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60 7. THE PRAXIS OF THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION MONA EL-GHOBASHY If there was ever to be a popular uprising against autocratic rule, it should not have come in Egypt. The regime of President Husni Mubarak was the quintessential case of durable authoritarianism. “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on January 25, 2011.1 With these words, Clinton gave voice to a common understanding of Egypt under Mubarak.Government officials,pundits, and academics,foreign and domestic,thought the regime was resilient—not because it used brute force or Orwellian propaganda,but because it had shrewdly constructed a simulacrum of politics. Parties, elections, and civic associations were allowed but carefully controlled, providing space for just enough participatory politics to keep people busy without threatening regime dominance. Mubarak’s own party was a cohesive machine,organizing intramural competition among elites.The media was relatively free, giving vent to popular frustrations. And even the wave of protest that began to swell in 2000 was interpreted as another index of the regime’s skill in managing, rather than suppressing, dissent. Fundamentally, Egypt’s rulers were smart authoritarians who had their house in order. Yet they were toppled by an eighteen-day popular revolt. Three main explanations emerged to make sense of this conundrum:technology,Tunisia, and tribulation.Technological analyses celebrated young people who employed new media to defeat a stolid autocrat.By the second day of the Egyptian uprising,CNN correspondent Ben Wedeman was calling it a “very techie revolution.” In the following days, every major news outlet framed the uprising as the work of wired, savvy twenty-somethings awakening the liberating potential of Facebook,Twitter, and the writings of American intellectual Gene Sharp. “For the world’s despots, his ideas can be fatal,” asserted the New York Times of Sharp.2 A second category of explanation credited the Tunisian people’s ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in mid-January with supplying a shining example to follow. Esam Al-Amin notes that the Tunisian revolution “inspired Egyptians beyond the activists or elites.”3 A third theorem focused on the many tribulations afflicting Egyptians, particularly soaring commodity prices, positing that hardship finally pushed the population to rise up against oppression. “Food: What’s Really Behind the Unrest in Egypt,” one Canadian newspaper headlined its story.4 61 EGYPT | THE PRAXIS OF THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION None of these explanations are false. All of them correspond to interpretations of events forwarded by the participants themselves. And each has an impeccable intellectual pedigree, harkening back to two influential traditions in the study of popular collective action. One is the dramaturgical model, identifying a cast of self-propelled characters, armed with courage and a new consciousness, who then make an uprising.The second is the grievance model, by which an accumulation of social troubles steadily diffuses among the population and finally reaches an unforeseeable tipping point.The two models call attention to distinct but equally important forces: specific actors and generalized complaints.But both are oddly without context .Because aggrieved and heroic people exist under every type of political system,the models do not explain when such people will band together to challenge the conditions they deplore. Egypt’s momentous uprising did not happen because Egyptians willed it into being. It happened because there was a sudden change in the balance of resources between rulers and ruled. Mubarak’s structures of dominion were thought to be foolproof, and for thirty years they were.What shifted the balance away from the regime were four continuous days of street fighting, January 25-28, that pitted the people against police all over the country. That battle converted a familiar, predictable episode into a revolutionary situation. Decades ago, Charles Tilly observed that one of the ways revolutions happen is that the efficiency of government coercion deteriorates.That decline occurs “when the character,organization, and daily routines of the population to be controlled change rapidly.”5 The organization and daily routines of the Egyptian population had undergone significant changes in the years preceding the revolt. By January 25, 2011, a strong regime faced a strong society versed in the politics of the street. In hindsight, it is simple to pick out the vulnerabilities of the Mubarak regime and arrange them in a neat list as the ingredients of breakdown. But that retrospective temptation misses the essential...

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