Youth Activism and Contentious Politics in Egypt: Dynamics of Continuity and Change by Nadine Sika, and: Youth Activism in Egypt: Islamism, Political Protest and Revolution by Ahmed Tohamy (review)

Since the start of the new millennium, the “youth” category has been increasingly important in global political and development discourses. International agencies, governments, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and academics multiplied their references and preoccupation with youth, youth unemployment, and youth marginalization.¹ The Arab world is no exception to this trend. A very youthful population compared to the global average and the exceptionally high percentage of youth unemployment were increasingly spotted in the 2000s as the main threats to social stability.² When a largely spontaneous mass mobilization wave shook the region in 2010/11 and toppled die-hard dictators such as Zine El-‘Abidine Ben ‘Ali in Tunisia and Husni Mubarak in Egypt, it was largely read as a “youth-led revolt” and a “youth response” to sclerotic, corrupt, and senior authoritarian governments unable or unwilling to meet youth needs and aspirations. After the uprisings, two contradictory narratives on youth coexisted in the media and in the academic and development literature: on one side, the danger to stability represented by unsupervised (i.e., unemployed, marginal) youth, and, on the other, youth dynamism and inner progressive spirit as the engine for positive regional change.³

The two books reviewed here fall within the second, or positive, narrative mentioned above. They both concentrate on youth political agency in Egypt and consider youth activism and “youth” social movements as main actors of potential authoritarian breakdown. The books’ authors, Nadine Sika and Ahmed Tohamy, are Egyptian political scientists based at the American University of Cairo and at Alexandria University, respectively. Similar research questions guide their works: What are the conditions and processes of youth mobilization under authoritarian regimes? Why does youth mobilization sometimes result in authoritarian breakdown and sometimes in authoritarian resilience? What does the study of youth activism through the lens of social movement theory tell us about wider state-society relations in an authoritarian context such as Egypt?

To answer these questions, Sika devotes her attention in Youth Activism and Contentious Politics in Egypt to the contexts of mobilization within the authoritarian regimes of President Husni Mubarak, the interim rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), and the rule of President Mohamed Morsi, focusing on both the evolving regime structure and its influence on the rise and development of youth movements (Chapter 2). She then examines the repertoire of youth movement protests since the 2000s while also looking at their agency and their influence on the regime’s authoritarian upgrading and downgrading strategies (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, she presents interesting quantitative data from a survey carried out in Egyptian universities in 2012 on youth activists’ political attitudes, and in Chapter 5 Sika offers the reader a more qualitative analysis on mobilization networks and on the way these operated in the Egyptian public sphere since the 2000s through 52 semi-structured interviews conducted with young activists between 18 and 30 years of age. Finally, Chapter 6 compares contentious politics in Bahrain, Algeria, Jordan, and Morocco. Throughout her book, Sika emphasizes the importance of understanding the interactions between social movements and authoritarian regimes by skillfully utilizing social movement theory together with the so-called authoritarian resilience, or post-democratization, literature.

In contrast, Tohamy adopts an approach in Youth Activism in Egypt that is both broader and narrower than Sika’s. On the one hand, he devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 3) to cycles of youth protest in Egypt since 1952 “in order to work out the rules that governed the emergence of youth activism in these five decades, and from this to develop an analytical framework to explain similar examples that have emerged and developed in the last decades” (p. 44). On the other, he concentrates on two specific...