What has been the impact of the Arab Spring on Egyptian citizens? How did the uprisings affect ‎their aspirations, their problems and their relationship with the state? The literature on Arab ‎uprisings, particularly in Egypt, explores the causes and dynamics of these uprisings and the roles ‎that different groups (particularly youth, women and workers), political organisations (e.g. the ‎Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis), state institutions (particularly the army) and social media played ‎in them. ‎ What is lacking from these analyses are people’s voices which are crucial for understanding ‘how’ ‎these political changes affected the lives and aspirations of deprived communities. Building on ‎primary data collected in 2006/7 and in 2015, this paper tracks people’s wellbeing perceptions and ‎aspirations in two deprived communities, (1) Manshiet Nasser (one of the largest slum areas in ‎Cairo) and rural villages in Menia (one of the poorest governorates in Upper Egypt) over a nine year ‎period. The paper presents an inter-temporal and intra-case study analyses that examines how the ‎dynamics of wellbeing and aspirations have been affected by political changes in Egypt. Through a ‎wellbeing questionnaire, the paper explores the main elements of a good life that people value, their ‎main areas of deprivation, as well as their (unfulfilled) aspirations and examines the impacts of ‎recent political changes on people’s well-being and aspirations in both settings. ‎ Theoretically, the paper links the literature on wellbeing, aspirations and political change. It ‎explores the role of the state in fulfilling (or frustrating) people's aspirations. By examining the ‎impact of political uprisings on people’s wellbeing and aspirations; the paper fills an existing gap in ‎the literature on human development and political change. This is particularly important, for ‎example because most studies on the Arab Spring have so far mainly focused on the analysis of ‎authoritarianism, democracy, geopolitics and political economy; thus failing to account for the ‎relationship between wellbeing, aspirations and political change which this paper seeks to address.‎ Empirically, this paper draws on two waves of data collection (before and after the recent political ‎changes) to create a grounded and dynamic picture of how individual and communal wellbeing ‎changed over time. The paper is also policy relevant as it examines people's perceptions on the role ‎that the state, donors, and NGOs should/do play in promoting their wellbeing. Understanding these ‎roles is crucial to narrow down the gap between people’s aspirations and state policies; an essential ‎step for political stability.‎

The dominant portrayal of Egypt’s troubled transitional period since the 2011 revolution as a struggle between secularism and Islamism fails to capture what is actually at stake for many Egyptians who do not endorse a secularized conception of religiosity, yet refuse its conflation with the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood. The paper aims at elucidating how the institutional configuration and discursive forms of religious interaction impede transformation of power relations between state and democratic social forces. Why do the revolutionary and secular forces fail to constitute themselves as new brokers to usher in an inclusively democratic political regime? How is the arbitrary division between religion and politics misleadingly conceived? How can civil society organization surpass the binary choice between the conservative religiosity and national sentiments? The paper firstly investigates how the political class has long accentuated a schism between Islamists and secular forces to monopolize the ideological production of “Islam” at critical historical moments, and therefore to maintain hegemonic position over society. Secondly the paper draws a parallel between the position of the radical left in Latin America during the 1960s that polarized societies and led to the establishment of highly repressive “Bureaucratic Authoritarian” regimes on the one hand, and the role of Islamists in Egypt on the other. It will show how the production of ideological “socialist renovation” that offered a new ideational underpinning for the leftist ideology led to the re-emergence of a new version of moderate left since 2006 in Latin America, which, in turn, ushered in a new pluralistic and equitable socio-political order. This analogy would help unpack the role of subjectivity in a polarized context, exposing the importance of emergence of new “post-Islamist” forces to surpass existing political predicament of transition and constitute an inclusive democratic regime. Far from being a self-evident, my fieldwork conducted in Egypt in the period between May 2012-September 2015, including observer participation in some of the protest activities, such as marches, demonstrations and political rallies, as well as in-depth interviews, shows how diverse political forces are deeply interpellated in the perpetual zero-sum game between the nation-state and the Islamic groups. Understanding how the meanings and practices associated with such divisive categorical identities shifted over time would help to contemporaneously position the religious production of the state within wider debates in Egypt about the nature of the modern state and the links between religion and politics that animate modern governance.

Egypt’s local popular committees emerged in response to governance vacuums in urban spaces following the January 25th uprising. While some scholars stressed the unprecedented spontaneous growth of these committees (Bremer 2011), others pointed to their shared patterns of continuity with earlier forms of ‘non-movement’ activism in popular areas (Harders 2013). Notwithstanding the significance of this emerging debate, scholars have unanimously hailed popular committees as a grassroots democratizing force. Yet little comparative empirical work has been done on the actual patterns and evolution of this unique form of activism in revolutionary times, or on its impact on residents. What are the characteristics of popular committees as a form of activism? Specifically, what are their internal structures and claims to legitimacy? What accounts for the strategies they adopted vis a vis state authorities?And, finally, how far have these strategies served to fundamentally restructure urban governance dynamics? Based on original fieldwork conducted in 2013-2014, my comparative analysis of three neighborhoods in Greater Cairo (Ard El Lewa, Imbaba and Omraneya) shows that committees diverged in their ideological framings, internal organizations, relations with political actors and civil society groups, as well as collective forms of action vis a vis state authorities. Contrary to the social movements literature, I propose that a higher degree of informalization is not necessarily positively correlated with the adoption of more radical repertoires. Rather, ideological framings and links to outside actors, particularly the media and political parties, seem to shape committees’ strategies. Additionally, focus group discussions with residents showed skeptical views on the future role of neighborhood committees in local governance. With the exception of youth in the 17-25 age group, residents displayed widespread ambivalence with regards to democratic decentralization reforms. I suggest that among other things, activists’ framings, as well as weak alliances with political parties and social movements explain the committees overall inability to create sustainable momentum for decentralization reforms and participatory urban governance in the post-Mubarak era.

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In the five years since Egypt’s January 25th revolution in 2011, a significant wave of art and literary production related to the revolution has emerged. Hassan Teleb, one of the 70's poets of Egypt, and a founding member of the IDaa'a Poetry Collective of the 1980's, published his _‘Anjiil al-Thawra waQur’aanuhaa_ (GEBO 2011) soon after the first wave of the revolution in the summer of 2011, articulating the revolutionary cry for change, the heady and temporary exultation of the revolution’s success, and the mourning of its terrible cost in lives, even as the problems and unmet demands of demonstrators soon resulted in their return to Tahrir square in the days and months that followed. As a philosophy professor in the Faculty of Arts at Helwan University, Hassan Teleb’s poetic production is deeply rooted in Arabic philosophical and literary traditions, even as his early poetic production as part of the IDaa’a Poetry Collective challenged the values of the Egyptian literary establishment at that time, to be met then by critical disdain and roadblocks to publication. This paper , then, proposes to examine Hassan Teleb’s diwaan _‘Anjiil al-Thawra waQur’aanuhaa_ (GEBO 2011) in the context of the arc of his works (with 15 published poetry collections), his part in the broader developments in contemporary Egyptian poetry, and in the sweep of recent history and the relationship of cultural and literary institutions with the (now changed face of the) regime. In this fashion, this paper will consider how this diwaan reflects not only Hassan Teleb’s encounter with, participation in and reflection on day to day events of the Egyptian revolution of the winter of 2011, but also the pent-up frustrations from thirty years previous, when IDaa’a and ASwaat poetry collectives vied to produce the early diwans of each collectives’ members, marking those poets as voices of their generation, which were suppressed by the literary establishment at that time. Then too, this recent volume can only be understood as the distillation of Hassan Teleb’s philosophical and spiritual perspectives on the revolutionary coming together of Egyptians into an historical wave of change, despite the cultural and religious diversity which subsequent regimes have attempted to exploit to sow division and strife. In this fifth year since the onset of the revolution of 2011, Hassan Teleb has reissued his poetic part in an undaunted revolutionary spirit, hoping to outlast the new waves of repression which confront Egyptians today.