Monography - AUP Series ON Protest and Social Movements
Contested Legitimacies
Repression and Revolt in Post-Revolutionary Egypt
Since the overthrow of President Mursi in mid-2013, Egypt has witnessed an authoritarian rollback and shrinking spaces for civil society. Nationalist discourses have villified popular protest and channelled pressure for reform into a state-centric model of governance. Despite this hostile environment for social mobilization, protest has persisted.
Contested Legitimacies explores this resilience of contentious politics through a multimethod approach that is attuned to the physical and discursive interactions among key players in Egypt’s protest arena. Drawing from a unique archive of sources, it investigates the rise and fall of different coalitions of contenders, from the Tamarod uprising against Mursi, to the Anti-Coup resistance against the military coup, to the challenges posed by the Tiran and Sanafir island campaign to Al-Sisi's regime. It highlights the decisive impact of battles fought in a discursive arena on the conditions of possibility for street politics: In postrevolutionary Egypt, a contest over the meaning of political legitimacy cemented political polarization, limited social movements’ coalition choices, and ultimately paved the way for a restoration of autocracy.
"Contested Legitimacies fully exploits the potentials of mixed-methods designs. Combining event analyses with the richness of qualitative process-tracing and discourse analysis it pushes the boundaries of strategic-interactionist approaches in social movement studies."
- Swen Hutter, Center for Civil Society Research, WZB Berlin"A rich, profound, and insightful account of Egypt’s post-revolutionary dynamics. Theoretically provoking and empirically well-documented and detailed, this book is indispensable for anyone who seeks lucid and solid understanding of state repression and anti-regime protests in the aftermath of the coup."
- Khalil al-Anani, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
"Drawbacks notwithstanding, the Arab Spring had a transformative effect on contentious politics as well as on social movement studies. Theoretically original and empirically rich, this book points to the importance of political subjectivities in the move from structural constraints into collective action in post-revolutionary Egypt."
- Donatella della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore
