Paper long abstract:

The author would like to investigate the impact and role of "things" and assemblies of humans and non-humans during the uprisings or riots like the Egypt Revolution in 2011.The whole branch of political philosophy or political science focus on the agency, notion of freedom, economical issues or technological determinism when social movements are investigated. However, all of these traditional notions indicate either an anthropocentric perspective or dualistic way of thinking and as a result the role of non-human actors is completely displaced from the contemporary social movement analysis. Therefore, an aim of this proposal is to suggest a new way of thinking of uprisings and revolutions in terms of non-human agency, distributive agency and assembly of non-humans. By taking the Schmitt's notion of "state of exception" the author will depict how the relations within the "state" are changing through the relations and attachments to non-human actors during the protests. To achieve this aim the Actor-Network Theory will be incorporated as well as some examples from the New Materialism authors. The final conclusion should shed the light on the new, more processual and symmetrical, ways of defining the revolution, social movement and the state as well.