Euben’s Driven to Their Knees offers a timely and fresh perspective on humiliation, not merely as an emotion but as a political tool driving conflict across ideologies and cultures. Using evidence from contemporary historical conflicts and texts, Euben argues that the “conceptual vacuity” of humiliation makes it a dangerously effective rhetorical weapon, one central to political disputes from Washington to Gaza.
The book begins by examining how leaders across diverse political and religious spectra frame defeat as symbolic “emasculation” and victory as an assertion of “virility.” Euben defines humiliation as distinct from shame and introduces the “scaffolding” framework to analyze its expression in language. In chapter 2, the text shifts to Islamist discourse, focusing on figures like Sayyid Qutb, Hasan al-Banna, and Osama bin Laden. Euben shows how they transformed humiliation from “divine punishment” into a call to action against Western civilization, with powerlessness often framed as “unmanning.”
This theme of “unmanning” is central to chapter 3, which analyzes ISIS’s executions—such as those of James Foley and Steven Sotloff—as “spectacles of sovereignty” and “performative violence.” According to Euben, these videos were designed to enact “retaliatory humiliation” and “symbolically emasculate” Americans by inscribing “powerlessness” onto the victims’ bodies.
Chapter 4 turns to Egypt under Hosni Mubarak and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, examining how the regime used paternalistic rhetoric to infantilize Egyptians and, in-turn, to justify its rule through control and discipline. In Egypt, however, humiliation provoked a politics of “refusal and resistance,” demonstrating that the cycle of violence is not inevitable. The conclusion synthesizes the book’s thesis, arguing that humiliation and dignity are not opposites but mutually constitutive.
Euben writes for a diverse audience, including academics, lawmakers, and civil society leaders. The book’s strength is its theorizing of humiliation as a distinct rhetorical and political device, supported by a diverse archive of English and Arabic texts. Since the book is rooted in qualitative rhetoric, it lacks the large-scale empirical data favored by some social scientists.
Driven to Their Knees is an important contribution to understanding the deeper psychological and political roots of contemporary conflicts between Western civilization and the Islamic world.
Craig Considine is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Rice University. He is the author of eight books and a forthcoming ninth book, When Marx Meets Islam: Navigating Radical Ideologies in Defense of the West (Pitchstone Publishing, 2026).
