What economic and labor policies led to the unlikely confluence of corporatist collapse and increased labor militancy in Egypt? Theorists have argued that neoliberal policies weaken trade unions. Similarly, corporatist control has been hailed as a way to constrain labor militancy. When Egypt attempted to pursue both strategies at once, instead of reinforcing one another, neoliberalism eroded corporatist control, resulting in a resurgence of labor militancy in the country. Corporatist control involves the centralization of labor institutions and the aggregation of worker demands upward, to be handled through tripartite negotiation. In its more authoritarian form, corporatism can suggest a trade union movement controlled by the dominant party. The party provides labor quiescence by offering benefits and political access. Egypt eroded this arrangement by adopting increasingly union-free work sites to appease international corporations, reducing worker benefits and subsidies, and denying workers a say in governmental affairs. This reduction in benefits decreased worker loyalty, and allowed new, independent trade unions to gain a foothold and press for reforms. These independent unions built relationships with transnational activist networks and gained official government recognition. The successful execution of strikes and political campaigns transformed these new unions into hardened cadres of activists, who later mobilized into a general strike in the critical days of the January 25th uprising. Contentious labor actors forged linkages with other protest groups, and disseminated best practices to social, economic, religious, and political organizations that used the same tactics to pressure the regime. This paper uses detailed, original interviews of labor activists, former regime politicians, representatives of the international trade union movement, and post-revolution government officials over eleven months of fieldwork. I demonstrate that the neoliberal model used in Egypt eroded corporatist control. The implications of this will have bearings on any country using corporatist control of their labor sector in an era of neoliberal “consensus.”

When considering the role of the media in the Arab Spring most accounts focus on new media, such as the Internet and satellite television stations. In the Egyptian case, I argue, the print media had an important role to play in the years leading up to the January 25th Revolution. From the mid-2000s, when they rose to prominence, privately-owned newspapers increased the available political information. These outlets contributed to public discourse, in particular, with reports on instances of corruption and protest events. Thus, these outlets made clear to Egyptians that many of their fellow citizens were similarly frustrated and even angry with the government. My paper advocates for the continued importance of print media to politics in Egypt by exploring this story in three parts. First, it presents the legal and institutional changes that enabled the expansion of privately-owned print media in Egypt. Then it explores the political context in which these papers emerged, and the contentious opposition voices with which they engaged. Finally, the paper presents quantitative content analysis and illustrates how (and how much) privately-owned newspapers covered corruption and protests in comparison to their state-owned counterparts. This paper will use the Egyptian case to add nuance to a number of themes in social science and communications studies. This project speaks to two trends in media in non-democracies with which scholars are currently grappling. Today, many autocracies allow privately-owned print media, where state-owned papers previously dominated the market. Experts also observe that autocracies show more variation in levels of press freedom than do democracies. The case of Egypt from the mid-1990s to today allows for an exploration of the relationship between these trends. Additionally, this paper juxtaposes works on ‘authoritarian resilience,’ many of which come from studies of Egypt and other Arab states, with works on the role of the media in the framing necessary for contentious politics.

The institutional configuration of Egypt's judicial system, particularly in the domain of personal status law, can be explained as the outcome of contestation between religious minority groups and the state over the extent to which these groups are permitted to exercise either substantive or procedural judicial autonomy. Shapiro (1986) and Scott (1999) explain that states seek to eliminate rivals to the state’s monopoly on coercive power as exercised through its judiciary in order to retain control over norm-setting via dispute adjudication and taxing powers through property rights regimes. Moustafa (2008) expands this argument to include authoritarian states, which use courts to monitor bureaucratic agents and reduce corruption. Minority groups, conversely, attempt to maintain control over the laws that govern their members, particularly with respect to family law. In Egypt, although the judiciary is centralized, each religious group has a separate legal code that governs disputes between co-religionists in state family law courts. Through archival and interview-based research, this paper argues that this semi-pluralistic arrangement is primarily the result of contestation between the Coptic Orthodox Church, Egypt’s largest religious minority, and the Egyptian state. The simultaneous deterioration of Coptic adjudication forums and a breakdown in bargaining between the Coptic Pope and President Nasser allowed partial centralization Egypt’s judicial system. However, the state stopped short of complete decentralization, which would have provoked massive dissent, and instead isolated family law as the sole arena of pluralism within an otherwise unified judiciary. Before his death, Pope Shenouda successfully strengthened the Coptic Orthodox Church’s administrative structure and concentrated power in the office of the Pope, which permitted an increase in bargaining between Pope Shenouda and President Mubarak. Newspaper accounts and interviews reveal that before the 2011 ‘revolution,’ Coptic leadership expected that a measure of judicial decentralization might result, allowing further autonomy for Coptic family law. Although subsequent events altered these prospects, the Egyptian judiciary is once again a zone for contestation for the meaning of Egyptian citizenship and the inclusion of diverse judicial forms.