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Montreal (QC): McGill-Queen's University Press ; 2025. Contents Search term < Prev Next > Epilogue States without People If despair is treason, what about hope? At least despair speaks frankly. Hope is treacherous and tricky. Is there any treason uglier than the one committed in the name of a hope you held? Alaa abd El-Fattah and Ahmed Douma, 2014 Everyday States of Defeat We have now reached the epilogue of this book and stop to look back and reflect on its conceptual journey; on how it could have been done otherwise and what criticism we, as the authors, can level at our work and what arguments we can mobilise in response. And, perhaps more importantly, what is to be done and from where could we start to build politics elsewise? The book dealt with the aftermath of defeat. Not a failure, but a defeat. This defeat exacerbated frustration through three salient moments: being a revolt , not a revolution ; a counterrevolution regardless of there being a revolutionary process; and the ascendance of the culture of the right amidst a civil war which caused a multi-latitude displacement across the region and beyond . This motion indicated both an epistemic shift in the understanding of citizen–state relations as well as a phenomenological change in the category of the ‘people’. We identify the culture of the right as a centre of gravity in the processes animating the aftermath of defeat. The culture of the right did not emerge out of nowhere. Equally, it was not the mere revamping of the ideological past informed by fascism and other nationalist ideologies. It is the expression of a global and transnational cultural phenomenon which illuminates the transformation of state–citizen relations in times of disruption. It occurs in the intermingling of offline and online platforms and in the everyday. 1 More ostensibly, for the phenomenological observer, it manifests itself in what are usually considered non-political and apolitical avenues: consumption, fashion, social interaction, recreation, and language. But it also has a material effect and bearing upon politics. And as we argued in the final chapters of the book, it finds momentum in the existential experience of displacement, in its latitudinal reach. The physical dislocation of people is a contemporary exodus in its own way. It moves parallel with the virtual displacement of those who stayed and those who cannot prefigure the nature of their belonging and their relation to the polities they must come to terms with. 2 It is the disorientation that one feels when no longer recognising the place one inhabits as home, and it prefigures a defeat of politics in that displaced people abandon engagement in political matters in favour of questioning who belongs to the nation and who doesn’t. In reference to his own journey as an errant Jew in the aftermath of World War II, Todorov named this dépaysement . From revolt to displacement, we coasted along on a phenomenological ferryboat. We kept the everyday realities of conflict in sight, while the interlocutors in our respective field sites (Israel/Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran) guided us from the shore – and indeed through virtual digital connections. Throughout our analysis, we saw state-making and nation-making – and the nexus of the two – as producing a condition that emptied the notional and imaginal category of the ‘people’ from government and polity, from the state. In a way, we moved from the concern of peoples without a state to the urgency of dealing with states that can do without people . The wake left by our shaky ferryboat reached that of a condition and a concept, states without people . But what exactly do we mean when we say that states no longer need people? Here, we are dealing with matters of language and matters of existence, with epistemological experiments and ontologies. In this, we have argued that what has come to power in the counterrevolutionary period is an assertive notion of the state that does not leave legitimate space, cultural as well as participatory, for the people within its unrestrainable format. In their varying and even conflictual forms, states across the region – and indeed globally – are rejecting an idea of ‘the people’, sustained by pragmatic and discursive measures, as all-inclusive and avant-gardist. No longer do these states see a need to create ambivalence and dissonance between ideology and praxis when it comes to the idea of what constitutes the people, citizenry, and nation. This shift in state theory has happened parallel with a depopulation/repopulation process through displacement, mass migration, and wall-building as well as war-making. Those who leave and those who stay remain disoriented in relation to the emerging polity. Their opposition to the regime in power no longer takes the form of opposition to a form of government and the pursuit of change; it becomes the fight of the estranged (or strangers) against the state. And those who support the state are no longer perceived – and no longer perceive themselves – as citizens but as partisans of the state. In such conditions, there is no meaningful place for the ‘people’ in the making of states. We expect states without people to be a transitory condition towards a redefinition of a new polity, emergent from the depoliticisation process that inhabits civil war. For us, it seems that we are moving beyond the demise of the nation-state. This demise has not given way to unleashed forces of people beyond the nation, but rather it is moving towards the state-nation , as becoming the centre of political life. Yes, the long-awaited discharge of the nation-state comes with the coming of age of the state-nation – not with the announcement of a state without nation, a commonwealth or a multitude of humans or the permanent assembly of the living – as somehow prophetically imagined by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their theoretical iterations of the 2000s. Alain Badiou captured the fluidity of ‘people’ in its relation to the state when writing that ‘the people’ is a political category – that is to say a category defining the polis – which has a positive meaning only with regard to the possible non-existence of the state, either the forbidden state whose creation is desired or the official state whose disappearance is desired. 3 In conceiving ‘states without people’ we had to grapple with a question. We pose this question to ourselves in the hope that others could articulate further or differently. Is the ‘state without people’ just another formulation of the totalitarian state? Is a state that leaves no space for the agency of people in their cultural, political form a reproduction of the already seen (and old) schemata of totalitarianism? Scholars of the Middle East have tackled the totalitarian nature of the state over the past century or so: Syrian Ba’athism, Khomeinism in Iran, and other minor keynotes in Ghaddafism in Libya and Saddamism in Iraq. These accusations often built upon the arguments of scholars in close association with Western governments, who applied the bugbear of totalitarianism to the enemies of the United States and Israel, often claiming they were new Nazis and fascists. The accusations of ‘Nazi’, ‘tyrannical’, or ‘totalitarian’ were more recently waged against Hamas in Gaza and its sponsors in Iran amidst Israel’s escalatory bombing of Palestinians in Gaza and the killing spree in the West Bank. Regardless of the merit of this application (little merit is there to be seen), the use of the term ‘totalitarianism’ was strictly tied to the ideological nature of the state under investigation. There could not be a totalitarian system without there being a concerted ideology, be it secular Arabism in the Ba’ath Party, Islamist republicanism in Iran, or Arab Africanism in Libya. On a more substantial and phenomenological note, the category of ‘totalitarianism’ comes with a denial of the agency of those becoming the object or mere performers of the ideology in place of the leadership. The examples of Nazism and fascism in Germany and Italy, in the historiographical tradition, well illustrate this point. But, as outlined in the work of historians such as Alf Lüdtke and the Alltagsgeschichte school, the everyday is an avenue of agency (either in productive or in destructive ways) in the most ideological and hegemonic conditions. We believe that the category of states without people is a category that captures a different mode of life and politics to those generally conceived under totalitarianism, conscious of the phenomenological and everyday fluidity of life. In this way, the concept of states without people does not preclude the possibility of agency nor does it argue that states are becoming all-powerful in their penetration of the social, cultural, and political fabric. Quite the contrary, states across the Middle East are often, though by no means always, depleted machines of control and repression, expression of a waning sovereignty. The building of walls, separation barriers, checkpoints, fences across borders or in urban areas, as in the case of Baghdad or Damascus, is the expression of the crumbling of the Westphalian nation-state dream, as also argued by Wendy Brown. After years of internal and external conflicts, the pressures of financial and economic obligations make them less than vigorous. They are also very different in their capacity of power projection, their geopolitical standing, their short-term and long-term plans of evolution. What brings them together is the redefinition of the ‘people’ into a category of use, a means without end, through a process that has been under way over the past two decades and at play over longer historical flows connected to the journey of the nation-state. States’ existence is akin to a journey on a cruise ship on a long sea voyage. If a passenger, or a group of passengers, misbehaves or threatens the safety of the vessel or ticket-holding passengers, at the first available dock or wharf the captain or crew will invite them to disembark, and if they resist they will be thrown overboard with no remorse. The ship will move on, to sail again. There is no clear destination, though the preservation of the vessel with its commanding leadership remains the principle to which crew and, unconsciously, the boarding passengers must abide. Perhaps a nautical metaphor is unimportant in times of interplanetary hype. The latter is left for the ultra-rich and their futuristic techno-solutions. The states in the region are more analogous with ships adrift in an ocean of rising waters: not totalitarian states or societies but states without people. So far, we have outlined the scope and meaning of states without people. It is a descriptor, a paradigm of intent for the phenomenological transformation that the region is undergoing as part of a global ecology of disruption. Now, we want to use this epilogue to grab the bull of critique by its two horns: on the left, with prolepsis, to self-reflect on each section and advance criticism while advancing responses to these shortcomings; and on the right horn, to give our own version of Что делать? – what needs to be done ? Words without Ideas The first accusation that can be levelled at our work is that we have concerned ourselves more with words and language than with actual sociological thinking. In brief, we dealt with cosmetic issues. Does it matter whether a popular protest is a revolt or a revolution? Whether intercommunal and societal violence is a civil war or part of identity politics? Does the category of mythological machine have an interpretative power? Or is the culture of the right not a paraphrasing of the déjà vu category of authoritarianism? And, finally, what is there to be added to the multi-latitudinal understanding of displacement when the categories of ‘exile’ and ‘migration’ can provide ample room for reflection? The long-winded response to these worthwhile objections is in the discussions provided in each section of the book. The succinct response is that what we provide builds upon the intimate link between the way we think of the world and the way we see the world. ‘A name is an ontological attribute of the thing being named’, writes Giorgio Agamben in the edited collection Ontologia e politica , adding, ‘not an external label’. 4 In keeping in mind the politics of names and words, which we consistently treat throughout the book, our lines of thought engage in a granular way with the question of what happens to the things of the world because of the existence of names. 5 In situating our thinking across linguistic territories in English, French, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and other idioms, we remained conscious of the gregarious nature of powerful words such as revolution and inqilab , civil war and harb ahliyyah across these political ecologies. We took note of Barad’s warning that ‘languages have been granted too much power’ in the interpretation of social and political phenomena, but we have also been aware that some languages (such as French and English) have been granted more power than others. Ours is a strike at remedying this epistemic injustice by means of a phenomenological positioning of words – and the ideas behind them – in the lifeworld of politics. In this experimentation we have not substituted one word with another. Our intention was to clear the field of words without ideas such as ‘authoritarianism’, ‘Islamist’, ‘democratisation’, and ‘awakening’ when it comes to the so-called Middle East. In their place, we introduced paradigms, words with ideas. What we are ultimately interested in are the ideas and practices behind words, their phenomenology, not their linguistics. We focus our analysis on connections and commonalities, careless of geographical divides between East and West, South and North, though our point of departure was the Middle East as a political laboratory for understanding global political change (see the prologue). This is a step that we hope helped us wash away the ideas of Arab and Muslim exceptionalism and the resilient application of the authoritarian frame as its distinct mode. The use of the culture of the right as an analytical category was critical in representing the way political culture travels and shares commonalities across the world. This is confirmed as we write this epilogue, with a new nadir in the embracing of militaristic, xenophobic, genocidal language and measures in Israel’s war on Gaza and against Palestinians in the West Bank. But it is also widespread across the region. In March 2023, the Tunisian president Kais Saied claimed: There is a criminal arrangement that has been prepared since the beginning of this century to change the demographic composition of Tunisia … there are parties that received huge sums of money after 2011 in order to settle irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Tunisia. This statement was echoed by high-profile cabinet members and the president’s political entourage, broadcast on the news channels, and turned viral on social media. It was a tour de force of anti-Black racism on several fronts. More specifically, the declarations had the imprimatur of the Great Replacement Theory ( grt ), outlined by the French novelist Renaud Camus and popularised by the Israeli Swiss writer Baat Ye’or, that we discussed in chapter 3 . ‘[They] want to make Tunisia an African country’, said Saied, adding, ‘not belonging to the Arab and Islamic nations’. 6 This was the head of an African and Arab state, not a European far-right leader. Saied’s ideological move occurred in the footprint of a broader counterrevolution against the post-2011 political movements, which took place by means of arrests, detentions, and political repression of opposition members and antagonistic social groups. Considering this type of event, categories such as ‘authoritarianism’ do not do justice as analytical tools for the phenomena at play. The complex of political reaction – embodied in muscular repression and promotion of national identity – is part and parcel of a transnational process which is best captured by the paradigm of the culture of the right. Here is another example, this time from the Islamic Republic of Iran: In 2017, ahead of the presidential elections, the then head of one of the largest Islamic endowments and future president of Iran, cleric Ebrahim Raisi, met the rapper Amir Hossein Maghsoudlou, aka Tataloo. In the mind of the cleric’s strategist, it was a move intended to bolster the politician’s image and show that he was in touch and in tune with the life of the youth. The rapper’s motives for such a public association remain inscrutable. His music banned, preaching a syncretic vegan life philosophy, and his public profile very much at odds with the sombre and orthodox outlook of the former head of judiciary Raisi, Tataloo had 4 million followers (named ‘tatalees’) on Instagram. He held the record for livestream participants on the platform and was a global phenomenon on social media. Ahead of the rapper’s endorsement of Raisi’s electoral campaign, he had released a song, ‘Enerji-ye haste-’ (‘Nuclear Energy’), in support of the country’s nuclear programme. The text had strong nationalistic undertones and the music video was filmed on the navy ship Damavand in a political manoeuvring around the jcpoa negotiations. What could be described as an artist’s idiosyncrasy or with the much-repeated metaphor of the paradox of Iranian society is actually an outstanding representation of the inner workings of the culture of the right. Ideas without words were central to the rapper’s public interface. Homeland, justice, tradition were also tactical in the electoral manoeuvring of Iran’s conservative and reactionary groups. Not incidentally, later, Tataloo became the object of a public controversy and was banned from Instagram after he published a post calling for underage girls to join his harem. In a post on his hugely popular account (now banned) he wrote: ‘Girls between 15 to 20 [years] of age who live in Türkiye [where he resides], in the city of Istanbul, can write on direct [private message] to enter the Sultan’s harem.’ In an audio file circulated on Telegram following his ban from Instagram, Tataloo is heard commenting on the controversy. His words are testament to the organic fluidity of the culture of the right: What I discussed was legitimate by the laws of our country and our religion. It is in our religion that you can have four concubines and forty … no … four wives and forty concubines. Also, marriage above the age of nine is allowed in Islam. But I said fifteen to sixteen years of age. Then I said with the consent of the parents, so that there would be no controversy … Why? Because today’s fifteen-year-olds are much more intelligent and, God bless them, more ladylike, and have gained every kind of maturity. They tell me that I am a child abuser. A fifteen-year-old is a child? This is ugly. This is an insult to our teenagers. 7 Is Tataloo a novel type of Islamist, given his endorsement of presumed sharia-mandated underage marriage? What is the rapper’s infatuation with conservative and reactionary clerical authorities? And, vice versa, what value could a conservative cleric – and judge – gain from being associated with a rapper who preaches veganism and new-age spirituality? The answer to these questions cannot be derived from relying on paradoxes and incongruities and less so on the notion of authoritarianism. Instead, what brings together such a divergent political manifestation is the culture of the right, a culture characterised by its lack of content. 8 The Logic of the Gang The logic of the gang is the one animating societies in the Americas in the aftermath of the defeats of popular movements in the 1970s and 1980s. Gangs emerged out of the abandonment of informal, criminal governance in the Meso-American states of El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras or through the forced repatriation (displacement) of US-based individuals to their country of origin, as in the case of ms 13’s spread from Los Angeles to El Salvador. 9 The defeat of popular fronts against reactionary political orders supported by the United States and the socioeconomic range of violence that resulted (gendered, capitalist, political, and cultural) left space for the organisation of local groups aimed at self-defence against perceived others – be it the state, other contending armed and organised groups, foreigners, or internal outsiders. The perceived impossibility of achieving political change, of agency in transforming politico-economic and national structures, turns into the logic of groups of exclusionary mutual help, i.e., groups that support their members in a mutualistic, brotherly way by excluding all those who do not belong to the group. This is quite different from the mutualism of anarchist and socialist groups which are based on inclusivity and openness to the possibilities of the world and life. The logic of the gang works through means that are flexible but with tight organisation, wary of the state and external entities, setting up forms of auto-government (autarchy) and sustenance in the midst of crises, and solidarity and defence against those threatening the autonomy of the mutualistic group. The logic of the gang is exclusionary and reproduces the idea of the enemy as the definer of who belongs to the gang and who is to be fought. From a phenomenological point of view, the logic of the gang develops after the defeat of the logic of the partisan and the fallout of the social and political order. In fact, it maintains the ethos of the partisan group as discussed in chapter 4 , its inclination towards grassroots means of public authority beyond the state – but not necessarily antagonistic to it. But at the same time, it moves towards zones of absolute autonomy from the state order and its economy of capital, violence, and redistribution. The gang, therefore, is a useful paradigm to consider when viewing the horizon of politics and state–citizen relations in states of disruption. The logic of the gang sweeps across the Middle East in the wake of political defeat and hopelessness. In Iraq, criminal organisations have expanded their reach in spectacular ways since the US-led invasion in 2003. Human smuggling and trafficking, the illegal trade of human organs and body parts, a huge spike in the illicit drug economy and the diversion of legal pharmaceutical precursors, sex trafficking, and racketeering provide ample grounds for the rooting and expansion of gangs and criminal syndicates. Citizens, in the absence of viable political mobilisation, incapable of sustaining livelihoods through legal employment, turn to the more lucrative illegal economy managed by various gangs. This economy is an equal employment provider in the context of structural disruption. 10 It gives access to those who would find it hard or impossible to obtain legal employment, and it offers relatively meritocratic opportunities to advance. The gangs, hence, also become the main means of conveying political grievance through what Jenny Pearce defined as ‘violences’. 11 The consolidation of paramilitarism and the expansion of gangsterism become linked to the formal politico-economic networks of support and clientele, within and without Iraq. Libya struggles with a similar scenario with the rise of militia-cum-criminal groups operating in different areas of the country under the patronage of competing geopolitical organisations and their local agents. But Iraq and Libya are not exceptional settings and, with different intensity, the logic of the gangs is a horizon not so distant for more stable countries. In Israel, Jewish gangs operate in squadron-like fashion throughout Israeli and West Bank cities to smash and loot Arab-owned businesses. Their actions diverge from those of Jewish settler groups in that the former cover their faces and adopt urban control tactics typical of street gangs. The Israeli gangs attack Palestinian individuals and communities to assert control over the public space and to eventually take advantage of that control for socio-economic benefit. The creation of Itamar Ben-Gvir’s National Guard as a concession for his support of Netanyahu moves the discussion we advanced in chapters 3 and 4 on the culture of the right to the level of public institutions, a matter further confirmed by the escalation of settler and army violence and calls for ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Gaza since 7 October. Though different in its institutional outlook, Syria’s National Defence Guard, popularly known as shabiha , seems to follow similar statist rationales. Elsewhere, such as in Lebanon, curfews against Syrian refugees were enforced by militias or citizen-led groups, showing forms of grassroots authoritarianism. Unlike American gangs, they do not demand and extort racket money, so far. But they do use their control of public space to position themselves in a superior state vis à vis competitors. Religious faith and social bonds shape their mythologies in formats not unlike those of gangs in other contexts, such as the previously mentioned ms 13 gang which embraces a strong Christian revivalism and devotion to the Virgin Mary. The violence that the logic of the gang perpetrates bolsters a novel citizen–state pact. The state tacitly relies upon gang violence to destroy its enemies when needed. This configuration of power is not unheard of for those acquainted with the history of gangs in the Americas, a step beyond what Michel Foucault termed ‘the useful delinquent’ in his book Discipline and Punish . 12 And in the absence of viable avenues for political transformation among those victimised, it might well be the gang that becomes the mode of politics among them too. The logic of the gang subsumes those spearheading violence. Ours is a line of thought on the processes at play, not an inflexible claim over the direction of the future. So, we will not pursue the case with other examples. But this enables us to highlight how the formation and transformation of state–citizen relations in disruptive conditions may have to deal with the question of human (in)security and violence. Here comes the right horn of the bull: where is hope and what needs to be done? Beyond the Hope of Another Multitude There is a shortage of hope around the world. In the everyday lives of Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, and Afghans, as much as Egyptians and Libyans, hope has become a vain horizon. Vainer when its pursuit is by means of institutional politics and diplomacy. This condition is at the same time consonant with and dissonant from that of the rest of the world. Israelis were ranked fourth in the world for happiness (before the 7 October attacks), which makes one wonder how happiness could flourish when faced with the helplessness of people living in that same land. In Europe and North America, it is the looming climate catastrophe and the inability to take decisive action that has projected political life into a state of helplessness: whatever reforms are put in place for the improvement of our societies and polities, the prospect of ever more acute living conditions on the planet will make such efforts ineffective, eventually meaningless. Concerns over the liveability of the biosphere are not the order of the day for the great majority of people in the Middle East. Basic biological needs connected to personal and community safety, the capacity to procure decent economic resources to sustain oneself and the family, and the pursuit of a future (often through the dream of migration) take precedence. The environment is surely part of this despairing picture, but in the background. More than any other region, the Middle East is experiencing the devastating side effects of global warming. Destabilising water resources exacerbate the fragile ecosystem based, in most areas, on sedentary agriculture and hydrocarbon industries or their by-products. In this scenario the violence of exclusionary politics and predatory economics combine with the environmental violence to which the populace is increasingly subjected. Concerns over the everyday trump the wider horizon of environmental politics. Here, the use of hope can become an instrument ‘to neutralize the legitimate resentment of the dominated’. 13 In chats on the sidelines of fieldwork across the region, we regularly heard statements such as there is nothing for me here to do , I need to leave , I cannot find hope when I wake up , God is the money , there is no God , Hope? Where, here? Confronting such despair makes thinking about theory sound like detachment, a critique, a pastime; books seem like fetishes to mask the blinding darkness emanating from the condition of fellow humans. In this sombre condition, it is easy to fall for the power of mythologies and utopistic imaginaries. After fifteen years of research on/in the region, a great number of our interlocutors – some of whom have become friends – have left the region, or worse. Are we in need of progressive myths to sustain our hopes for a world different from the one we live in? In other words, can we make good use of mythological machines for the purpose of social justice, equity, and political participation? Where are the mythologies of progressive politics to sustain our will to live? Alaa abd El-Fattah and Ahmed Douma write about hope and despair in cognisant terms: ‘If despair is treason, what about hope? At least despair speaks frankly. Hope is treacherous and tricky. Is there any treason uglier than the one committed in the name of a hope you held? … Hope, like despair, is treason. But also, like despair, it’s a normal human weakness. Here in my cell, I wrestle with my dreams and my nightmares, and I don’t know which hurts most. Despair and hope pull at me – but I am never a traitor.’ 14 Or, in the words of the Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous, ‘We are doomed by hope, and come what may, today cannot be the end of history.’ We think that there has been a trend towards projecting our political hopes into mythological thinking. Here we provide some examples of this mode of intellectual hopefulness: Donatella Di Cesare is a philosopher whose work deals with political violence, identity, and the Holocaust. Her work has touched upon themes of contemporary relevance, from a dissertation on Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (his favourable writings on Nazism) to reflections upon the nature of Islamist terrorism and the place of the Holocaust in the present. In a book published in 2014 titled Israele: Terra, ritorno, anarchia (Israel: land, return, anarchy), she envisions the future of the world as shaped by the rethinking of Israel as a paradigm of the state to come. ‘The time has come for that people [Jews]’, she writes, ‘which defines itself for its doctrine of justice, to apply that justice … Israel appears more than ever to be the political laboratory of globalization.’ 15 In her messianic projection of Israel as the state of the future, Di Cesare criticises the Zionist state along Martin Buber’s ideas. But she equally embraces the self-projection of the Zionist state as the ‘start-up nation’, a publicity message that has gained wide resonance across the world through the idea that mandatory military service and Jewish immigration to Israel are the key to the success of entrepreneurship. Di Cesare represents Israel as a place where Herzl’s dreams have become reality: ‘to live in a state like any other, where Judaism [ ebraismo ] is a private affair, and to obtain a new identity, the Israeli, which refutes any Jewish [ ebraico ] specificity’. The return to Zion, instead, should be not an end in itself, in her view, but a new world order inhabited by a Hebrew humanism; Israel as a state where the gherim – the ‘foreign resident’ that in the lexicon we use in chapter 7 we may well call the displaced – can live an open-ended citizenship unlinked to territorial meaning. No one is indigenous in such a world; everyone is migrant, and exile is a perpetual condition. 16 Di Cesare’s pursuit of Israel as becoming the utopia for a world different from the one we live in illuminates the risks of pursuing hope at all costs and where there might be none, a fact all the more blatant – if there was any need for it – in the midst of the military onslaught against Palestinians. To put it differently, can we find this hope by pursuing a mythology that is not embedded in the culture of the right? The eagerness to find positive mythologies (for the left) ends up in an intellectual quagmire. Where is hope then? There is little as we know it. So, we look for ours in the human capacity to generate, or germinate, a new emotional state – an affective reaction – to form a new religion out of the residue of affect and desire that we have. Without the hierarchy of a church, but with its organisational power and its solidarity, such is the power that we need if we want to bypass and move beyond – perhaps even without violent erasure – the current world. Though never formulated as such, there is a mythology of the left. Take Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s groundbreaking book Empire , conceived in the post–Cold War 1990s and published in 2000 just before the world-changing events of 9/11. In the latter pages of that book the two authors report an apocryphal quote from either Hegel, Holderin, or Schelling: ‘The great masses need a material religion of the senses. Not only the great masses but also the philosopher needs it … [W]e must have a new mythology, but this mythology must be at the service of ideas. It must be a mythology of reason.’ 17 They make use of this predicament to envision the world as it comes to be beyond the contemporary. The figure that will inhabit this world in their secularised eschatology is the militant . ‘In the postmodern era, as the figure of the people dissolves’, they conclude, ‘the militant is the one who best expresses the life of the multitude: the agent of biopolitical production and resistance against Empire.’ The authors are eager to say this novel figure, the militant, is not the tired myth of the ‘sad, ascetic agent of the Third International whose soul was deeply permeated by Soviet state reason’, a Jesuit of that age. Instead, the myth to which they address their vision is Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), ‘posing against the misery of power the joy of being’. 18 The founder of the Franciscan Order was an itinerant preacher who lived and praised poverty as a form of life after having been a libertine young man in love with richness and sensual pleasures. After his revelation, he pursued peace and attempted to stop the Fifth Crusade; he was known for his universal love of animal and plant life and was one of the first to compose text in a proto-version of the Italian language in his Canticus Frater Solis (Canticle of Brother Sun), an ode to the environment and Mother Nature. If you need a myth of progressive politics that can establish a transversal and intersectional front, there are few as good as Saint Francis. We feel the emotion of this thought. Hardt and Negri’s mythology for/from the left is powerful. Yet, it is like kicking the ball so far ahead and in a direction where you are not even sure if there is anyone who will run for it. It is a magic football pass to no player. Projecting our hope on the indeterminate or the earthly saint is beautiful, but those in most need of it will not find it relieving, let alone useful. Hope, unlike Bloch’s cosmic understanding of it, is not like uranium or lithium: a good search will not necessarily locate it. 19 All myth merges into the mythological machine. The working of the machine is always beyond human control and its truth unknowable. Hope, like myths, is hard to know. Sometimes we are better left without them. In such instances, protests and confrontation with a violent and unjust world can only take the form of a biological reaction. It becomes an expression of unlivability – of the impossibility of life in the present ruins of the world. Frantz Fanon identified this condition as the ultimate force among the colonised. In 1952, about the Vietnamese resistance against the French occupying army he wrote, ‘It is not because the Indo-Chinese discovered a culture of their own that they revolted. Quite simply this was because it became impossible for them to breathe, in more than one sense of the word.’ 20 Breathing, this is the same breathing as in the Black ghettos of the US; as in France’s banlieues; as for women and men in Iran, Afghanistan, and Egypt; Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories; Syrians, Libyans, and Iraqis across the spaces of refuge; Yemenis under relentless foreign bombardment and siege; the Lebanese amidst the crumbling of their socio-economic lifeworld. This biological condition elapses into a condition of existence upon which we must pause, reflect, and construct our thoughts for the future. It compels us to imagine how a revolt out of biological need could fertilise the seeds of another world. To do so, the most immediate need for people is the care for security, but security beyond the statist mindset and warmongering drivers. We need to humanise security. 21 Humane Security For too long, discussion and thinking about ‘security’ has been left to the right and to proponents and agents of the state, to those claiming the grip on public authority. This has led to a combination of state-led securitisation and grassroots-led securitisation. Yet, security is a matter of everyday life, of care and safety beyond social control. It shapes the experience of people across all walks of society; it influences, directly and indirectly, the making of citizenship, its political trajectories. Not engaging with the question of security means leaving it at the mercy of the ever-lasting push for more (statist) control, more disenfranchisement, more exclusion. There is place for a ‘security from below’ and a thinking about security that is transformative of the idea of state–citizen relations. In the Latin American context, some scholars and practitioners have started undertaking participant action-research as a way forward to rethink and retrain the way of security. What they have found is the increasing capacity of people ‘to think about their security and to define collectively the values and norms that should inform state provision’. 22 This is the principal way, they argue, to foster participatory principles as the basis of the transformation of state and societal practices. The aim is to reduce violence, of the state and of those citizens reproducing statist violence, in the void of judicial and security responses. Amniyat (in Farsi) and amn (in Arabic) are terms, just like securidad humana (in Spanish), that resonate in the everyday lifeworld of people living in the context of war, violence, and displacement. They relate to a shared feeling and desire for safety. They enable constructive dialogue with the practical purpose to ‘search for solutions’, to move the order of things towards an order that is humane and that leaves space for accommodation, arrangement, ambiguity, and sharedness. The experience of communities in Latin America coming out of decades of civil war and imperialist meddling, and state–citizenship conflict, shows its potential for world-making. But what would this human(e) security look like? We are unsure as to whether a response is out there for us to convey. However, it is out of people’s experiences in the ruins left by war and displacement and their everyday insecurities that any thinking of rebuilding and rekindling political life should start. There are some examples, though hard to grasp as paradigms for the time being. In north and east Syria, in the region known as Rojava by Kurdish militants, a system alternative to hierarchical power and patriarchal structures is being experimented with, in dissonance (though not overt antagonism) with capitalism. Here, too, the state is held together by partisans, though they claim to fight for a state beyond the nation-state, rooted in the idea of ‘democratic confederalism’, outlined by Kurdish intellectual and dissident Abdullah Ocalan. With a population of 4.6 million people, the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria stands out for its political project in terms of vision and political culture. But it also exists in a space guaranteed by US imperial support and other regional geostrategic calculations such as Israel’s historical endorsement of Kurdish separatism. 23 This leaves the experiment always at the mercy of dramatic geopolitical shifts, the likes of which have occurred in the past. The pathway ahead will be marked in the sand and rubble of war and repression, but it is generative of possibilities. There is no space or force for grand projects and theories along the historical experiences of the past, nor can the mythologies of past glories build liveable futures. Other than the tiring, hands-on encounters over a more human(e) security, there is no ground for another possible world. So, we should relinquish our hopes for a new or reformed religious sentiment bringing about peace, be it in the form of Saint Francis of our saeculum as suggested by Hardt and Negri or of an Israel as the state-of-the-future as proselytised by liberal-oriented Zionists or an Islamic cosmopolitanism of the contemporary as dreamt by nostalgists of the age of Muslim empires. For once, if there is any hope, it is relinquished from under the rubble of the present ruins in Gaza and beyond whereby the mere testament to living may see it emerge otherwise, liberating us all from shame and guilt and impatient inaction. © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2025. This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons ( cc-by-nc-nd ) licence, thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust, which permits noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction provided the author and McGill-Queen’s University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ . McGill-Queen’s University Press in Montreal is on land which long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous Peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. In Kingston it is situated on the territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek. We acknowledge and thank the diverse Indigenous Peoples whose footsteps have marked these territories on which peoples of the world now gather. Bookshelf ID: NBK613239 Contents < Prev Next > Share Views PubReader Print View Cite this Page Brownlee BJ, Ghiabi M. States without People: Revolt and Defeat in the Middle East [Internet]. Montreal (QC): McGill-Queen's University Press; 2025. Epilogue: States without People. PDF version of this title (4.5M) In this Page Everyday States of Defeat Words without Ideas The Logic of the Gang Beyond the Hope of Another Multitude Humane Security Other titles in this collection Wellcome Trust–Funded Monographs and Book Chapters Recent Activity Clear Turn Off Turn On Epilogue - States without People Epilogue - States without People Your browsing activity is empty. Activity recording is turned off. Turn recording back on See more... 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