Revolution in the Real World

Selbin, Eric

doi:10.4324/9780203206638_chapter_5

Cited by 15 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…In this fight, Turks and their “Muslim Arab brothers” idealized in the image of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood would join together against the alleged ever-lasting and overarching oppression of the ümmet by secular military powers. This was an ideological strategy of narrativization that served the political agenda of IslamicTV through, as Selbin (1997) describes, the rewriting of collective memories to fit the past into the exigencies of the present, thereby justifying and legitimating the current order, or contesting it (p. 126). Furthermore, the ideological narrativization in this interpretation of the coup story not only dissimulated the experience of any social conflict or differences between Turks and Arabs, but also masked the asymmetrical power relations that the Turkish government might have been seeking to establish with Arab states by assigning itself a neo-Ottomanist, imperial position.…”

Section: Empirical Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideology, Polarization, and News Culture: The Secular-Islamist Tension in Turkish Journalism

Aşık

2022

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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What role does political ideology play in the production of news in a contentious cultural context? To address this question, this article investigates how Turkish Islamic conservative journalists produced and circulated representations of two dramatic uprisings in 2013: the Gezi Park protests in Turkey and the military coup in Egypt. I chose these two cases because the Islamic political bias and activism that shaped the production of news about these two events are symptomatic of the way in which Islamism as a political ideology instrumentalizes news making. Based on newsroom ethnography conducted at an Islamic national mainstream television channel in Turkey between 2011 and 2014, the article demonstrates how Islamism shapes the ways in which Islamic conservative journalists interpreted and articulated the two events in the newsroom, and represented them in news coverage. In this context, journalistic practice gains an ideological character when the journalists utilize journalistic representations as strategic instruments to advance the political agenda of Islamic conservatives against secular forces in Turkey. As the polarization between Islamic and secular groups is based on cultural distinctions, I argue that the political ideology determining journalistic practices is defined not only by party affiliations or socioeconomic class positions but also by the common cultural ways of living and thinking of journalists who work and live as members of a sociocultural group. Islamic ideology serves as a social cement that creates bonds among the IslamicTV journalists as a sociocultural group, and a degree of unity and common purpose in their professional practices.

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Section: Empirical Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideology, Polarization, and News Culture: The Secular-Islamist Tension in Turkish Journalism

Aşık

2022

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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“…The main difference between regressive revolution and the previously mentioned social change goals is that endorsement is associated with imagining an alternative system. This imaginative act has been theorized as a central part of revolutionary social change (Merton, 1957;Pettee, 1938;Selbin, 1997), although it is largely absent from work on the psychology of social change. In addition, endorsing regressive revolution as a social change goal should be associated with perceiving that it is difficult or even impossible to increase social value within the current system.…”

Section: Regressive Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“I Have a Dream”: A Typology of Social Change Goals

Sweetman

Leach

Spears

et al. 2013

J. Soc. Polit. Psych.

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To date, there is little in the way of theorizing or empirical work on the imagined endpoint of political action aimed at social change -the type of "dream" those engaged in action are attempting to bring into fruition. We suggest that previous approaches have focused narrowly on one type of social change -amelioration of collective grievances. In contrast, we argue that social change is much richer and imaginative than this narrow focus suggests. In the present article we draw on key constructs in social psychology (e.g., goals, efficacy, legitimacy, identity, social system, and social value) in order to develop a typology of social change goals. In doing so, we explain why people might support one type of social change (e.g., revolution) versus others (e.g., separatism or amelioration). The typology is used to discuss future directions for research and to highlight the implications for psychological (and broader) approaches to social change.

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“… 16 Contingency in sociological writing on revolution assimilates readily to agency, as opposed to structure (see Selbin 1997 on agency in revolution theory; Wickham-Crowley 1997 on structure). Debates over the relative importance of agency and structure in the social sciences have a very long history (for prominent interventions, see Bourdieu 1977, and Giddens 1984).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Trickster in Egypt's January 25th Revolution

Armbrust

2013

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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The term “counter-revolution” evokes a straightforward contestation of political claims in a revolutionary situation. But contestation is not a zero-sum game: this side wins; the other side loses, and power remains the same. A revolutionary situation is unpredictable. New formulations of political claims may emerge in a protracted moment of “liminal crisis”—a kind of political ritual with no master of ceremonies capable of ending it. Indeed, the meaning of the political prize itself might be open to reinterpretation. My paper examines counter-revolution through the lens of Taufiq ‘Ukasha, an Egyptian talk show host and former member of the deposed National Democratic Party. Since the Revolution ‘Ukasha has become increasingly prominent as an unacknowledged spokesman for Egypt's Military Council, which assumed executive powers in the wake of the Mubarak regime's collapse. I argue that ‘Ukasha should not be understood simply as a filul—a remnant of the old regime. He is rather a “trickster,” a creature at home in the betwixt-and-between of open-ended liminality, and as such not an instrument of a socially grounded political power. In an environment in which the usual points of social and political orientation are called into question, the significance of a trickster is that he or she can become an object of emulation, an instrument of “schismogenesis”—the creation of a new social formation. A trickster, as a creature of pure liminality, is particularly prone to generating perverted forms of social knowledge. In ‘Ukasha's case, this new social formation is an unprecedented formulation of Egyptian militarism.

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Revolution in the Real World

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

Ideology, Polarization, and News Culture: The Secular-Islamist Tension in Turkish Journalism

Ideology, Polarization, and News Culture: The Secular-Islamist Tension in Turkish Journalism

“I Have a Dream”: A Typology of Social Change Goals

The Trickster in Egypt's January 25th Revolution

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