While structural factors grounded in political and economic institutions and structures are key to understanding the proliferation of protest waves which swept the streets of Egypt for almost a decade culminating in the massive 25 January uprising, as Gramsci (1971) pointed out, objective structural conditions do not necessarily by themselves create successful mobilisation. The process of mobilisation, its dynamics, the forms it takes and the actors involved, therefore, need to be examined in order to understand how potential revolutionary forces were unleashed. Journalistic writings on the Arab uprisings have used ‘breaking the fear barrier’ to refer to the new willingness of ordinary citizens to take to the streets in the face of authoritarian and violent regimes. Unlike this language, which evokes deterministic psychological explanations, this paper proposes a framework based on the notion of ‘normalisation of protest’. In the Egyptian context, I use the term ‘normalisation of protest’ differently to how it is employed in traditional theories of social movements where protest activity becomes normalised when it moves from the margin to the mainstream (Norris 2002, Gamson 1990, Verhulst and Walgrave 2009) and becomes simply ‘another form of conventional political participation in modern democracies’ (Mosely and Moreno 2010). Far from being ‘normal’, participating in protests under Mubarak represented in fact an ‘exceptional’ act of bravery. Moreover, as Egypt had no legal channels for bona fide political participation in the first place, protest was not at all an alternative to institutionalised opposition politics. On the contrary, protest in Egypt was the only form of meaningful opposition. Hence, normalisation of protest in this paper refers to a process of accumulating experience through which protest becomes a lived daily reality to the extent that people involved in the protest as well as those observing them from a (close) distance begin to accept as part of everyday existence. The paper examines factors as disparate as media coverage, poor road networks, heavy police presence and public debate as elements which contributed to the normalisation of protest and the politicization of ordinary citizens eventually unleashing a massive uprising and an undiminished revolutionary process.