asef Bayat

Asef Bayat, born in Iran in 1954 and professor of Sociology and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lived through the Iranian revolution of 1979 and devoted his work to understanding how ordinary people, without unions, parties or formal movements, transform the cities of the Global South. He taught for years at the American University in Cairo and directed the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in Leiden.

His central concept is the quiet encroachment of the ordinary: the urban poor occupy land, tap into the power grid, sell on the pavement and build their houses bit by bit, not as protest but as a way of living, and those dispersed practices, added up, change the city more than many demonstrations. He formulated it in Street Politics (1997), on popular movements in Tehran, and generalised it in Life as Politics (2010) with the idea of social nonmovements: collective actions by non-collective actors.

Revolution without Revolutionaries (2017) compares the Arab Spring with the revolutions of the 1970s and argues that the neoliberal era produced revolts without a project of transformation, and Revolutionary Life (2021) looks at what changed in everyday life in Egypt and Tunisia. His notion of the street as political space, the political street, is one of the most cited contributions to urban studies of the Global South and to the debate on informality.

To explain how people who do not organise nonetheless act together, Bayat proposed the idea of passive networks: instant communication among isolated individuals who recognise themselves in the same situation without having agreed anything. The street vendors on one street do not form a union, but when the police arrive they react at once, because each knows what the others are doing. That coordination without organisation explains why the practices of the urban poor resist both repression and regulation so stubbornly.