Since Mubarak's forced departure in February 2011, many academics have commented on the pace and trajectory of Egypt's events. For some, the popular mobilization that dislodged Mubarak constituted a revolution. Others labeled it an uprising, which suggested it linger short of a revolution. Such analysis and debate, however, overlooked the slower and deeper structural processes in motion. The ethos of this panel is that the initial 18-days of protest accelerated ongoing processes of change and exchange that continue to unfold in Egypt. While notable differences to the country's politics, economy, and society are apparent, unsettling continuities remain. This panel is structured around examining the tension between the politics of power, hegemony, and nodes of resistance to activate understandings of a process as opposed to finalized outcome. Thus, it reveals how the country is moving towards incremental but comprehensive revolutionary change.
This panel's presenters will deliver papers on different aspects of Egypt's process that are theoretically informed but steeped in on-the-ground field research. Whereas one paper may look at Islamist incorporation, another will focus on the nexus between the electoral process and representation. A third will reflect on the how the political economy of transitions reorganize how citizen claims are constructed. The fourth paper will historicize the demands of 2011 by tracing them to the student movement of the 1970s. Although the papers cover these varying aspects, they share a common theme.
Specifically, the papers uncover the ways in which elected and unelected elites construct discourses of power to try to counter contentious politics as well as how those plans are resisted and thwarted. Through the interaction between a newly decentralized state and street mobilization, protesters challenge the reconstruction of exclusivist electoral arenas, the design of painful neoliberal policies, and the ways in which elites maintain classist and gender hierarchies. By gathering scholars from different disciplines, the aim is to break through narrow disciplinary debates to expose the process of change at work. The authors' diverse research methods and their findings help to widen the multi-disciplinary opportunities for subsequent faculty and graduate student research on revolution and processes of change.
How does the challenge of generating and sustaining economic growth limit the inclusivity and directions of democratic transitions? Based on the case study of post-2011 Egypt, this paper reconsiders dominant theoretical understandings of the relationship between democratic transitions and neo-liberal economic reform. Following the collapse of the USSR, many scholars correlated the emergence of democracy with economic liberalization in post-Soviet states. Based on interviews from relevant leaders in the US and Egypt, primary documents including Egypt’s Closing Account of the General Budget, and material acquired from international financial institutions, this paper argues elites from both the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces as well as around the newly elected Brotherhood president pursue economic policies that exclude popular social forces. This continues to enable crony capitalism and is producing more continuity than change in the government’s practices.
Specifically, the paper examines how ties between transnational actors and those that oversee and distribute capital accumulation in Egypt help define and maintain an exclusivist political arena. Thus, it explores this topic by using the elites’ reform discourse, economic indicators from the state budget, and foreign direct investment to examine the changes and continuities in Egypt since Mubarak’s resignation. Therefore, elements that will be considered in this paper include examining economic growth in the context of declining revenue injections, the effect of the unaccountable “officers’ economy” on the economy, and the relationship between domestic power wielders and international actors and the ways in which this shapes the practice of contentious politics.
By examining political transitions through a lens of political economy, we gain the capacity to explain lingering continuities and a lack of reform such as in the security sector or in the field of education. More than path dependent, explaining transitions through a political economy approach exposes the crevasse between what elites are trying to do and how it produces resistance to these plans. Thus, such research findings become crucial for explaining the ongoing processes of political change in transitional settings because of how it defines and redefines incumbency and opposition. This paper seeks to contribute to the established debates on the political economy of transitions by adding a prominent case from the Arab world.
Egypt’s Uprising and the Politics of Narratives
How are contemporary Egyptian political struggles and conflicts shaping the evolution of emergent accounts of the January 25 Revolution? While many research efforts focused on developing an understanding of the origins of what is often referred to as the “Arab Uprisings” and the determinants of their success in overthrowing longstanding incumbent autocrats, little attention has been paid to how ongoing political and social struggles have affected dominant accounts of the uprisings.
Based on an extensive case-study and review of emergent accounts of the Egypt’s January 25 Revolution in both Arabic and English, this paper argues that such efforts ignore the extent to which the outcomes of the Arab Uprisings remain tentative, open-ended, and are still being fought on the ground. Using an analysis of important books and primary documents detailing the history of the Egyptian uprising and its outcome, the paper sheds light on how various pending political struggles have helped shape critical aspects of our understanding of the January 25 Revolution, in particular, social class composition; the role of the military in ousting former President Hosni Mubarak; the role of the United States government in supporting the 2011 eighteen-day uprising and pressuring Mubarak to leave office; the role played by the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist activists in the uprising, and the role of social networking sites in initiating and sustaining anti-Mubarak protests during the uprising.
The paper reveals that popular narratives of the revolution have come to reflect and embody critical social conflicts in Egypt. By bringing to light and analyzing sources of bias in conventional understandings of the Egyptian uprising, the paper underscores some critical challenges facing efforts to theorize the origins and determinants of the Arab uprisings. It also shows the difficulty to adjudicate between competing claims about the conditions that forced Hosni Mubarak’s ouster and initiated a more decentralized process of political competition and change.
