Benoît Challand is Associate Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York. He has published widely on civil society in the Middle East, including Palestinian Civil Society: Foreign Donors and the Power to Promote and Exclude (2009), The Arab Uprisings and Foreign Assistance (co-edited with F. Bicchi and S. Heydemann, 2016), and Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory and Identity (co-authored with Chiara Bottici, 2013).

• List of figures; Acknowledgements; Prolegomenon: a two-layered book; Introduction; Part I. The Making of Latent Citizenship: 1. Revisiting the foundations of citizenship: the Colonial era; 2. Post-independence aspirations, security custodianship and latent citizenship; Part II. Informal Revolutionary Practices (2011–2014): 3. The three facets of vis populi: re-articulating active citizenship; 4. Revolutionary crossroads: security reform and the limits of informalism; Part III. Embattled Revolutionary Legacies (2014–2021): 5.Two tales of decentralization; 6. Strong men syndrome and the re-subjectivation of citizenship; Conclusions; Bibliography; Index.

'Empirically rich and theoretically compelling, Challand's book has much to tell us about how informality generates formal political change, collective imaginaries and “latent citizenship”, and how violence, creatively understood, responds to the shackles of what can appear to be an unshakable reality. A splendid work that communicates with theory from the Global South and helps us rethink democratic theory based on the Arab uprisings.' Mohammed Bamyeh, University of Pittsburgh