Lived citizenship and the Arab Uprisings: everyday politics, mobilization and belonging

Published: 2025
Citizenship Studies, 28(6), 565–594
ISBN/ISSN: 1469-3593

Abstract

Instances of popular mobilization are often analyzed through their most prominent repertoires and demands. However, protest waves encompass diverse aspirations, modalities, temporalities, and emotional intensities, reflecting varied lived experiences. The complex interplay between mobilization, everyday politics, and local struggles often remains underexplored. This article deploys lived citizenship as a device for capturing the differentiated social locations, relations, practices and emotions that mediate subject relations with the state in episodes of mass mobilization. Focusing on the Arab uprisings, it offers a novel and comprehensive reading of the literature from the perspective of citizenship and everyday lived realities. In approaching the uprisings as lived and performed in the squares, on the margins, in mass demonstrations, violent reprisals, resource reclamation and everyday encroachment, it brings to the fore the myriad practices of citizenship enacted in the course of the uprisings and their aftermath. In surveying the literature, it highlights the innovative ways in which the contributions to this special issue engage with notions of lived citizenship in the context of the uprisings, examining its connections to questions around subjectivation, infrastructure, grabbing back, brokerage of care, and practices of voice, exit and loyalty.