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  • Contesting the Repressive State: Why Ordinary Egyptians Protested during the Arab Spring by Kira D. Jumet
  • Lisa Blaydes (bio)
Contesting the Repressive State: Why Ordinary Egyptians Protested during the Arab Spring, by Kira D. Jumet. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 296 pages, $99.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.

Political scientists have long been concerned with the role of elites in organizing and mobilizing protests. Activists are often described as either first movers who are relatively insensitive to the costs of repression or as ideologues who derive utility from expressing their deeply held ideological commitments. But how can we understand the decision of ordinary individuals to participate in popular protests? Protest participation is especially puzzling when one considers the high costs incurred by individuals who challenge repressive regimes. Kira Jumet's carefully researched monograph, Contesting the Repressive State, provides a compelling narrative about why ordinary Egyptians took to the streets in 2011 as well as how the protest movement eventually lost momentum.

Jumet focuses on the individual-level decision calculus associated with protest participation. In order to understand why individuals protested, she interviewed almost 200 Egyptians. This included individuals who participated in the protest uprisings and those who did not, a research design strategy that allows her to make inferences about the most important factors differentiating the two groups.

Jumet pays particular attention to the dynamics of protest mobilization and the conditions under which revolutionary "tipping points" and thresholds were reached, allowing crowds of protesters to grow. She identifies a number of factors that influenced [End Page 508] an individual's decision to mobilize. First, Jumet finds that new social media technologies were effective at mobilizing ordinary Egyptians. Facebook, in particular, was an influential network in this context, facilitating the development of a politically conscious citizenry in the years leading up to the uprisings. For Jumet, social media reinforced grievances, exposed corruption, and lowered the threshold for participation in protest since individuals came to realize that they were not alone in their opposition to the regime.

Second, a number of individuals who were initially reluctant to participate in the protests eventually did mobilize, in part out of a desire to aid first movers who had been subject to regime repression. Jumet's interview evidence suggests that a number of informants had feelings of shock, anger, and moral outrage in the face of repression against protesters. She characterizes the decision of these individuals to participate as an emotional response in a revolutionary moment—a type of contingent action based on feelings of empathy. This leads Jumet to conclude that the "Egyptian government's response may have inadvertently accelerated protest rather than diffused it" (p. 89). New forms of nationalist discourse based on feelings of shared grievance and collective identity were born of opposition to the regime of Husni Mubarak.

Jumet also takes up the question of how political mobilization continued in the period to follow. She argues that the behavior of ordinary Egyptians reflected a "post-revolutionary emboldening effect" (pp. 145–48), a phenomenon that Jumet describes as an emotionally driven belief in the efficacy of public protest. Egyptians came to believe that they could challenge political power structures in ways that were inconceivable just a few years before. When popular disappointment with the presidency of Mohamed Morsi emerged, Egyptians were quick to publicly air their grievances. One of her informants who opposed Morsi's rule said that he believed that change was possible through protest because the "street wouldn't be denied" (p. 185). Building on Samuel Huntington's concept of a "veto" coup, Jumet also makes a useful intervention in her conceptualization of Morsi's overthrow on June 30, 2013, as a "popular participatory veto coup" (p. 172).

Over time, the levers of state repression came to target political activists, social media figures, and opposition group members. Repression was compounded by a growing fatigue on the part of ordinary Egyptians, many of whom yearned for a return to political stability. Jumet's conclusions suggest that the effects of state repression are multi-faceted and context specific.

Contesting the Repressive State is a book with many positive attributes. Jumet is attentive to the details of the lives and...

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