The period following Hosni Mubarak’s resignation can be analysed as a ‘revolutionary situation’ without a ‘revolutionary outcome’ (Ch.Tilly) or as a ‘failed transition’ (Nathan Brown) during which several actors were in competition for power and for defining new rules for the political game (A.Boutaleb, S. BenNefissa). My paper aims to provide a new theoretical framework in order to analyse this struggle for power through the lens of legitimacy. Though, rather than analysing the narratives of each actors I intend to focus on modes of legitimation as praxis. Indeed, while the 2011 uprising can be defined as a ‘crisis of legitimation’ (M.Camau), the transition that followed can be analysed as a process of legitimation. My paper based on my doctoral researches (observation’s fieldwork) aims to demonstrate that the institutional process has lost its legitimacy because of competing claims using competing modes of legitimation. It provides a conceptual framework of the use of legitimation by the actors (rulers and challengers) during the transition in order to defend their claims over power. It shows that such a competition for legitimacy was witnessed in each decisive moment of the transition (when the ruling coalition may change). The lack of consensus around the institutional process set up by the army fostered the actors to advance competing claims for which they used various modes of legitimation. In this struggle indeed, competitors have been prone to legitimating their own claims through revolutionary mobilisation, electoral conquest, judicial verdicts or constitutional materials. What makes this process specific is the ‘political crisis’ (M.Dobry) and the lack of hierarchy between those modes of legitimation (in ‘normal’ times, the electoral process should take precedence over the popular mobilisation). Moreover, each mode of legitimation is not exclusively used by certain actors insofar as they all tried to handle various modes of legitimation. Eventually, the electoral process which has been widely considered as fair and free did not succeed in bringing to power a legitimated ruler. On the contrary, the military coup has been supported by a wide range of the political spectrum as well as by many within the population. In the end, while some scholars favour the thesis of a ‘counter revolution’, my research shows that the coup was the result of a process of legitimation in which the revolutionary legitimation prevailed over the electoral legitimation.

Much ink has been spilled on the successes and failures of political movements during the Arab Spring. Amongst a milieu of other factors, the literature has spoken to the role of political leaders, albeit in non-systematic ways. Using strategies from political psychology literature, we investigate how different personality types and leadership styles contributed to the structural posturing of the government following the Egyptian uprising in 2011. We first map the internal stakeholders of the regime (military, political, and civil) through expert surveys. Noting the accessibility problems to many political leaders, we elect to use content analysis derived from public proclamations by elites. Using the Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA) scheme in the Profiler Plus software, we analyze the stakeholders’ rhetoric across five critical political junctures between 2011-2014. Between these time periods, we observe three elections and two referendums that were deemed polarizing in the revolutionary context. We hypothesize that leadership traits had an impact on coalition building behavior amongst elites. This approach can provide an avenue to examine leadership behavior and contribute to the growing literature on elite decision-making in transitionary political environments. We conclude that there is a flourishing transnational research agenda investigating how individual personalities, which are amplified during times of crisis, contribute to the structure of post-revolutionary governments.

Scholars of Egypt commonly acknowledge that new forms of political and economic activism in the decade before 2011 laid the groundwork for the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. New modes of political cooperation between Muslim Brothers and non-Islamist politicians in the anti-Mubarak Kifaya movement (Albrecht, 2013) and record levels of labor protest (Beinin, 2012) have won significant analytical attention. Other scholars have examined how social media and informal networks encouraged youth involvement in the 2011 protests (Sika, 2017). This paper examines a third form of activism that emerged in this period -– organizing against sexual harassment and assault of women in streets, on public transit, and in protests - including the 2008 publication of the first national study of sexual harassment by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR) and the 2010 founding of HarassMap, the first youth anti-harassment initiative. Examining anti-harassment activism offers an important corrective to existing scholarship on this period, which with some exceptions (Duboc, 2013) largely focuses on male activism, even in labor struggles where women’s role was central (Hafez, 2019). While Kifaya’s ability to mount large anti-Mubarak protests is well-documented, the best-attended Kifaya “protest” was a vigil condemning police sexual assault of women protesters (Mahdi, 2010), which led to the creation of “The Street is Ours,” an anti-harassment group of secular and Islamist women activists. Youth blogging has been credited with attracting followers to Kifaya and making torture a key political issue, but prominent pre-revolution blogger Alaa Abdelfattah notes that as many as 70% of Egypt’s first generation of bloggers were women (Otterman, 2007), and discussions of how to fight sexual harassment helped bloggers create feminist networks (Pahwa, 2016). Documenting this pre-2011 activism also helps to explain the dramatic expansion of post-Mubarak anti-harassment work and successes, including 2014 penal code changes toughening penalties for harassment and notable changes in media discussions of harassment (Langohr, 2015). The paper employs interviews with activists including Nihad Abul Qumsan, then-head of the ECWR; an editor of Kelmitna, a youth magazine which initiated university anti-harassment campaigns; the founders of HarassMap; and a member of “The Street is Ours.” It also examines TV coverage of harassment, including the first-known discussion of the common phenomenon of harassment in crowded shopping areas during ‘Eids (2006) and interviews with the first woman to win a jail sentence for her harasser (2008), as well as analysis of how women bloggers worked to end harassment.