The Dhufar revolution in Oman (1965-1976) was the longest running major armed struggle in the history of the Arabian Peninsula, Britain's last classic colonial war in the region, and one of the highlights of the Cold War in the Middle East.Monsoon Revolution retrieves the political, social, and cultural history of that remarkable process. Relying upon a wide range of untapped Arab and British archival and oral sources, it revises the modern history of Oman by revealing the centrality of popular movements in shaping events and outcomes. The ties that bound transnational anti-colonial networks are explored, and Dhufar is revealed to be an ideal vantage point from which to demonstrate the centrality of South-South connections in modern Arab history.

The Dhufar Revolution was fought between 1965–1976, in an attempt to depose Oman's British-backed Sultan and advance social ideals of egalitarianism and gender equality. Dhufar, the southernmost governorate in today's Sultanate, captured global attention for its revolutionaries and their liberation movement's Marxist-inspired social change. But following counterinsurgency victory, Oman's government expunged the revolution from sanctioned historical narratives. Afterlives of Revolution offers a groundbreaking study of the legacies of officially silenced revolutionaries. How do their underlying convictions survive and inspire platforms for progressive politics in the wake of disappointment, defeat, and repression? Alice Wilson considers the "social afterlives" of revolutionary values and networks. Veteran militants have used kinship and daily socializing to reproduce networks of social egalitarianism and commemorate the revolution in unofficial ways. These afterlives revise conventional wartime and postwar histories. They highlight lasting engagement with revolutionary values, the agency of former militants in postwar modernization, and the limitations of government patronage for eliciting conformity. Recognizing that those typically depicted as coopted can still reproduce counterhegemonic values, this book considers a condition all too common across Southwest Asia and North Africa: the experience of defeated revolutionaries living under the authoritarian state they once contested.

What is the effect of revolutions on legal systems? What role do constitutions play in legitimating regimes? How do constitutions and revolutions converge or clash? Taking the Arab Spring as its case study, this book explores the role of law and constitutions during societal upheavals, and critically evaluates the different trajectories they could follow in a revolutionary setting. The book urges a rethinking of major categories in political, legal, and constitutional theory in light of the Arab Spring. The book is a novel and comprehensive examination of the constitutional order that preceded and followed the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Jordan, Algeria, Oman, and Bahrain. It also provides the first thorough discussion of the trials of former regime officials in Egypt and Tunisia. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including an in-depth analysis of recent court rulings in several Arab countries, the book illustrates the contradictory roles of law and constitutions. The book also contrasts the Arab Spring with other revolutionary situations and demonstrates how the Arab Spring provides a laboratory for examining scholarly ideas about revolutions, legitimacy, legality, continuity, popular sovereignty, and constituent power.

The first truly global history of revolutions and revolutionary waves in the modern age, from Atlantic Revolutions to Arab Spring.

British leaders use spies and Special Forces to interfere in the affairs of others discreetly and deniably. Since 1945, MI6 has spread misinformation designed to divide and discredit targets from the Middle East to Eastern Europe and Northern Ireland. It has instigated whispering campaigns and planted false evidence on officials working behind the Iron Curtain, tried to foment revolution in Albania, blown up ships to prevent the passage of refugees to Israel, and secretly funnelled aid to insurgents in Afghanistan and dissidents in Poland. MI6 has launched cultural and economic warfare against Iceland and Czechoslovakia. It has tried to instigate coups in Congo, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere. Through bribery and blackmail, Britain has rigged elections as colonies moved to independence. Britain has fought secret wars in Yemen, Indonesia, and Oman — and discreetly used Special Forces to eliminate enemies from colonial Malaya to Libya during the Arab Spring. This is covert action: a vital, though controversial, tool of statecraft and perhaps the most sensitive of all government activity. If used wisely, it can play an important role in pursuing national interests in a dangerous world. If used poorly, it can cause political scandal — or worse. In Disrupt and Deny, Rory Cormac tells the remarkable true story of Britain's secret scheming against its enemies, as well as its friends; of intrigue and manoeuvring within the darkest corridors of Whitehall, where officials fought to maintain control of this most sensitive and seductive work; and, above all, of Britain's attempt to use smoke and mirrors to mask decline. He reveals hitherto secret operations, the slush funds that paid for them, and the battles in Whitehall that shaped them.

The Arab Radical Left explores the entangled histories of Left-wing trends across the Mashreq and Maghreb regions in the 'Long Sixties'. Based on an analysis of textual and audio-visual materials, it surveys radical Left traditions in the Arab world that took shape between the 1950s and 1970s. The book is divided into three thematic parts that are compiled of case studies utilising a multitude of perspectives in political theory, history, literary studies and sociology. In the first part, the authors study revolutionary circulations of men, representations, and know-how. The second part is devoted to interrogating the multifaceted tensions between local, regional, and global challenges. The final part scrutinises the transformations of political subjectivities and invites reflection on the general shift from a revolutionary configuration of temporality to the closure of time - and the so-called 'Left Melancholy'. The result is a balanced account of Left-wing revolutionaries that provides new insights into the history of the Middle East as well as contemporary radicalisation processes and authoritarian rules.