ABSTRACT
The Arab Left has been a foundational actor in twentieth-century Arab politics and its history is often written in terms of a ‘rise’ and ‘fall,’ its entanglement in the important moments of the region’s developments, and a sense of missed potential that is indicative of the region’s politics as a whole. This chapter aims to historicise the Arab Left by anchoring it the typologies of its political parties rather than ideologies or other leftist movements. We consider four typologies: the first mass-scale communist and socialist parties in their nationalist phases, followed by the rise of party-states and the deployment of Arab Socialism in the fifties and sixties; the post-1967 New Arab Left took place outside conventional party structures; and finally the Left’s parties sought to reinvent themselves to ensure their participation and survival during the 1990s façade democratisation decade. We conclude with a present-day assessment of efforts to define an Arab left-wing identity.
