Who is behind egyptian uprising

Mubarak: Egyptian statesman of war and peace. Egypt's day revolution. Image source, Getty Images. Tahrir Square in central Cairo became the focal point of the revolution. Years of one-man rule under Mubarak were brought to an end in just 18 days. Daring to hope. Protesters camped out in February , even resting on the tracks of tanks. But it was not to last. Short-lived solidarity. A violent crackdown ended demonstrations in support of Egypt's deposed President Morsi in Dashed dreams.

Image source, AFP. Egypt's President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi has severely restricted protests since he came to power in This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.

Related Topics. Published 25 January. Published 26 February Published 25 February Published 25 January He was asked to hand over his passport but refused. Shortly thereafter, he was fired from his job at an Egyptian university. A government press officer did not respond to a request for comment on targeting and intimidating Egyptians — either abroad or at home — based on their work as journalists, activists or academics, or for expressing political opinions.

Journalist Asma Khatib, 29, remembers the heady days of , when young people thought they could bring change. A month later, the new military leaders forcibly cleared them out, and more than people were killed.

Khatib documented the violence. Soon, colleagues started being arrested, and she fled Egypt — first to Malaysia, then to Indonesia and Turkey. She was tried in absentia on espionage charges in , convicted and sentenced to death.

Now, she and her husband Ahmed Saad, also a journalist, and their two children are seeking asylum in South Korea. The broad alliance of protesters — from Islamists to secular activists — fractured without a common enemy like Mubarak, and the most extreme voices became the loudest.

The role of religion in society remained largely unanswered, and liberal secular initiatives never gained traction. No one accounted for how many people would embrace former regime figures, especially in a crisis. Most Egyptians abroad have not been politically active, fearing for family and friends back home. But some have continued on the path begun on Jan. Tamim Heikal, working in the corporate world when the protests erupted, had doubted the government could ever reform.

But he soon became a communications manager for an emerging political party. More than ever, analysts of Egypt need to do fieldwork, conduct surveys, and re visit archives to make sense of developments. That being said, larger trends might have evolved and transformed slightly, but they are still very much in place.

State-led developmentalism and militarism, the effects of the international economic order, the realpolitik of the region especially in the context of conflicts in nearby countries —these kinds of long-standing global trends continue. But for anyone who observes Egypt up close today, especially the state and its transformations, this is not exactly the same state. The old regime has not simply reinvented itself and come back.

I think this decade has witnessed a real re-founding moment of the Egyptian state, bureaucracy, and economic elite and its relationship to the government and society. Of course, some portion of these voters were always opposed to the revolution. But what about the rest? One partial answer lies in understanding the bases of popular support for the mobilization.

The Arab Barometer survey finds that eight percent of the adult population protested during those eighteen days. Summing crowd participation sizes for protests reported in Egyptian newspapers suggests that this is likely an overestimate. Protest participation tailed off after Mubarak was ousted: Arab Barometer data suggests that only three percent of Egyptians joined a protest in the months following February 11, Egypt is not strange or abnormal in this regard; protest participation is a rare event in most contexts.

This is worth keeping in mind when evaluating popular attitudes to the mobilization. As Hannah sets out below, Egyptians who joined anti-Mubarak protests often speak of a liminal moment, of entering liberated spaces that promised a radically different political, social, and economic future. Reading the interview testimony of protestors, one cannot help but share in a feeling of revolutionary communitas. Egyptians who chose to stay at home did not have this formative experience and, so, inevitably held a weaker commitment to the protests and their goals.

The January 25 Revolution had a profound effect on the Egyptian economy. For example, the tourism industry, a major source of employment and revenue, was badly affected: Hotel occupancy rates from to were half of what they were in the last four years of the Mubarak era.

Economic hardship was compounded by deliberate police inaction following the bottom-up defeat of the Interior Ministry at the hands of anti-Mubarak protestors, leading to an increase in crime across the country.

Against this backdrop, an emerging body of research suggests that these negative externalities turned at least some Egyptians against the revolution. Even in the heady days of mid, a period characterized by optimism and revolutionary potential, successive surveys found that overwhelming majorities of Egyptians held negative views of ongoing protest.

This negative perception was encouraged by the Egyptian military, who launched ad campaigns calling on Egyptians to demobilize. And it seems that the negative externalities of the revolution and its aftermath had political consequences.

Egyptians living in districts that saw increases in crime post-February were more likely to vote for Shafiq, as were Egyptians living in districts that saw more protest. Analysis of survey data also suggests that those who lived in districts where protestors launched particularly disruptive kinds of protest were more likely to associate democracy with socioeconomic threat and instability. Again, this is not necessarily surprising: Revolutionary mobilizations inevitably inflict a cost on society.

In Egypt, however, these costs have been very effectively seized upon by reactionary elements, who have instrumentalized nostalgia for the relative stability of the pre-revolutionary period for political gain.

Hannah Elsisi: I agree with Youssef that the January 25 Revolution has come to represent a seismic event, against which Egyptians organize recent history and memory into a before and an after.

For those who were for the revolution, especially those who participated in protests, it is still largely seen as a gamble that was well worth the risk and an experience that many would not trade for the world. Marrying this conviction and commitment to the revolution with the daily lived experience of its grim consequences is evidence of the pedagogical power of revolutions and the difficulty of dislodging the modes of thought cultivated through revolutionary participation.

For middle- and high-ranking members of the military, many of whom have seen their fortunes and political power expand beyond their wildest imaginations, we can surmise that few are sorry for anything that transpired over the last decade.

As Neil points out below, we are already observing a different state form as the regime eschews ruling through a dominant party, akin to the Mubarak-era National Democratic Party NDP.

Their parents can be heard mumbling too, as they have lost one mega-project tender after another to the military and its affiliate companies. It is not unreasonable to think that the shift to vernacular in presidential speeches is about creating new publics. So there are certainly new cleavages in the making.

But what of old cleavages? The revolution undoubtedly exacerbated, and the agents of counterrevolution willfully inflated, an intractable divide between the Muslim Brotherhood MB on the one hand and all other stripes of opposition—whether Salafist or leftist—on the other. Neil Ketchley: The government of President el-Sisi has clearly diverged from the Mubarak template of rule in several important ways.

The enhanced role of the military in the economy and the reluctance to build a political wing to the regime comparable to the National Democratic Party are but two obvious examples. During the first days of the January 25 Revolution, police forces primarily relied on tear gas and batons, rather than live ammunition and birdshot.

Following the removal of President Morsi in a coup, protestors taking to the streets have had to reckon with armed security forces who opened fire with impunity. The Interior Ministry has become particularly proficient at cracking down on the modalities of protest pioneered in early Police tactics were honed in the year following the coup, when the Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Morsi supporters launched thousands of street protests.

The apogee of this repression was the Rabaa Massacre on August 14, , when over 1, protestors occupying a square in northwest Cairo were killed in just a few hours.

That violent episode forms part of a pattern in which security forces have used any means necessary to deny space and visibility to anti-regime protestors.

There has also been an unprecedented wave of arrests. To give a sense of the scale of the crackdown that has followed the coup, a forthcoming version of the WikiThawra dataset contains information for over , political arrests in Egypt over the past seven years.