Colloquium co-organized with CAREP (Centre arabe de recherche et d'études politiques de Paris).
Since the end of the 18th century, if we take into account Volney's trip to Egypt and Syria, the human and social sciences (SHS) in the West have been interested in the Arab world. Different approaches can be defined as either the verification of theoretical hypotheses in the field, or, on the contrary, the formulation of theoretical hypotheses based on fieldwork. Each of these approaches is fraught with risks : on the one hand, to impose other realities on these societies; on the other, to adopt uncritically the discourse of these societies on themselves. These biases have been circumvented by the development of comparative approaches between several societies, including European ones.
The Arab revolutions of 2011 led to a reappraisal of these different approaches, insofar as they did not allow for a prediction of these movements and could not provide an immediate intelligibility of them (Bennani-Chraïbi and Fillieule, 2012).
Moreover, few European researchers have examined the impact of these uprisings on Arab SHS (Catusse, Signoles and Siino, 2015). On the other hand, on the side of the actors involved, the 2011 uprisings brought out analyses rooted in the realities on the ground and gave Arab researchers a voice once again in the production of narratives about their own societies (Bayat, 2021).