Popular protest has formed a significant challenge to the prevalence of the authoritarian regime in Egypt. After weeks of mass protests in late January and early February 2011, skepticism prevails over the potential of people’s power to instigate significant political change in the guise of genuine democracy. With the military establishment taking over power and the protest movement experiencing internal fragmentation, serious doubts remain as to the long-term effects of popular protest. However, mainstream perceptions toward assessing mass protest—as to either triggering systemic transformation (democratization) or the movement’s failure (authoritarian resilience)—dismiss the notion that mass protest can have a significant impact on transformation within authoritarian regimes. This paper inquires into authoritarian regime change beyond democratization. It has three aims; first, I will provide insights into the political sociology of street protest in Egypt during the past decade by briefly discussing the aims, opportunities, and social composition of distinct movements. In reflecting on economic indicators and political events in the second half of 2010, a tipping point in Egyptian politics is identified that saw limited and contained protest turn into a major challenge for the authoritarian incumbents. Profound miscalculations of the degree of the protest as well as the failure of repressive containment strategies help explain the regime’s ineffectiveness to respond to the challenge of people’s power. In a second part of the paper, empirical evidence is provided to explain the military’s take-over in the light of ongoing pressure to allow for political reforms. While the military apparatus has effectively taken over governance procedures as early as of 28 January, the formation of political institutions and a ruling coalition are yet to follow. Third, three scenarios are discussed to link the Egyptian case to comparative historical experience and provide a more general explanation of the potential impact of protest movements for the transformation of authoritarian regimes: 1) the “Turkish scenario” that sees the military’s swift return of governance to a representative party regime; 2) the “Algerian scenario” witnessing the establishment of a military junta rendering civilian political institutions entirely ineffective; and 3) the “Sudanese scenario” that allows the military to widen its support base by integrating a popular movement into the ruling coalition.

On January 25, 2011, tens of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets calling for “Change, Equality, and Social Justice.” Initially, protesters raised both economic and political grievances. Economic demands included an increase in the minimum wage, as well as combating poverty and unemployment. Political demands included an end to the state of emergency, and the removal of the minister of interior. Less than a week later, protesters seemed to have converged on a single demand, namely the departure of President Hosni Mubarak. Paradoxically, economic demands raised at the onset of the protests almost entirely disappeared, even as social classes with entrenched economic grievances increasingly outnumbered the young middle classes responsible for initial mobilization. Even more surprising, Egypt’s independent labor movement, which had become particularly active in pushing for higher wages over the last six years, only formally joined the protests after they had converged over a seemingly controversial goal for this constituency, namely ousting Mubarak. Over the last six years, Egypt had witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number (and intensity) of low-level protests, involving not only the traditionally active blue-collar workers, but also white-collar state employees. For the most part, these protests revolved around localized economic demands, though they have occasionally pushed for politically ambitious goals, such as the legalization of independent unions. Although the labor movement greatly contributed to the spread of a protest culture in Egypt, it refrained from endorsing an anti-regime posture that might jeopardize its core interests. This paper will trace the evolution of discourses and slogans raised over the course of the January 2011 uprising. In doing so, it will reveal a disjuncture between the interests and discourses adopted by an increasingly diverse popular movement. Two explanations will be addressed. The first has to do with the institutional barriers to independent mobilization of the labor movement. The second has to do with the fact that the leaders of Egypt’s independent labor movement mobilized their bases when it became clear to them that they can no longer place their bets on the survival of the regime. The analysis will pay close attention to geographic variation in protest discourse and to the impact of the nature of the various groups involved on the timing of their mobilization. It will draw on interviews with local scholars and labor activists, and on the extensive local press coverage of the period under study.

The revolutionary mass mobilization that overthrew President Husni Mubarak in February 2011 poses some important questions for political philosophers as well as for students of comparative politics or the Middle East. It revives even if it does not resolve long-standing debates about the relationship of emotions to ethical and political choices as well as long-forgotten debates about the role of spontaneous mass activity in the face of modern structures of organization. It poses the question of whether we should at least supplement the idea of “identity” with that of “community membership.” A simple example suffices: for the first time since 1919 Muslim and Christian Egyptians came together in large numbers to remake the state despite a profound sense in the preceding months of growing intercommunal threat and violence. For political theories based on “identity” this suggests such plasticity or instability that it jeopardizes the very basis of the concept. A range of other theoretical approaches from recognition theory to the important work of Marsha Nussbaum on emotion in politics provides a better way to understand the Egyptian events. Egyptian intellectuals have also addressed some of these issues over the past 40 years in debates, echoed in the final weeks of the regime, about spontaneity, organization, the threat of chaos and the meaning of revolt. This paper discusses competing ideas of the role of violence, anger and mass participation in the work of Egyptian political thinkers such as the judge Tariq al-Bishri and several critics of his work over the past 30 years.

Since the ouster of Tunisian dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali on 15 January 2011, a wave of popular, democratic and revolutionary protest has swept the Arab world. Mubarak’s heavily armed dictatorship collapsed after only 18 days of determined popular protest. This methodological paper suggests some ways to approach these dramatic movements and set them in historical context. Some are seeing in these revolutions the moment when the Arab world catches up with the 21st century, and becomes more like ‘us’ in the ‘West’ either through Facebook, educated youth, or democracy. Others have already written off these movements as containing within them a lurking, and fundamentally Other, Islamist threat. This paper rejects both positions as long-familiar and problematic instances of the discourse of the colonial modern. Instead, I argue that these movements are better understood through the more plural lenses of an unruly and border-crossing post-colonial history from below. This approach draws on social theorists and historians such as Antonio Gramsci, Peter Linebaugh, Michael Mann, Marcus Rediker, E.P. Thompson, Charles Tilly, and Raymond Williams in order to get beyond modernism and (neo)Orientalism alike. The paper argues for the utility of linking the analysis of contentious, non-routine, and disruptive politics to hegemony, popular groups, and border-crossing. First, in order to develop the importance of historical context (sometimes lacking in social movement theory), and the importance of struggles for consent, attention can fruitfully be paid to the rise, defence, and defeat of hegemony – understood as the unfinished struggle to marry domination (military, political, economic and ideological) with projects of moral, political and intellectual leadership capable of achieving universality in the social formation as a whole. Second, in order to bring the increasingly marginalized ‘Subaltern’ back in, and capture dynamics slighted in top-down histories of the victors, I suggest that it is vital to pay attention to the ideas and activism of ordinary people who do not occupy positions of social power. And third, to avoid nationalist history and to tackle problems of socioeconomic, discursive, and cultural determinism alike, I argue that it is important to pay attention to how ideas, people and resources cross national and other kinds of borders. I will defend this approach with reference to the historiography of protest in the Middle East, illustrating the argument with historical examples from the eighteenth century to the present.