Driven to Their Knees

How the rhetoric of humiliation defines the powerful and the powerless in modern politics

Humiliation pervades our politics, from images of stripped Palestinian men in Gaza to mocking chants at MAGA rallies. It suffuses pictures and videos, speaks through bodies as well as words, and is expressed by those with too much power as well as by those with too little. In Driven to Their Knees, Roxanne Euben takes readers from conflicts in the Arabic-speaking world to America’s divided public square, advancing a theory of humiliation rooted in the ways people articulate and enact it. She analyzes some of the most conspicuous but least studied Arabic expressions of humiliation, drawing on sources that range from Qurʾānic commentary by Islamists to anonymous tweets during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, videos to poetry, slogans to songs.

Driven to Their Knees reveals what the language of humiliation says—and also how it works. It shows how humiliation expresses the imposition of impotence by those with undeserved power and how it is a matter not just of power but virility. The rhetoric of humiliation defines both the humiliated and the humiliator and issues an urgent call for a remedy in the viscerally charged language of emasculation. For Donald Trump and Usama bin Laden alike, this means driving their enemy to his knees for all to see, and then boasting about it to compound the degradation. But for others, humiliation galvanizes their struggle to “stand erect,” uniting them in a refusal to be bowed low.