For many observers, the return of authoritarian confidence, the changing zeitgeist among activists and the mixed gender outcomes following the Egyptian uprising are signs that the grand visions of the uprising are gone. More dramatically, that the "Egyptian Spring" was a false hope in a future that never came and that politics now is one marked with disappointment. In this paper, I map the field in which the politics of disappointment and hope unfolded among women's groups after the 2011 Egyptian uprising. I argue that disappointment does not mark the end of politics and activism; it may rather give rise to the politics of pragmatic hope. Studying the politics of disappointment is momentous and meaningful as women are largely the first and foremost group to experience disappointment following political struggles and regime change. The data for this project draw upon 32 semi-structured interviews with activists and leaders of women's rights organizations. Data was analysed within the prism of critical discourse analysis, this entailed a closed reading of the words of participants with a view to what is occluded from the discussion. I build on participants' accounts to highlight the influence of state feminism, deep state, civil society fragmentation, gender violence, and authoritarian resilience on Egypt's transition and activists' experience following the uprising. Utilizing the rich theoretical tools found in social movement and contentious politics literature, I conceptualize the 2011 uprising in Egypt as an episode of contention. While revolutions can either fail or win, episodes of contention, social movement theorists explain, are characterized by their cumulative effect regardless of the cycle's immediate outcome. This approach is significant for my research; utilizing it I offer a dynamic explanation of the challenges that hindered gender equality and democratic transition in Egypt. The survey of these forces encourages us to moderate our expectation and appreciate the diminutive forms of sustained activism that managed to develop notwithstanding all the odds. The analysis presented also highlights some of the ways in which female activists reconfigure their demands and strategies in the midst of complex entanglements of hope, failure, and pragmatism. I emphasize how activists maintain their activism and the memory of social resistance through participation in creative social and/or artistic initiatives, engagement in critical debates over longstanding taboos, and the survival of friendship networks. This survey is significant to avoid stereotyping women as passive and the MENA region as stagnant.

Under what conditions do citizens decide to join in or abstain from protesting an authoritarian regime? To what extent do the trajectories of nearby, ostensibly similar states inform their heuristics about the utility and likely outcomes of mobilization or demobilization? Does the subject of protest matter when citizens are deciding whether to mobilize or remain quiescent? Drawing from the literature on cognition and behavioral economics, we argue that examples of protest failure are more consequential for informing citizens' decisions about whether or not to mobilize than examples of protest success. We contend, furthermore, that this effect is magnified when the subject of potential mobilization aligns with what people perceive to be the sources of nearby mobilization. We test the theory through an original survey experiment of 500 Egyptian college students. The results show that those respondents exposed to cases where protests led to a democratic breakthrough (Tunisia) are less consequential than those where protests resulted in repression and civil war (Syria), or a general control condition. Further, cases of protest failure exhibited the strongest deterrent effects on those citizens who saw the drivers of Arab Spring protests as inherently political, as opposed to mobilization sparked by economic, human rights, or corruption-based grievances. In addition to generating new insights into the micro-level decision calculuses of protestors in one of the region's most turbulent countries, the results also suggest revisiting theoretical arguments that authoritarian regimes secure their rule by maintaining a widespread "barrier of fear" that prevents citizen mobilization.

Why did the collapse of a dominant party not bring about significant democratic transformation and generate power-sharing pacts? How did new collectively organized alternatives that once capitalized on vulnerability and flaws in previous regimes, fail to withstand the post-rupture dynamics? Why did newly emergent forces opt for alliances that generated new vulnerabilities and unleashed further authoritarian adaptation? The paper aims to step beyond whether authoritarian resilience or transition paradigm matters to offer two-layered analytical framework based on the leverage level and coherence of demands of pro-democracy forces to account equally for the moment of one-party collapse and the consequent dynamics of authoritarian restructuring in Egypt. I offer more room for complex interactions and strategic contingency between different components of society on the one hand, and between them and old ruling class on the other in the aftermath of the removal of Mubarak. When pro-democracy forces maintain their leveraged position and keep demand-claiming framework unified, they secure consistent democratization pressure that lead to regime breakdown. When they adopt conformist stance and accommodate their demands to incumbent regime, they become captive of the interests of dominant ‘black knights’ and offer them room to maneuver and to hobble efforts to move toward democratization. The leverage of the pro-democracy forces refers not to the exercise of pressure per se on the old power centers, but rather to the vulnerability of these forces to pressures and ploys exerted by old ruling bloc. Where newly emerging forces lack bargaining power and are heavily affected by old elites’ cooptive/manipulative strategies, leverage is low. By contrast, where new democratic forces possess substantial bargaining power and/or can withstand old elites’ cooptive /manipulative action, leverage is high. Also, unified set of demands is central to understanding variation in the effectiveness of democratization pressure. Fragmented demands made any societal cause for democracy as kind of whirlwind. By contrast persisting and unified demands would help in: (1) heightening the reverberation caused by autocratic abuse and maintaining the cost of repression at its upper limit by attracting a massive influx of societal stakeholders thereby narrowing autocrats’ room to maneuver; (2) re-shaping interests and shifting representative patterns as demand-making creates wide domestic constituencies for democratic norm-abiding behavior; and (3) altering the distribution of power within society, strengthening democratic and opposition forces and weakening and isolating autocrats. Part of the field research for this paper was conducted between (June 2013- May 2016) in Cairo.

In post-2003 Iraq, the strongest and most violent groups secured their political and economic interests, while ordinary Iraqis suffered the effects of war and occupation. Today’s Mosul operations reflect and illustrate the animosities and tensions between the different military forces and militias, which make who will capture what land a secondary if not primary concern alongside liberating the people who have been living under the rule of ISIS. This echoes similar concerns at the height of the violence, which ensued shortly after the invasion and occupation of Iraq wherein the major power blocs divided Iraq and claimed neighbourhoods as their “territory.” This paper problematizes the crisis of democratic nation-building in post-war Iraq. After thirteen years of ‘democratic nation-building,’ Iraq exhibits no signs of becoming a functioning democracy; sectarianism and violence continue to dominate Iraqi society and politics. Over a decade of nation-building has also not resulted in a coherent Iraqi national identity; in fact, the politicization of sectarian and ethnic identities has resulted in a regression towards tribal affiliations not seen since the pre-Iraq period. The human toll of this failure is massive. The majority of the conventional literature on post-2003 Iraq attributes its inability to democratize to the inherent sectarian nature of Iraqi society and to Arab or Muslim exceptionalism to democracy. Moreover, studies on nation-building in post-war Iraq focus largely on elites and a top-down approach to democratization. In this paper I first, explore why post-invasion Iraq has not transitioned to a “democracy” following regime change and “nation-building.” Using critical postcolonial and decolonial thought, this paper challenges the explanatory power of “sectarianism” and “exceptionalism.” Second, I am interested in exploring the potential for grassroots or indigenous perspectives on the current social and political situation in Iraq. This is evident by the mass protests and demonstrations in Iraqi cities and streets since the beginning of the occupation until today. An Iraqi perspective can provide a more nuanced understanding of the current crisis but it also offers an alternative approach to democratization “from below.” To that end, this paper draws on data collected from semi-structured interviews with Iraqi civil society organizations and academics in the Winter of 2016.