Afterlives of Oman's Dhufar Rebellion

A fascinating new account explores what happens after revolutions are defeated and their memories censored

Note: As many of you by now have heard, the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting, scheduled for Labor Day weekend in Los Angeles, has been thrown into turmoil by an ongoing labor strike by hotel workers. In solidarity with the workers, POMEPS (along with the APSA’s MENA Politics Section) has sadly decided to cancel its annual reception usually held in conjunction with the conference. We will instead host a reception at MESA in Montreal in early November, and hope to see you there.

And now, welcome to another installment in weekly MENA Politics book review essay series!

Alice Wilson, Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman (Stanford University Press, 2023)

A few summers ago I found myself enthralled by Abdel Razzaq Takriti’s Monsoon Revolution, the first fully realized diplomatic, political and social history I had read about Oman’s Dhufar Rebellion. Takriti’s global history of the insurgency and the British-led counterinsurgency put what might seem like the most local of local conflicts into a much broader perspective of the Cold War, British imperial decline, Chinese support for leftist revolutions, transnational connections among revolution-minded students, the connections between the Middle East and Africa, and the distinctive patterns of state formation and social conflict in the Arabian peninsula. And, of course, it went beyond the colonial archives to draw on a rich array of primary and secondary Arabic sources. Monsoon Revolution won’t soon be surpassed (really, you should read it). Alice Wilson’s fascinating new book Afterlives of Revolution (with a foreward by Takriti) doesn’t try. It instead picks up where Takriti left off, exploring what happened to the combatants and civilians caught up in that decade of insurgency after the war ended and Oman moved into an era shaped by oil, development, and the overarching presence of Sultan Qaboos.

Wilson pointedly does not try to recreate Takriti’s global canvas. Instead, she shifts scale down from the global to the local and from the political to the social to explore the longer term effects of an ostensibly defeated insurgency. Through careful ethnographic immersion, she sets out to discover how women, in particular, rebuilt their lives after the end of the rebellion. Her interviews and observations scale back up to offer new interpretations of the legacy of Sultan Qaboos, a reevalution of the winners and losers of the rebellion, a sensitive portrait of Oman’s social fabric amidst decades of change, and a keenly insightful discussion of the organization and conduct of the insurgency itself.

Wilson is interested in how former revolutionaries adapted to their lives in Sultan Qaboos’s Oman after the ending of the rebellion. She doesn’t focus on the question political scientists might expect, whether a revolutionary past makes a person more likely to engage in political activism; with virtually no political activity is allowed in Oman, it would have been dangerous to her interlocutors to even ask such questions. She’s exemplary here in her direct and transparent discussion of the limitations, as she models ethical research under such conditions. Nor can she draw on a vibrant public record of commentary and analysis of the Dhufar Rebellion; such topics are heavily censored in Oman, an enforced silence which is itself central to the story she tells.

Instead, she focuses on social relationships, gender norms, economic status, and the reintegration of at least some revolutionary leaders into the new Omani elite. She is fascinated by the ongoing fraternity, sometimes furtive, between ex-fighters, how they remember their insurgent past and how they communicate those memories despite official censorship. Her topic is the afterlives of revolution, which she defines as “the lasting values, networks, ideas, and legacies that persist, despite political repression.” She sees those afterlives in everday interactions, kinship and marriage practices, and daily socializing more than in official commemorations or political mobilization. As she points out, such conditions are very much what the activists of the 2011 Arab uprisings face after the brutal counterrevolutions, insurgencies, collapsed states and failed transitions.

Her oral histories and historiographical investigations do offer a sharply drawn portrait of the Dhufar insurgency itself, as well as the practice and effects of British-led counterinsurgency. Her conversations with female participants in the rebellion give particularly keen insights into the social transformations which the leftist Dhufar Liberation Front brought to southern Oman, from free education to changing gender norms to a broader ethos of egalitarianism. Those revolutionary ideas often ran hard into the conservative cultural norms still dominant in Dhufar, as they would in the post-insurgency period. She doesn’t romanticize this period — noting, for instance, the Front’s executions of dissidents and perceived traitors — but she follows her interlocutors in their memories and reflections to capture something of the meanings of rebellion. The It is the legacy of those changed norms, practices and identities which she then sets out to trace down the decades following the end of the fighting.

Wilson makes a (to me) provocative case that Qaboos and the British in part defeated the Dhofar Rebellion by adopting a number of its key demands (she’s quite keen to poke holes in the British glorification of a successful counterinsurgency). While she is unsparing in her accounting of the violence of the counterinsurgency, and especially the forced relocation of so many of the area’s residents and the slash and burn devastation of homes, livestock and agricultural fields, she sees as much patronage as coercion in the evolving counterinsurgent response, especially after the official end of the rebellion. She notest that many of the regime’s investments in the Dhufar region tracked closely with the demands made by the insurgency in an earlier era, suggesting more agency and greater accomplishment for the Front than would usually be seen. Many of the former rebels did quite well by the new system upon their return from exile, translating their revolutionary prominence into significant government-funded rewards and prominent business activities.

Afterlives of Revolution turns in the second half of the book to the social legacies of the revolution, with well-written and quite illuminating accounts of marriage choices, kinship patterns, and the veiled persistence of egalitarian norms. Those legacies can at times appear more transient or deeply hidden than she might like; there isn’t a clear linear narrative of social transformation from the rebellion to the contemporary era on offer here, which is fine. Life is messy. One fascinating theme running through the text is her account of racial difference among Omanis, and how it intersects with tribe, status and class; her discussions of social Blackness, histories of slavery, tribal hierarchies and the varied meanings of skin color in the Omani context would fit in well with our ongoing Racial Formations project (more on this soon).

Oman in general, and the Dhufar Rebellion in particular, have tended to be neglected in studies of the Middle East and of the Arabian Peninsula for a variety of reasons. Afterlives of Revolution is a very welcome addition to that literature, illuminating on its own merits and pointing the way towards a wider set of possibilities in the study of frustrated revolutions which should prove quite fruitful for scholars focused on the aftermath of the 2011 failures and frustrations.