“When Revolutions become Non-Violent: Democratic Change in Tunisia and Egypt.” The paper examines the trajectories and mobilization strategies of the pro-democracy revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. The two states were notorious for their authoritarian regimes and coercive policies that institutionalized for a repressive police state. These two regimes have stifled the opposition, dis-empowered civil society, and restricted the avenues of change. The paper examines the constraints of the political environment, the repressive techniques of Mubarak’s and Ben Ali’s regimes, and the reasons behind the success of the pro-democracy protests despite the watchful eyes of the state. It addresses the strategies the political actors used for popular mobilization and the channels they created to engage the larger populace in grass-roots, pro-change movement. It explains the methods of mobilization and coalition-building that made these revolutions possible. The paper makes the argument that despite their sudden eruption, these revolutions are actually the result of a cumulative process and years of organization and popular action of certain actors who managed to successfully create channels of change despite the constraints of their political environments. Remarkably, the pro-democracy revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have been non-violent. This fact will have a direct impact on the type of political system and institutional arrangements in the post-revolution phase. The paper argues that when revolutions are nonviolent they have a better chance of success and of mobilizing popular support. They are also more likely to lead to the establishment of a democratic system and consensual institutional structures. The paper uses a variety of research methods to substantiate the main arguments. Primary sources will include interviews, published statements, literature and websites of political actors. Secondary sources will benefit from the scholarly work on social movements, mobilization and state-society relations.

Women’s political underrepresentation is a global reality, though this reality is even more pronounced in Muslim societies, including in Iran and Turkey. In Iran, the percentage of female parliamentarians has remained marginal, never exceeding 4.5% since the Islamic Revolution, while in Turkey this percentage has never reached 10%. However, such low levels of female representation in formal politics does not infer women’s marginalization from informal political fields in both countries, such as women’s organizing and mobilization at the grassroots levels to address women’s political underrepresentation. In fact, the Turkish and Iranian women’s movements have played a critical role within the past decade as they strategized and campaigned for the adoption of parliamentary gender quotas. One main strategy of these women’s organizations was to take advantage of the political opportunity structures (POS). They aligned themselves strategically with parties or factions that depended on female political involvement in order to increase their political appeal. In turn the women's organizations used their contributions as leverage to demand for more powerful political positions from (or in) these parties. It is the purpose of this paper to juxtapose the demands of domestic women’s movements in Turkey and Iran to increase women’s political representation, with the efforts of the major Turkish parties and Iranian factions, in an attempt to illuminate the strategic interactions between the two groups. This paper argues that although the issue of women’s involvement in formal politics has entered the public discourse in both countries, there is a difference in the nature of the strategic interactions which the two country’s women’s movements utilize to approach the problem. While Turkey has recently made significant steps in enhancing the level of women’s political representation, the political landscape is still marked with major ideological clashes between secular and Islamist parties that continue to place women’s issues at the center of their conflicts. This paper argues that party competition in Turkey provides valuable POS for different women’s groups as they can manipulate political differences to their advantage. Conversely, within the Iranian context, in which factions are less organized, the women’s movement has a longer road ahead of it. Despite the formation of gradual, yet strategic coalitions between Islamist and reformist women’s organizations in demand for adoption of gender quotas at the party level, Iran’s increasingly single-party rule greatly limits the POS available to them.

The paper is based on ethnography conducted on the campus of a major university, which has a reputation of being "the most liberal" hub of higher education in Istanbul. On the basis of three field trips (ethnographic fieldwork, 34 informal interviews and four group discussions), I explore and analyze the university campus as a major urban site of political contestation over Muslim politics. The ethnography illustrates the interplay between non-state actors (faculty, students and administration) and the state's shifting attitudes towards Islamic symbols on university campuses, including but not limited to the headscarf ban. I argue that the campus mediates highly contested issues of Muslim politics in a secular state by containing diluting and sometimes reinforcing contestation and bargaining between polarized groups of citizens. As a prospective chapter in a larger book manuscript, the broader goal of this paper is to bridge two fields, urban and political studies, which have traditionally talked past each other. Along these lines, I aim at exploring a) how ordinary people negotiate with their states by utilizing urban sites, and b) how urban space and political institutions are mapped upon each other in the long and challenging process of democratization in the Middle East.

On December 31, 2010, a major Egyptian daily headlined one of its year-in-review articles, “Majles al-Dawla: the hero that ruled Egypt in 2010.” The article reviewed a score of administrative court rulings handed down that year that challenged the government on sensitive matters of domestic and foreign policy. It interviewed legal specialists who lauded the role of the courts and denounced the government’s failure to implement judicial rulings. Why would the arcane administrative courts be adjudicating key policy issues and developing such a high profile? This paper traces the roots of administrative court prominence, showing how citizens’ individual and collective resort to the courts has catapulted the institution onto political center stage. It argues that citizens’ legal mobilization has turned into a distinct political act in contemporary Egypt, now routinely used by disgruntled individuals, rights activists, workers, opposition coalitions, students, and farmers. The paper places the rise of administrative litigation as a political act within the context of contemporary Egyptian politics. Starting in the mid-1990s, associational life and electoral politics in Egypt have been progressively restricted or extinguished altogether. Elections at every level have been restricted or suspended. Non-governmental organizations are highly monitored, and political parties are hemmed in by confining regulations and government divide-and-rule tactics. In such a context of increasing repression and the imposition of high costs to collective action, the individual act of suing a government official in the administrative courts gained traction. First used by individual lawyers as a colorful mode of self-expression, petitioning the courts soon spread to other sectors and took in a wide array of issues, from urban residents contesting municipal ordinances to professors, workers, and women’s rights activists suing ministers, governors, and the president. To capture the phenomenon of legal mobilization as a political act, the paper surveys both high-profile and obscure instances of litigation. It is based on interviews with petitioners and judges; analysis of court rulings and contemporaneous press accounts; and insights drawn from the law-and-society literature on legal mobilization in democracies. The paper reveals the logic behind the seemingly symbolic act of petitioning the courts, demonstrating how citizens establish links to judges who then are spurred to activate their constitutional oversight of an unaccountable executive branch. Legal mobilization has created a new arena for doing politics in Egypt, establishing the political standing of previously anonymous, powerless citizens and extracting a modicum of responsiveness from a remote and unaccountable government.