Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

Чтение книги онлайн.

      A Sociology of Revolutions and Counterrevolutions

      In December 2010, street demonstrations, labor strikes, and other acts of civil resistance swept through the small North African nation of Tunisia. The demonstrators met strong resistance from the Tunisian government. Nevertheless, their protests eventually resulted in the overthrow of autocratic president Ben Ali after 23 years in power.

      The trigger for the Tunisian protests was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old street vendor who claimed he had been harassed and humiliated by authorities. Bouazizi died in a burn and trauma center 18 days after setting himself on fire.

      The Tunisian revolution was at the root of the “Arab Spring”—the wave of social unrest and social revolution that Tunisia’s uprising inspired throughout the Middle East. Such events are not only important in themselves; so too are the counterreactions to them by other individuals as well as by larger organizations. Those responses have since undermined the revolutions that occurred during the Arab Spring. In some cases, such as in Egypt, counterreaction by the military led to a return to the kind of autocratic government that was a cause of the protests in the first place. In the Persian Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain), monarchs have suppressed dissidents and thwarted efforts aimed at greater democratization. In the aftermath of the 2011 overthrow of dictator Muammar Qaddafi, Libya (and Yemen) have descended into civil wars, vicious fights for power, and, at least at the moment, large-scale anarchy. In Libya, but more important in Syria and Iraq, a radical Islamic group—the Islamic State (IS, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL], the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS], or Da’ish, from an acronym for a name of the group in Arabic)—swept through large portions of those countries and succeeded, at least for a time, in dismembering them in its effort to form an independent state that spanned much of the Middle East. That new state was envisioned to be a caliphate, dominated by a leader—a caliph—devoted to a strict interpretation of Islam. The success of IS led, in turn, to other counterreactions, both locally (especially by the Kurds and Iranians) and globally (with the United States helping the Iraqi government and Russia aiding the Syrian government), designed to limit IS’s gains, if not to defeat it. Today, IS has been defeated on most fronts and lost much of the territory it once controlled, but it remains a significant threat as a terrorist group.

      By drawing on modern sociology’s 200-year history while looking to the future, sociologists today can find the tools and resources to gain a better understanding of where we have been, where we are, and, perhaps most important, where we are going. Sociology has traditionally tried to understand the place of the individual—even a Tunisian street vendor—within society and society’s effect on the individual. In today’s global age, however, we need to look beyond given individuals and societies to global realities and processes. For example, IS grew in strength through the influx of individual supporters and fighters from other parts of the world, including the United States and Great Britain. To take a more general example of globalization—one that is more directly relevant to most readers of this book—online networks that transcend national boundaries, such as Facebook and Twitter, have forever altered the ways in which we interact with each other as well as the societies that we shape and that shape us. As the world has become increasingly globalized, sociology has developed an increasingly global perspective.

      The Changing Nature of the Social World—and Sociology

      One of the most important lessons you will learn in your study of sociology is that what you think and do as an individual is affected by what is happening in groups, organizations, cultures, societies, and the world. This is especially true of social changes, even those that are global in scope and seem at first glance to be remote from you, such as Mohamed Bouazizi’s public suicide and the revolution throughout much of the Middle East that it helped set in motion. The roots of that dramatic act of protest lay in poverty, high unemployment, an authoritarian government, and political corruption that affected Bouazizi personally. Before his actions, most Tunisians would never have risked their lives to protest against their country’s repressive regime. Yet Bouazizi and tens of thousands of others in countries across the region did just that. While you may or may not be motivated to engage in revolutionary activities, you are continually affected by the social changes taking place around you.