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. Euben analyzes some of the most conspicuous yet least studied Arabic expressions of humiliation, drawing on sources ranging from Qur?anic commentary by Islamists to videos, poetry, songs, and tweets from the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Driven to Their Knees reveals what the language of humiliation says—and also how it works. This groundbreaking book shows how humiliation expresses the imposition of impotence by