The Affective Dynamics of Mass Protests: Midan Moments and Political Transformation in Egypt and Turkey

This book examines the connection between affects, mobilisation, and political transformation. Offering unique insights into the affective and emotional dynamics of occupied Tahrir and Taksim Squares, this book builds a novel understanding of urban mass protests and their capacity to “travel” across time and space. Its Midān Moment concept breaks new ground in affect and emotion studies with a focus on political transformation in Egypt and Turkey. It is based on empirically grounded research which covers the 2011 and 2013 uprisings and their authoritarian aftermath.

This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in affect and emotion studies in a range of disciplinary areas, including political science, sociology, anthropology, area studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.

Bilgin Ayata is Professor of Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. Her main research interests are migration, borders, affect theory, postcolonial studies, and socio- political transformation. She is the director of the Nomis Research Project “Elastic Borders: Rethinking the Borders of the 21st Century”. Ayata was the DFG Mercator Fellow at the CRC Affective Societies during 2019–2023 at the FU Berlin. From 2015 to 2019, she co-developed and was international collaboration partner of the research project C01 “Political Participation, Emotion and Affect in the Context of Socio-political Transformations” within the CRC Affective Societies. She has published on affective citizenship, belonging, border regimes, displacement, mass protests and genocide denial.

Cilja Harders is Professor of Political Sciences and the director of the Centre for Middle Eastern and North African Politics at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her main research interests cover affect and emotion, transformations of statehood in the Arab World, especially in Egypt, politics from below, and gender relations. Among others, she published with Bilgin Ayata about “Midān Moments”, in Slaby, Jan; von Scheve, Christian (ed.), Affective Societies: Key Concepts (2019). In 2020 she published about “The Politics of the Poor in the Middle East and North Africa. Between Contestation and Accommodation” in the “Routledge Handbook on Citizenship in the MENA Region”.