Alice Wilson - “What happened to the women from the revolution?” Contested inequalities and the retrieval of revolutionary agency in post-war Oman
Lecture abstract
Many revolutionary movements seek to promote egalitarian social change, such as the emancipation of women and other minoritised subjects. Conversely, counterinsurgency campaigns often undermine revolutionary egalitarian projects
via the fostering of (new) inequalities. When a revolution meets with military defeat and repression, what becomes of revolutionary egalitarian values, and indeed of former revolutionaries? In Oman, the military defeat of the anticolonial Dhufar Revolution (1965-1976), renowned for its gender liberation programmes, has led many to ask: “what happened to the women from the revolution?” Ethnographic research in post-war Oman foregrounds both the role of the authoritarian state in
imposing conservative gender norms, and the continuing engagement of some former revolutionary women and men with social, including gendered, egalitarianism. These survivals of revolutionary social values – that constitute lasting legacies or “afterlives of revolution” – retrieve the ongoing significance of revolutionary agency in post-war times, and revise conventional understandings of revolution, counterinsurgency and their aftermaths.
About the lecturer
Alice Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research examines the projects for social change of anticolonial liberation movements in South-west Asia and North Africa, specifically Western Sahara and Oman. She is the author of Afterlives of Revolution:
Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman (Stanford, 2023), and Sovereignty in Exile: a Saharan Liberation Movement Governs (Pennsylvania, 2016, winner of Honorable Mention in the 2017 American Anthropological Association Middle East Section Book Award).