The recent wave of protests in the Middle East have raised questions about the prospects for meaningful political reform throughout the region. In Jordan, thousands of protesters have taken to the street over the past few years, though their demands often vary and coordination between opposition groups has been irregular. The protests in Jordan during January and February 2011 have presented a more united front, calling not for regime change but for substantive reforms that would include a revised elections law and a more representative parliament. King Abdullah has responded cautiously, seeking to "get ahead" of the protests by dismissing the cabinet and tasking the new prime minister with drafting reforms in the next months. But what do these changes mean? One might be eager to see these moves as part of a wave of reform sweeping the region, in which popular mobilizations and organized social movements pressure regimes to undertake reforms they would otherwise shun. In Jordan, however, the regime's response feels more like business as usual: dismissing cabinets in response to economic crises or other political dissent has become almost sport, and it changes little. At the same time, the context of potential reforms elsewhere in the region do make this historical moment different; the question is how and why. This paper seeks to examine these protests in Jordan from a perspective that moves beyond social movement theory. That is, rather than focusing on how mobilizations emerge, what resources groups have, and whether they are successful at pressuring the Hashemite kingdom for substantive political reforms, this paper will examine protests and governance as part of a pattern of performative politics that has emerged in Jordan since King Abdullah took the throne in 1999. I am currently writing a book on protests in Jordan from 1946 to the present, so I seek to bring an historical and richly contextual perspective that allows for a nuanced understanding of the recent protests by examining patterns of political dissent and repression and how they have (or have not) shifted in recent years. I draw on several years of archival and original field research, including interviews with government officials, all major (and many minor) opposition groups, security agencies (including the army and the Public Security Directorate), and human rights actors.

The extraordinary popular uprisings across the Arab world early in 2011 call for a radical revision of the stagnant, donor-driven definition of civil society as “NGOs” and “CSOs:” formal, often professional organizations duly licensed by their governments and registered with the UN to participate in white-collar policy-oriented workshops or provide welfare benefits to underprivileged social groups hurt by cut-backs in state programs. This paper will critique that notion and offer instead a more dynamic conceptualization of civil society that incorporates concepts of civic activism, popular collective action, and public civic realms (inspired in part by Gramsci and Habermas but also by analyses of the American civil rights movement and rapid change in Central Europe around 1990). This conceptualization invites analysis of spontaneous, informal, and/ or contentious activities and of openings of public civic spaces in urban squares and at intersections where citizens stand guard, clean trash or direct traffic. The paper offers a theoretically grounded thesis and a political argument. The theoretical intervention, tested comparatively against new empirical evidence from Egypt and Yemen, is that civil society is a variable (not a constant). It changes shape and size: it mobilizes, retreats, and takes different forms according to the dynamics, constraints, and opportunities of surrounding political, legal, and socio-economic circumstances and spacial geographies. Some times and situations tolerate lobbies and round-table talks; others inspire marches and strikes. Hopefully this framework offers insights into the sudden, transformational mobilization of Egyptian civil society and facilitates understanding of contrasts and similarities between the two cases of simultaneous mass action. The political assertion is that anti-populist “democracy and civil society promotion” as practiced by American, European, and UN agencies in the past two decades has proven irrelevant to the popular aspirations and actual prospects for democratization in the Arab world.

The unprecedented mobilizations that toppled Hosni Mubarak’s presidency in February 2011 have involved a broad range of Egyptians who share economic and political grievances against the regime. From workers to medical doctors, university professors, unemployed graduates or tax collectors, different sectors of Egyptian society have joined their efforts to oust the Egyptian president. These protests have taken place against a background of increasing mobilization in Egypt over the past ten years, fuelled by the degradation of Egyptians’ living conditions. Between 2004 and 2010, two million workers have voiced their grievances through strikes, sit-ins and other forms of protest against poor living conditions caused by the erosion of wages, rising inflation and precarious employment. This paper examines the organization of workers’ collective action, and is based on an ethnographic study of two textile companies from the Nile Delta region conducted from 2008 to 2010 in Mahalla al-Kubra and Shibin al-Kawm. The Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), a state-controlled organization designed to control rather than represent workers, recognized only one of the 1,900 protests that took place during this seven-year period. Moreover, political parties and opposition groups do not have strong ties to industrial workers and have only a limited presence among Cairo intellectuals. Yet this paper argues that these protests have not taken place in a vacuum, and considers the leaders, social networks and organizations that have enabled mobilization to take place. This paper also departs from most social movements analyzes of the strikes that have been state-centered, and have focused on the “politicization of the movement” and the repression-opportunity framework. While it is true that the state influences workers’ room to maneuver, both as a negotiating partner and through its ability to repress protests, state-centered analysis has overlooked the dynamics of workers’ collective action.

This paper employs urban violence to map communal division and multiplied fluid identities based on localism, gender and class during speed urbanization and industrialization in Interwar Egypt. Thousands of landless peasants immigrated to the town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra to work in the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company once it was established in 1927. This turned the town into a host of new social and economic tensions between the urban populations, who called themselves Mahallawiyya, or the people of al-Mahalla, and the peasant workers who were called Shirkawiyya, or people of the company. The company workers were also divided among themselves based on gender, geographical origins, their positions inside the factory, and their residential neighborhoods. Workers from the same villages clustered in shared rooms in the slums of al-Mahalla and turned into `usba, violently competing and fighting gangs. In this paper, I trace the communal divisions and the roles played by fighting bands of Mahallawiyya and workers, `usba, and their leaders, Futuwat to examine how such groups helped workers to adapt to urban industrial life while distracting them from “working class solidarity.” I show how and why these fighting groups sometimes cooperated with one another against the Company during strikes. More importantly, I look at how workers defined themselves vis-à-vis the nationalist Company, the Mahallawiyya, and even each other. The broad research question addressed here is to what extent modern industrialization changed local communal identities into a “modern class-gender identity” and what extent modern social types of organization replaced communal networks. I argue that both horizontal class and vertical communal relations co-existed and sometimes competed. In that fluidity, individuals and groups acted and interacted depending on socio-economic status, conjuncture, and a shared, often contested discourse. For instance, workers who were normally divided into hostile groups based on regional origins sometimes acted in class solidarity against the administration. Thus, it is not surprising to find that although the poor Mahallawiyya were hostile to the poor Shirkawiyya on a social and cultural level, they nonetheless supported the latter’s strikes. The paper draws intensively on a variety of archival sources, including Shari‘a, criminal and civil court documents in addition to the ‘Abdin Royal Court petition files, the archive of the Corporations Department, memoirs and oral history.