On 28 January 2011 the Egyptian army was deployed onto Cairo's streets following days of escalating protests. Upon entering Midan al-Tahrir, a column of newly arriving army tanks and APCs was attacked by protestors. Throwing stones and dousing the vehicles in petrol before setting them alight, protestors pulled soldiers out of their vehicles and beat them; seizing ammunition and supplies, protestors would even commandeer a tank. Minutes later those same protestors were chanting pro-army slogans, posing for photographs with soldiers and sharing food. How protestors respond to the deployment of security forces assumed loyal to a regime determined to end protest is often summed-up in the dyad of 'fight or flight'. In this paper, I consider a third option: fraternization. Through a social interactionist lens, I explore the prevalence of pro-army chants, graffiti, the mounting of military vehicles, physical embraces, sleeping in tank tracks and posing for photographs with soldiers in and around Midan al-Tahrir during the 25th January Egyptian Revolution. Drawing on the revisionist contentious politics literature, as well as micro-sociologies of violence and ritual, I suggest that protestors improvised contentious performances that made immediate, situational claims on the loyalty of regime troops. From initial techniques of micro-conflict avoidance, fraternizing protestors and their micro-interactions with soldiers forged a precarious 'internal frontier' that bifurcated governance from sovereignty through the performance of the army and the people as one hand in opposition to the Mubarak regime.

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.

In the study of social protest, mobilization and contestation in the MENA, historians focusing on social change, the economy, state formation and imperialism convincingly rejected (decades ago) Orientalist exceptionalism and cultural essentialism (Abrahamian 1982; Baer 1969; Batatu 1978; Beinin and Lockman 1987; Halliday 1974; Hanna; Quataert 1993; Raymond 1973; Tucker 1985). Conventional social movements theory (McAdam et al 1996) has also been appropriated to reject (neo)Orientalist accounts of Islamic activism in the region (Wiktorowicz 2004). More recently, however, cultural historians and those influenced by revisionist social movements theory (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001) have done much to refute the sometime objectivism, rationalism, materialism and determinism of conventional SMT and historical sociology alike (Abu-Lughod 1990, 1998; Afary 1996; Beinin and Vairel 2011; Clancy-Smith 1994; Cronin 2008; Johnson 2001; Khalili 2007; Lockman 1994a, 1994b; Paidar 1995; Provence 2005; Thompson 2000). Revisionism stresses social constructionism and the role of (re)interpretation in contentious politics – against the hydraulics of modernization or capitalism on the one hand, or the objectivism and rationalism of conventional SMT on the other. This paper, drawing mainly on examples of political contention in the recent uprisings, aims to interrogate the new constructionism, accepting much of its critique of older approaches, embracing its strengths, while arguing that its key weakness lies in its dissolution of material domination, structural forms, and historical context. The paper argues that the remedy lies not in a return to the old, but in a reformulated notion of hegemonic contestation – where hegemony refers to historically-situated, always contested and unfinished, and multi-scalar attempts to unite material domination with projects of moral/religious, political, and intellectual leadership. Hegemonic contestation stems from the very fact that domination is indeed always (re)interpreted – and it is this (re)articulation to which we must attend in order to understand collective action. This paper aims to situate recent protests within this intepretive framework, paying special attention to the importance of the (unruly and border-crossing) political imagination. The paper summarizes the conceptual thrust of a funded book-project on contentious politics and consent in the MENA since the eighteenth century. I have been working on this project on a full-time basis for three out of the last five years using Arabic, French and English sources in archives, libraries and through fieldwork in the UK, the US, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf.

Almost nobody predicted the "Arab Spring." Immediately, however, scholars and other observers sought to domesticate this historical surprise by proposing causes that made the events seem, in retrospect, not quite so surprising. Scholars in social movement studies drew on that field's primary explanatory tools, including mechanisms from the dynamics of contention model that was introduced to the field in the early 2000s. Based on systematic comparison of 19 Arab-majority countries, this paper's research shows that this approach cannot clearly distinguish between the Arab countries that experienced widespread protest in 2011 and the Arab countries that did not. In theoretical terms, this study proposes that dynamics of contention in the Arab Spring cannot be captured by the anodyne concept of "mechanisms," with its mechanical implication that a particular set of inputs generates a particular sets of outcomes on a regular basis. This study presents case studies of micro-level dynamics during the Arab Spring that illustrate the varying ways in which particular mechanisms actually played out.