Egyptians in Revolt: The Political Economy of Labor and Student Mobilizations 1919–2011 by Adel Abdel Ghafar (review)

Building upon recent scholarly interest in popular revolution in Egypt and the Middle East, Adel Abdel Ghafar analyzes labor and student mobilization across four distinct historical eras in Egyptians in Revolt. Abdel Ghafar adopts a “hybrid theoretical model” that combines the political economy framework developed by Alan Richards and John Waterbury with the social movement theory proposed by Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, and others. This analytical and theoretical approach allows Abdel Ghafar to chart and analyze the historical processes of social mobilization amid distinct historical eras, across class boundaries, and between state and society.

Egyptians in Revolt is structured around four distinct historical periods: the pre-1952 era, the Nasser era (1952–1970), the Sadat era (1970–1981), and the Mubarak era (1981–2011). While the Mubarak era is divided into two distinct chapters for opaque reasons, each chapter follows a similar analytical script in which the author provides an overview of the political economy of the period, analyzes the development of the labor movement and student movement and any diffusion of mobilization between the two movements, and then highlights the political opportunities and threats that might explain the relative success or failure of mobilization efforts. Ultimately, the book serves to contextualize the four distinct historical moments of critical social mobilization across the labor and student sectors in 1946, 1968, 1977, and 2011.

Abdel Ghafar employs a variety of primary and secondary sources to advance his arguments about the mutual influence of authoritarian state and social movements upon one another, the extent of and limit to cooperation between workers and students, and the degree to which the extension of state control over labor and student movements managed to inhibit such cooperation and preserve the authoritarian grip of the state on Egyptian society. The most impressive sources mined by the author to shape this comparative historical analysis are the author’s fieldwork interviews with workers and student activists. These sources are supplemented by an array of published interviews and memoirs, along with a sprinkling of newspaper accounts and archival documents. The bulk of the author’s analysis, however, is driven by secondary sources; the subjects of his interviews have little to say about the Nasser and Sadat eras and nothing to say about the pre-1952 era. Even in the two chapters on the Mubarak era, virtually all of Abdel Ghafar’s analysis of Egyptian political economy is rooted in his reading of secondary sources.

This overwhelming emphasis on secondary source analysis is the most notable methodological drawback of Egyptians in Revolt, but the book also suffers from some weakness in conceptual and analytical approach. At the conceptual level, the scope of the book is simply too broad to permit an effective historical interrogation of the subject at hand. While Abdel Ghafar’s commitment to comparative historical analysis is laudable in the abstract, the simultaneous application of the comparative approach across chronological, methodological, and thematic spheres serves to limit the author’s ability to offer any truly novel insight into the subject at hand. The need to effectively contextualize both political economy and the discrete dynamics of labor and student movements in each distinct historical era severely limits the space for historical analysis. This problem is compounded at the analytical level by the fact that several of the author’s core arguments seem a bit too obvious to warrant sustained attention. Abdel Ghafar identifies five core arguments that shape his analysis, the first asserting that “political economy dynamics have had a direct impact on the labor and student movements and their mobilizations” (2) and the second contending that “various opportunities and threats had an impact on mobilizations by the labor and student movements” (2). While it is impossible to quibble with either assertion, the fact that the author feels it necessary to articulate such truisms is symptomatic of a larger analytical problem in which nuggets of wisdom are...