The Egyptian revolution of January 25, 2011 was an occasion to bring many apolitical social actors into the political public spectrum after more than fifty years of the state monopoly over political and public sphere. The Ultras, “hardcore” football fan groups, who have always self-categorized themselves as apolitical in nature, constitute one example of those engaged in politics and confrontations against the state. Before the revolution, the struggle between the Ultras and the state was hardly viewed as a political conflict. The Ultras sought recognition and acknowledgement and expected the state, specifically the police, to grant them freedom in the stadium. After the revolution, the political nature of the conflict between the state and the Ultras became a central issue in their relationship. Ultras engaged not only in clear and overt political activism, but employed a wide range of political conflict tools against the state in doing so. By utilizing social movements and contentious politics theoretical frameworks, the paper argues that the state forced the Ultras to act politically by threatening their collective identity. This paper relies on three main questions in examining the Ultras’ political shift: First, in what ways did the state play a part in radicalizing and politicizing the Ultras? Second, what were the ways in which the Ultras reacted to the new social realities brought on by the onset of the Egyptian revolution? And lastly, given the changes in the politicized stance that the Ultras took, what could we anticipate as the future for the Ultras as a political organization? In addressing these questions, the paper is structured into three parts. The first part focuses on uncovering the nature of the Ultras, providing the historical background of the Ultras in Egypt as well as the internal dynamics of the organization and membership, inter-Ultras relationships, and the Ultras’ notion of collective identity. Secondly, examining the contention in the relationship between the Ultras and the state preceding, during, and following the revolution. This part addresses the main issues that drive the relationship, the points of contention between both parties, and the tools each party employs against the other. Finally, the paper investigates the dialectical relationship between the Ultras and the revolution. This part examines the effects that the revolution had on the internal dynamics of the Ultras and their presence in the political sphere, especially as they led to some core changes in their discourse, tools, and identity.

Amidst the recent political uprisings in the region, physicians and other healthcare workers have found themselves, willy-nilly, in the crossfire. This paper focuses on Egypt’s medics, paying special attention to how many have both appealed to and practiced medical neutrality as its own potent and contested political stance, particularly since the period of military rule following Mubarak’s removal from power. The paper draws on interviews with key players in the doctors' strike and with physicians who served as volunteers in the field hospitals in the days of unrest and violence, including those who belong to organizations, such as “Tahrir Doctors,” “Doctors Without Rights” and “Operation: Anti-Harassment.” The paper reveals how their commitment to medical neutrality put them at odds with the orders of military personnel, infuriated throngs of protestors, led to suspicion among members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and even caused divisions and fractions within their own movement.

The politics of unruly uprisings in Egypt This paper investigates the nature of the agency and drivers of citizens who participated in the 30th of June uprisings against the Morsi regime in Egypt and the relationships in which they were embedded. While the agency, motives and goals of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood to stage protests in support of the President are understandable (in terms of defending the legitimacy of the regime that they voted into power), what is perplexing is what drove citizens to rise en masse against a regime that has only been in power for a year. The paper is premised on a mixed method methodology implemented between October 2013 and Jan 2014 involving a survey of 2,400+ citizens who revolted on the 30th of June, selected using cluster sampling (to take into demographic dimensions). Trained local researchers used snowballing to identify participants. The research was complemented with 12 focus groups undertaken in six governorates (Cairo, Alexandria, Fayoum, Beni Suef, Minya, Qena) in 33 communities nationwide in order to provide more nuanced and in-depth examination of emerging findings and capture perspective and citizen viewpoints. The paper offers some ground breaking findings regarding what drove citizens to protest, what they intended to achieve, who influenced their decision to take part, how mobilization occurred and their profile in terms of prior political action, voting preferences, age, gender, income and educational levels. In analysing the data, the paper proposes “unruly politics” as an analytical lens through which to examine the pulse of the citizenry. Unruly politics framework focuses on modalities of political action that generally escape conventional governance thinking in terms of democratic engagement and working from within the system. Unruly politics may provide some inroads in understanding dynamics of mobilization that go beyond perceiving citizens as constituencies/members/followers of social movements, political parties or leaders. While there has been a burgeoning body of scholarship offering important analytical perspectives on macro-dynamics of regime ruptures, the contribution of this paper will be to provide insights on the revolts of the 30th of June “from below” by presenting analysis informed by an approach based on critically “seeing like citizens”. The findings ultimately have bearings on understanding ruptures and revolts, democratization and collective action.

Applying a Gramscian framework to the 2011 Egyptian uprising would produce a complex analysis that centres on the ruling class, hegemony and the state. The Gramscian approach represents a critical approach to International Political Economy (IPE) and International Relations (IR), drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci, and can be described as an epistemological and ontological critique of the empiricism and positivism found in mainstream IPE and IR theories. The approach aims to understand how world orders are created and influenced by specific social forces, at both the level of discourse and materiality. Using historicist methodology, this paper goes back in history to trace the events and processes that produced the contemporary class of elites, with the military at its centre. Understanding Egyptian elites as a coherent class can shed light on why the 2011 uprising occurred. This elite class, following a Gramscian approach, should be conceptualized as containing fundamental structural divisions. Despite this, they exercise control over society through a hegemonic project—in the case of Egypt a primarily neoliberal one. The question of interest is: What power shifts have occurred within the ruling class and how have they generated constraints on its cohesion and ability to govern Egypt? More specifically, how did these shifts within the ruling class relate to the societal tensions that contributed to the 2011 uprising and the military’s intervention? Such an analysis can specify both how the various groups within the ruling class created the conditions that produced the uprising and also show that shifts and power struggles within this class are essential to understanding the events that happened in 2011. This paper will first delineate the various Egyptian elites, and will then place them within economic and political historical processes and demonstrate clearly how these processes created a hegemonic system in Egypt. This paper will use this data to argue that the marginalization of the military by Gamal Mubarak and his circle of neoliberal elites is one of the major factors behind the 2011 uprising. The policies pursued by this neoliberal elite threatened to disrupt the hegemonic project as well as marginalize the military. The military's intervention in 2011 can thus be seen as an attempt to restore itself within the elite class as well as to attempt to restore the hegemonic project.

This paper analyzes the political theoretical thrust of of the oeuvre of one of Egypt's most prominent philosophers, Hassan Hanafi (b. 1935). More specifically, it examines Hanafi's claim that the repeated faltering of the Egyptian -and Arab- Spring is their incompleteness: while it has managed to remove the political regime, the revolution has hitherto failed to transform the "consciousness" of the Egyptian subject, its disposition towards matters social and political. Such transformation, Hanafi adds, could only be brought about through a critical engagement and reinterpretation with the most central component of this consciousness: the popular and intellectual Arab-Islamic traditions. Accordingly, this paper investigates how Hanafi deploys the concept of “tradition” to perform two different and interrelated purposes: to critique that tradition's problematic impact on the constitution of modern-day Egyptian subjects, and to present a vision of these subjects if/when reformed in accordance with a “reconstructed tradition.” I then discern the theory of human agency underlying Hanafi’s dual conception of tradition, arguing that its failure to account for human interpretative activity across Arab-Islamic history puts in grave doubt the possibility that the contemporary Egyptian subject could indeed undergo the transformation that Hanafi intends it to: namely, become a critic and renewer of tradition rather than its passive heir.