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Event

Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman

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Webinar

Join us for an engaging book talk with Dr. Alice Wilson, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sussex, as she discusses her latest work, Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman. In this groundbreaking study, Dr. Wilson explores how revolutionary values and networks persist even after official suppression, focusing on the Dhufar Revolution in Oman. She delves into the “social afterlives” of these movements, examining how former militants utilize kinship and daily interactions to maintain egalitarian ideals and commemorate their revolutionary pasts in unofficial ways. This event offers a unique opportunity to gain insights into the enduring impact of revolutionary movements and the ways in which their legacies continue to shape societies.

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Speakers

  • Alice Wilson is a social anthropologist, with research interests in the political and economic anthropology of the Southwest Asia and North Africa. Her work is concerned with transformations in the relationship between governing authorities and governed subjects, especially in contexts of revolution and liberation movements. She is and Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of Sussex, UK. Her first monograph, Sovereignty in Exile: a Saharan liberation movement governs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), examines sovereignty through the case of the government-in-exile of Western Sahara’s liberation movement. Through a study of revolutionary social change, legal reform, democratization, and economic entwinements of aid and informal trade, Sovereignty in Exile explores insights into state power brought to light by the changing significance of tribes amongst Western Sahara’s refugees. Sovereignty in Exile won Honorable Mention in the 2017 American Anthropological Association Middle East Section Book Award. Her second book, Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in southern Oman (Stanford 2023) focuses on legacies of the former liberation movement in Dhufar, southern Oman. The book examines how kinship practices, everyday socialising and the unofficial commemoration of some former revolutionaries generate ongoing social legacies and afterlives of Dhufar’s revolution. These afterlives invite a rethinking of revolution, counterinsurgency, and conventional postwar histories.

  • Omar Al-Shehabi was a visiting associate professor at the Sociology Department at the University of British Columbia from 2020 to 2022, before joining the University of Leeds. Before that, he was Associate Professor in Political Economy at GUST University and the Founding Director of the Gulf Centre for Development Policies in Kuwait. He also had work stints at the IMF, the World Bank, and McKinsey & Co. He obtained his DPhil in Economics from Pembroke College, Oxford, where I also completed an MPhil in Economics and a BA Hons in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He is currently on the editorial board of International Studies Review, Contemporary Arab Affairs, and Al-Mustaqbal Al-Arabi. He is also a founding editor of the book series Radical Histories of the Middle East by OneWorld publishers.