Review of Bayat's Street Politics (1997)

Reviewed Work(s): Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran. By Asef Bayat. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

December 14, 2015

In this critical work, Asef Bayat argues that Iran's urban poor, being structurally disempowered and simultaneously caught in a constant struggle in, about, and for urban space, exert their social power in ordinary, surreptitious, unassuming ways in order to secure their own survival. This type of everyday direct action Bayat terms "quiet encroachment" — a concept that he has developed in other writings as well and that now appears to have stuck in the contemporary literature on urbanism and social change. Bayat arrives at these conclusions on the basis of historical analysis, original archival research, surveys, and interviews, and he focuses on the period between 1977 and 1990. The resulting picture is one of Iran's urban poor stretching out across Iran's urban centers, Tehran particularly, through land invasions and squatting or by occupying space in the street in order to maintain their autonomy and to secure a living. In doing so—and without having intended it—Iran's urban poor limited the power of the state and elites while also making concrete, immediate material gains through direct reappropriation. Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran is a provocative and essential text on social change for a number of reasons: first, by revising prevailing understandings of urban social change to elucidate how ordinary, everyday, unassuming actions have real and significant consequences for state power and in creating social change; for identifying how the Latin American model for urban social movements fails to account for the ways in which social change is achieved by the urban poor in many countries of the Middle East and in Iran particularly; and finally, for telling the story of the urban poor in Iran through Iranian voices.

Chapter one introduces the major themes of the text and defines some of the core concepts deployed throughout the book. Street politics as Bayat defines them are "a set of conflicts and the attendant implications between a collective populace and authorities, shaped and expressed episodically in the physical and social space of the streets—from the alleyways to the more visible sidewalks, public parks, or sport places. [...] The term signifies an articulation of discontent by clusters of different social agents without institutions, coherent ideology, or evident leadership" (p. 15). Moral necessity and a lack of alternative mechanisms for social change make the streets an essential site of contestation. Culture and politics play crucial roles in shaping the nature of this contest through their shaping of grassroots action and social networks: "quiet encroachment is largely the feature of undemocratic political systems, as well as of cultures where primordial institutions serve as an alternative to civic associations and social movements" (p. 21). Bayat concludes, "The repressive policy of the state renders individual, quiet, and hidden mobilization a more viable strategy than open, collective protest" (p. 21).

An analysis of the critical characteristics of the new urban poor in Tehran by the late 1970s follows in chapter two. Vulnerability was a defining feature of the poor's collective existence on the eve of the 1979 Iranian revolution (p. 31), the subject chapter three. The author argues that "the urban poor were not revolutionary" (p. 38) but were nonetheless engaged in a parallel and simultaneous struggle in the localities through quiet encroachment. Absent formal community organizations that could pursue the poor's demands with the state, the poor turned in practice to traditional networks (p. 42) and "resorted to quiet direct action in acquiring shelter, setting up collective consumption, acquiring jobs, and consolidating their communities" (p. 57).

Chapter four takes on hotel and home occupations from 1979 to 1981 and the new squatters' movement, which leads into an analysis in chapter five of squatters and the state in the wake of the revolution. Unlike students and other members of "the intellectual class, the disenfranchised cannot afford to be ideological" (p. 75). Migration to Iran's cities after the revolution propelled a trend of increasing urbanization which helped fuel a housing crisis (p. 82) where the newly arrived largely found themselves excluded from formal housing markets (p. 83). When gains of the poor were threatened, government forces met with noisy demonstrations and riots, forcing the government to pursue other tactics including de facto tolerance of squatters (p. 104–108). The din of bulldozers, sent to tear down dwellings that had been built in quiet, was met with commotion and noise — the quiet turned loud and the hidden became visible.

The revolution, having propelled a tremendous crisis in unemployment as shown in chapter six, was met with collective actions by the ordinary urban unemployed to demand "jobs and maintenance" in 1979 (p. 110). When the unemployed movement subsided, street politics "simply shifted from the jobless on the street subsistence workers, notably street vendors" (p. 131) who are the subject of chapter seven. Here Bayat attempts to correct the omission of serious treatments of street vendors from the scholarship on Iran. Chapter eight concludes by considering the prospects for informal politics—specifically, quiet encroachment—and teasing out some of the implications.

Street Politics offers important findings on the significance of ordinary, everyday actions by the Iranian poor to hold the forces of domination at bay—and even to propel their retreat. In so doing, this book provides a qualified optimism about the prospects for the urban poor in the Middle East to produce meaningful social change. One issue that remains unclear, however, is to what extent home and hotel squatting can be said to constitute street politics, specifically, or whether its inclusion is simply necessary to the analysis and context of street politics in Iran. One possibility is that home and hotel squatting inherits a politics of the street because of the actions of the homeless, who—being in the street—tether homes and hotels to it. Clearly, this historical analysis is necessary to this study's elaboration of the manner in which urban subalterns, not being able to sustain this kind of squatting over the long-term, could not help but return to quiet encroachment.

One aspect of this study that I see as particularly valuable is the possible areas of further investigation that it suggests. While much more could and ought to be said about the sonic dimensions of social change and grassroots movements, Street Politics also seems to point the way toward a politics of the door, the stoop, the balcony, and the window—that is, the politics of interstitial spaces that thread open and enclosed space. Through its focus on issues of visibility for the urban poor and the discussion of the ways in which visibility helps activate passive networks, Bayat's investigation demonstrates how the deeply interwoven aspects of visibility/invisibility and audibility/quiet are to the strategies pursued by Iran's urban poor. While quiet encroachment helps call our attention to the importance of sonic dimensions of social change and the social power of the poor, it seems more properly to also be an issue of visibility and hiddenness—hence activity in back alleys, conducting land occupations at night, vendors' ability to disassemble and disappear into the crowd quickly when officials might be approaching. I do think the emphasis on quiet is quite crucial to this analysis and rightly calls our attention to the politics of audibility, but even so, Bayat does not comment upon how the politics of visibility, which appears everywhere tethered to the sonic dimensions of encroachment, works with and in relationship to quiet direct actions—after all, one can hardly imagine that concern about being quiet is not fundamentally about being perceived in all sensorial ways generally. A movement that seeks to evade one sense seems likely to want to evade other human senses as well. I do not view this as a fault of the study per sé since inaudibility is not often considered with regard to movements in the extant scholarship and there does seem to be considerable value in correcting this omission by calling our attention to the issue. Or perhaps it is just that "imperceptible encroachment" fails to work because ultimately the encroachment is perceived. In any case, the complex interplay of different kinds of perceptibility remains to be considered.

Street Politics is a critical work that contributes in substantial ways to our understanding about how quiet, ordinary, non-ideological, everyday actions constitute a movement in the Middle East, particularly Iran. One of the great strengths of this work is in its emphasis on the local as a critical location where oppression and exclusion are experienced and where social change is produced. In the particular case of Iran, Bayat has provided a significant contribution to the field of urbanism and urban sociology that has far-reaching implications for the study of social movements and social change.