Utopianism In The Middle East And North Africa
Download Utopianism In The Middle East And North Africa PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Utopianism In The Middle East And North Africa book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Utopianism in the Middle East and North Africa
Author: Thomas Pierret
language: en
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Release Date: 2025-03-31
This is the first systematic exploration of the diversity of utopian thought and practice in the modern Middle East and North Africa. Beyond intellectual debates, utopianism has infused the many ideologies that have shaped contentious politics and governance in the region, from state formation to revolutionary transformations, conflicts, and the recent authoritarian resurgence. Drawing on case studies from Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, contributors address a broad array of utopian visions pertaining to political ideologies such as liberalism, secularism, Islamic revivalism, and socialism, but also to fields of expertise and technologies such as urbanism, the atom, and artificial intelligence. Likewise, they acknowledge the diversity of players that partake in the production of utopias, including writers, ideologues, activists, statesmen, experts, artists, and social media users. Moreover, authors consider both imaginaries promoted by challengers to the incumbents, and visions that serve the consolidation of authoritarianism.
The Quest for Socialist Utopia
In the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s, the Ethiopian student movement emerged from rather innocuous beginnings to become the major opposition force against the imperial regime in Ethiopia, contributing perhaps more than any other factor to the eruption of the 1974 revolution, a revolution that brought about not only the end of the long reign of Emperor Haile Sellassie, but also a dynasty of exceptional longevity. The student movement would be of fundamental importance in the shaping of the future Ethiopia, instrumental in both its political and social development. Bahru Zewde, himself one of the students involved in the uprising, draws on interviews with former student leaders and activists, as well as documentary sources, to describe the steady radicalisation of the movement, characterised particularly after 1965 by annual demonstrations against the regime and culminating in the ascendancy of Marxism-Leninism by the early 1970s. Almost in tandem with the global student movement, the year 1969 marked the climax of student opposition to the imperial regime, both at home and abroad. It was also in that year that students broached what came to be famously known as the "national question", ultimately resulting in the adoption in 1971of the Leninist/Stalinist principle of self-determination up to and including secession. On the eve of the revolution, the student movement abroad split into two rival factions; a split that was ultimately to lead to the liquidation of both and the consolidation of military dictatorship as well as the emergence of the ethno-nationalist agenda as the only viable alternative to the military regime. Bahru Zewde is Emeritus Professor of History at Addis Ababa University and Vice President of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. He has authored many books and articles, notably A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1974 and Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century. Finalist for the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize to the author of the best book on East African Studies, 2015. Ethiopia: Addis Ababa University Press (paperback)
Utopia
Our world is mired in chaos, disorder, and endless conflict. We have depleted the planet's natural resources to a point of scarcity. Wars now threaten to erupt over the dwindling remaining natural resources: fossil fuel, water, arable land, and rare-earth minerals. We have used the fear of mutual assured annihilation by destructive weapons to achieve a tenuous and shaky peace in the world. Our financial institutions are imploding as nations sink beneath oceans of debt. It is becoming clear that the entire model human civilization was built upon is flawed and destined to soon unravel. Our past is plain, the present is ambiguous, and our future remains uncertain. Sooner, or later, we're going to have to confront the very challenges that now threaten our survival on this planet. The clock is ticking, and we are running out of time to avert disaster. This is the second book in the Sparkle Series.