A divine cosmopolitanism? Religion, media and imagination in a socially divided Cairo

With a focus on young Egyptian women, this article explores the different ways it becomes possible to reconcile a Muslim identity with a cosmopolitan openness towards the world. Informed primarily by transnational television, these women articulate a divine cosmopolitan imagination through which they form multiple allegiances to God, the nation and global culture simultaneously. Thus, a close analysis of their regular consumption of transnational television helps challenge linear and somewhat naturalized preconceptions of how Muslims articulate perceptions of self and others. In the articulation of both their cosmopolitan imagination and religious identities, young Egyptian women have become skilled negotiators, moving within and between mediated and non-mediated discourses. They move physically within a grounded place that sets the moral boundaries for bodily existence, yet shift subjectively between disembedded spaces of mediated representation, often providing new contexts for meaning and inclusivity. The result, for young Egyptian women, is a divine cosmopolitan imagination

Change and continuity after the Arab Uprising : the consequences of state formation in Arab North African states

This article provides a comparative macro-level overview of political development in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. It examines their evolution from the colonial period through several distinct phases, showing how differences in their origins were followed over time by a certain convergence towards a common post-populist form of authoritarianism, albeit still distinguished according to monarchic and republican legitimacy principles. On this basis, it assesses how past state formation trajectories made the republics more vulnerable to the Arab uprising but also what differences they make for the prospects of post-uprising democratisation. While in Morocco the monarch's legitimacy allows it to continue divide-and-rule politics, in Egypt the army's historic central role in politics has been restored, while in Tunisia the trade union movement has facilitated a greater democratic transition.PostprintPeer reviewe

Navigating multiple sites: religion and women\u27s NGO activism in Cairo

In this project, I explore and problematize the demarcation of religious versus secular based women\u27s activism in Egypt. In doing so, this thesis accompanies the body of literature that contests liberal feminists\u27 assumptions that Islam and gender justice are incompatible and that Muslim women\u27s lives are linked to religious and cultural factors only. Through fieldwork at the Cariene women\u27s NGO, Center for Egyptian Women\u27s Legal Assistance (CEWLA), this thesis reveals that women\u27s rights work can operate within frameworks, which are rooted simultaneously in liberal secular ideas, and Islamic discourses of gender justice. CEWLA is an organization that aims to establish equity among citizens and runs myriads of right based- and development driven projects. The center bases its mission and objectives on the international human rights conventions of which CEDAW is a significant reference. However, the organization systematically engages Islamic discourse throughout their work. The deployment of religion encourages dialogue and provides a space where discourses of women\u27s rights work, gender justice, and Islam can convene and be debated. This thesis argues that the members of CEWLA navigate among the multiple discourses at play in women\u27s right work and the Egyptian society. Since religion is a vital discourse on which people\u27s social imagination is structured, it becomes axiomatic for CEWLA members to deploy religious knowledge. Through analyzing how CEWLA recognizes the complex and non-clear cut religious and secular dimensions in Egypt, I locate the deployment of religious discourse within the wider debate on women\u27s right work and gender justice in an era of transnational feminism

Without hope there is no life: class, affect, and meritocracy in middle class Cairo

This thesis examines the lives of a group of young middle-class Egyptian men who experience a mismatch between their aspirations and their chances of realising them. It analyses the historical emergence of an under-recognised ‘falling’ middle-class in contemporary Egypt, by comparing their relative fall with another middle-class population which has experienced a dramatic rise in wealth and status in the aftermath of neoliberal economic change. I contribute to literature examining the rise of the middle-classes across the Global South in recent years. First, I reveal the importance of historically-owned rural land, cultural privilege, the legal and political remnants of state socialism, and international migration in the socio-economic rise of an Egyptian middle-class. Second, I move away from a predominant focus on consumption, and instead highlight how educational markers, and ‘character’ differences enable the exercise of a new form of ‘open-minded’ middle-class distinction. But finally, I challenge existing literature by uncovering the emergence of an alternative, less-celebratory middle-class in the late-20th and early-21st century, one which has experienced relative decline as the public sector jobs, education, and subsidies they relied on to forge their middle-class lives have been stripped away. The rest of the thesis uses eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork stretched over two years to delve into the lives of a group of young men in this falling middle-class category as they attempt to make the transition from education to ‘aspired to’ employment. It first establishes the existence of a rupture in the Bourdieu-like congruence between their aspirations for a globalised middle-class life, and their ability to reach it. The three main empirical chapters analyse the consequences of this ‘mismatch.’ By applying affect theory to the study of class immobility, I recast existing understandings of how people navigate conditions of ‘waithood,’ in particular through reintroducing a focus on stability and power. I argue that these young men survive their classed and aged immobility through forming a ‘cruel attachment’ to a discursive and material terrain of Egyptianised meritocracy that affects them with hope for the future. This terrain was continuously extended by certain labour market industries and institutions, such as training centres, recruitment agencies, and an entrepreneurship ‘scene,’ that constituted part of Cairo’s ‘hopeful city.’ The thesis therefore demonstrates how Egypt’s capitalistauthoritarian regime also survives, securing the compliance of young middle-class men, despite denying them access to respectable middle-class living, by continually regurgitating a hopeful promise of future fulfilment

Marriage for Refuge? Syrian Refugee Womens Resettlement Experiences in Egypt

Women navigating forced displacement are often confronted by gendered norms and expectations. The practices that they initiate in response remain under-explored. For Syrian women who settled in Egypt during the 'Syrian refugee crisis,' one such practice is marriage to Egyptian men. Many such marriages have been unregistered or polygamous and have been criticized by some feminist advocacy groups and media platforms as exploitative. By focusing on this case study, I aim to transcend interpretations that situate such marriages within the domains of sexual and gender-based violence and child and forced marriage. I instead ask: How might marriage be a strategy for resettlement? And how might it further our understanding of refugee womens decisions, experiences, and subjectivities? In the summer of 2017, I conducted forty in-depth interviews in two major Egyptian cities, Cairo and Alexandria, with Muslim Syrian refugee women, their husbands and family members who took part in these marriage arrangements, a practice which I refer to as 'marriage for refuge.' Using a decolonizing intersectional theoretical framework, I argue that by seeking marriage, these women are not simply complying with socially ascribed gender roles. Instead, they are making a calculated decision to forge their own resettlement trajectories. I found that, despite elements of victimization stemming from displacement and patriarchy, intersectional factors including gender, ethnicity, and displacement were resources that some respondents leveraged to enhance their autonomy and to challenge norms. The narratives underscore how displacement and marriage are connected, in that exile has led to the reconstruction of the meaning and purpose of marriage. In turn, marriage has come to be perceived as a means to overcome the precarity of displacement. To explain this, I attend to social conceptions such as sanad (social capital or support) and sutra (protection or sheltering) and social practices such as polygamy and customary marriage. I position marriage for refuge as a phenomenon that expands understandings of intersectional, gendered and Othered refugee experiences. In so doing, I highlight two decolonizing analytical strategies: rejecting binaries (e.g., agent/victim) and decoupling associations (e.g., agency=resistance), and draw attention to concepts such as moral agency, creative leveraging, and social capital

Broken promises: the politics of lax enforcement of tax laws in Egypt

This thesis seeks to explain the lax enforcement of tax laws in Egypt. While I acknowledge that existing explanations emphasising amongst other things the importance of low administrative capacity, neopatrimonialism, or rentseeking may discern some of the drivers of tax collection performance, I claim that other factors have been neglected. Based on a combination of historical and ethnographic research, I show how historical legacies and contemporary political dynamics intertwine and shape taxation at the three levels of microlevel tax relations, intra-bureaucratic relations, and the administrative and political leadership. I argue that deep-seated distrust on the one hand, and the consequences of a persistent but broken social contract on the other, contribute to the lax enforcement of tax laws. I show how repressive statebuilding resulted in a legacy of distrust that became institutionalised over time and that permeates tax relations to this day. I also explain how post-colonial populist state-building has led to the formation of moral economies of a “caretaker state”, widely-held norms, expectations and beliefs with respect to what the state should do for its citizens and its employees. The persistence of core aspects of this social contract until this day, in combination with its breaking by the state, shapes state and bureaucratic politics in important ways. On the one hand, tax collectors are in many different ways less inclined to do their jobs effectively and to strictly enforce the law against their fellow citizens. On the other hand, lenient enforcement is influenced by regime fears that the strict application of tax laws could provide a trigger for regimethreatening popular mobilisation. These findings make a number of different contributions to the literatures on taxation in developing countries, everyday governance and the enforcement of laws, as well as Middle East political science. Most crucially however, my research shows that both distrust and normative-ideational factors have to be taken seriously not only when it comes to explaining the willingness of taxpayer to pay, but also the willingness of tax collectors to collect