Roxanne Euben's Driven to Their Knees: How humiliation shapes modern politics and power

"The language of humiliation remakes the world in which we live," argues Roxanne Euben in her new book Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics.

Political science has produced several studies on how emotions such as disgust, vengeance, rage and anger shape our political beliefs and behaviours. But few have dissected humiliation as a distinct political emotion that shapes action, and yet it is all around us.

"[Our citizens] have lived through one international humiliation after another," US President Donald Trump told the Republican National Convention in 2016.

"Clinton appeared in front of the world threatening to take revenge, but this threat was a pretext for retreat. God has humiliated you, and you withdrew," Osama Bin Laden's 1996 declaration of jihad against the United States reads.

Both men, worlds apart and speaking in different contexts, who share the notion of the centrality of humiliation, both in the sense of receiving and giving it.

They were not alone. After the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called the strike a national humiliation and said that Israel must respond by ruthlessly destroying Gaza.

A few months later, after footage emerged of Israeli soldiers rounding up Palestinian men, who were barefoot and stripped to their underwear, journalist Gideon Levy argued the images of Palestinians driven to their knees were designed to show both their powerlessness and humiliating state.

Euben argues that Arabic discourse on humiliation can offer us the seeds for making sense of it as political behaviour. She points out that several Arabic terms, depending on context, denote different types of humiliation, including being driven into the dirt or earth.

Islamist writers have spent a lot of time writing about humiliation, but they have also produced a lot of images and videos of it. Humiliation is visual as much as it is textual, it is experiential as much as it is rational.

Reading Sayyid Qutb's In the Shade of the Qur'an, Euben finds that Qutb tries to solve the problem of how God allows the enemies of Islam to humiliate Muslims.

Qutb makes a distinction between apparent power and absolute preeminence. At the same time, those he defines as the enemies of Islam might be able to inflict physical punishment on believers, but this is temporal. Their ultimate humiliation lies in wait, and it will be greater than what they were able to inflict.

He argues Muslims should not resign themselves to living in humiliation, and 'the power of unbelievers to humiliate believers reflects the failure of Muslims to live up to the piety exemplified by the earliest generations. God has permitted Muslims to be divided and degraded as punishment for succumbing to arrogance or apathy.'

For an unbeliever, humiliation is both their state and their future; for the believer, it is a transitory state. Humiliation is also an opportunity for Muslims to prove themselves.

What makes the Islamist discourse of humiliation, as we see later in the speeches of Bin Laden or Islamic State videos, essential to study is that Muslims not only should not receive humiliation passively, but that they need to humiliate their enemies back actively.

Indeed, for Bin Laden, humiliation is a key path in the road to victory, but as Euben notes, "Such a promised victory has little to do with conventional military metrics; it lies in any attack that shows the world the sign of a superpower that had long humiliated Muslims on its knees."

Beyond Islamism, Euben's book also explores the notion of humiliation, which has become a central theme in state-society relations in post-2011 Arab Spring Egypt.

The ousting of former President Hosni Mubarak, which was supposed to bring an end to state repression, only saw it rebuilt again, leading many Egyptians to tweet out that they are a nation built on humiliation.

What is interesting is that humiliation has also become a social glue that brings Egyptians together: "Humiliation knits Egyptians together in a shared sense of equality of insignificance," as Euben shows through blog posts and incidents that occurred in Egypt after 2011, which point to the shared nature of humiliation.

Driven to their Knees offers a thoughtful intervention into how to think about the politics of humiliation and the different forms it takes.

She takes seriously not only textual evidence for it but also the importance of visuals and the design of humiliation as a spectacle.

More attention could have been given to how the Arab discourse relates or helps us understand how humiliation functions in the MAGA movement in the US or in Israel. Still, one can draw lessons indirectly as the similarities are not hard to find.

Scholars will pore over this work and try to expand upon it in other contexts, but for the general reader, thinking about the prevalence of humiliation in today's world will also find the book illuminating. 

Usman Butt is a multimedia television researcher, filmmaker and writer based in London who read International Relations and Arabic Language at the University of Westminster and completed a Master of Arts in Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter