Protest and the Politics of Signification in Post-Revolutionary Egypt

This dissertation examines the issue of mobilisation in the context of authoritarian contraction through the lenses of hegemony theory. It explores the shifting coali-tions of contenders in Egypt since the 2013 military coup and their contending conceptions of political legitimacy. Its conceptual perspective is defined by the realisation that processes of social mobilisation are contingent on the dynamics of interaction between political contenders. This interaction takes place on the streets between demonstrators and police forces, and it takes place on a discursive level where contenders articulate competing narratives about contentious events in an attempt to establish hegemony for their reading of social reality. I argue that the trajectory of mobilisation and opportunities for cross-movement alliance building, as well as the scale of repression wielded by authorities against their contenders heavily depend on the outcome of this latter, discursive struggle. Ac-cordingly, in this dissertation project I investigate the unfolding waves of mobili-sation in post-coup Egypt in a nested research design that combines quantitative protest event analysis with in-depth qualitative analysis of the contested discours-es about events on the ground. By tracking the contentious dynamics in Egypt with the proposed analytical focus from the 2013 Tamarod-uprising, over the An-ti-Coup campaign against the deposition of President Mursi, to the restoration of an authoritarian order under the aegis of General Al-Sisi and, finally, to the 2016 Tiran and Sanafir island protests, I highlight the impact of shifts in the discursive architecture of contentious politics on the conditions of possibility and the oppor-tunity structures for both, resistance and repression. The aim of investigating pro-cesses of political contestation both in the discursive and the performative arena is to illustrate how the narratives established around contentious events crucially account for variances in the reaction of movements to regime action, of regimes to mobilisation, and of the broader public to the means by which these principal contenders interact with each other to achieve their goals—for instance, by esca-lating collective action and radicalising repertoires, or by restricting civil liberties and deploying state violence against protesters. Ultimately, this thesis thus at-tempts to map Egypt’s contentious politics in the first years of Al-Sisi’s reign. By systematically linking the performative and the discursive in an analytical frame-work informed by discourse theory and relational approaches of social movement studies, I propose an integrated approach to the study of contentious politics—one that 30 years after the cultural turn in the study of contention is still lacking.Diese Dissertation befasst sich aus hegemonie-theoretischer Perspektive mit poli-tischen Mobilisierungsprozessen im Kontext der autoritären Regression in Ägyp-ten. Ihr Schwerpunkt liegt auf den seit dem Militärputsch 2013 mehrfach wech-selnden politischen Allianzen und ihren umkämpften Auffassungen von politi-scher Legitimität. Die Arbeit fußt auf der Prämisse, dass Prozesse politischer Mo-bilisierung, sowohl seitens sozialer Bewegungen als auch staatlicher Akteure, nicht durch uni¬direktionale Kausalzusammenhänge erklärbar sind, sondern von den Mikrodynamiken sozialer Interaktion zwischen politischen Wettstreitern ab-hängen. Diese Interaktion findet einerseits auf einer performativen Ebene statt, etwa zwischen Polizisten und Demonstrierenden bei Straßenprotesten. Parallel dazu zeichnen sich politische Konflikte aber auch auf einer diskursiven Ebene ab, wo politische Rivalen um die Deutungshoheit über eben jene Protestereignisse ringen. Ausgehend von einer hegemonietheoretischen Betrachtung dieses diskur-siven Wettstreits zeigt die vorliegende Arbeit, wie sich beide Ebenen gegenseitig bedingen. Im Kern wird dabei argumentiert, dass Entwicklungsverlauf und Er-folgsaussichten sozialer Mobilisierung in Ägypten seit der militärischen Macht-übernahme sowie die Gelegenheiten für die Allianzbildung verschiedener wider-ständigen Akteure gleichermaßen von der faktischen Beschaffenheit und der dis-kursiven Darstellung von Protest- und Repressionsereignissen abhingen. Die Analyse mehrerer Protest- und Repressionswellen in Ägypten zwischen 2013 und 2016 stützt sich auf ein integriertes Forschungsdesign, welches quantitative Mess-verfahren zur Erfassung von Protestereignissen mithilfe von Eventdatenbanken mit einer qualitativen Diskursanalyse zu jenen Ereignissen kombiniert. Die resul-tierende Mehrebenen-Analyse der Protest-Repressionsdynamiken in Ägypten – von den Tamarod-Protesten 2013, über die Anti-Coup-Kampagne gegen den Mi-litärputsch, bis zu den Demonstrationen gegen die Aufgabe der zwei Inseln Tiran und Sanafir im Roten Meer im Jahr 2016 – belegt den Einfluss von Veränderun-gen in der diskursiven Architektur auf die Gelegenheitsstrukturen sozialer Bewegungen und politischer Regime und auf deren Bereitschaft, sich auf Protest- und Repressionskampagnen einzulassen. Nicht zuletzt verfolgt diese Analyse somit das Ziel, zu zeigen, dass die Art und Weise, wie über politischen Protest, Repression oder Gewalt gesprochen wird, letztlich ausschlaggebend dafür ist, mit welchen Mitteln soziale Bewegungen Regime herausfordern, wie selbige darauf reagieren und inwiefern beide Seiten hierfür potenzielle Unterstützer mobilisieren können

Contested Legitimacies

Since the military overthrow of President Mursi in mid-2013, Egypt has witnessed an authoritarian rollback. Through a combination of repression and nationalist securitizing discourses, popular pressure for reform was successfully channelled into a state-centric model of governance. But despite state violence and the restriction of public spaces, protests have anything but ceased. Contested Legitimacies explores this resilience of protest despite unprecedented repression through an approach attuned to the physical and discursive interactions among key players in Egypt’s post-revolutionary arena. Starting with the successful Tamarod uprising against President Mursi, to the unsuccessful Islamist resistance against the military coup, to the Rabaa massacre and the shrinking spaces for protest under Al-Sisi’s authoritarian rule, to the resurgence of popular resistance in the shape the Tiran and Sanafir island campaign, it investigates the rise and fall of different coalitions of contenders and explores their impact on Egypt’s political transition

Contested Legitimacies

Since the military overthrow of President Mursi in mid-2013, Egypt has witnessed an authoritarian rollback. Through a combination of repression and nationalist securitizing discourses, popular pressure for reform was successfully channelled into a state-centric model of governance. But despite state violence and the restriction of public spaces, protests have anything but ceased. Contested Legitimacies explores this resilience of protest despite unprecedented repression through an approach attuned to the physical and discursive interactions among key players in Egypt’s post-revolutionary arena. Starting with the successful Tamarod uprising against President Mursi, to the unsuccessful Islamist resistance against the military coup, to the Rabaa massacre and the shrinking spaces for protest under Al-Sisi’s authoritarian rule, to the resurgence of popular resistance in the shape the Tiran and Sanafir island campaign, it investigates the rise and fall of different coalitions of contenders and explores their impact on Egypt’s political transition

Zum alltäglichen Frieden: Rezension zu "Everyday Peace: How So-called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict" von Roger Mac Ginty

Roger Mac Ginty: Everyday Peace: How So-called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict. Studies in strategic peacebuilding. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2021. 978-0-19-756339-

Contested perceptions of contentious politics: framing as translation

This is the sixth post in the blog series „Movements and Institutions“. How is it that the actions of institutions come to be perceived as unjust by a critical mass? And how does this perception translate into collective action? Adopting a framing perspective, this article proposes to investigate the meanings that people attach to specific events as key for understanding interaction dynamics between social movement and institutions

Some vantage points for rethinking movements and institutions: introduction to a blog series

Social movements and institutions are central actors in national and transnational politics as well as core categories of social inquiry. Despite their importance, both terms are still haunted by a lack of thorough definitions. We introduce a blog series with ten weekly contributions on their interrelation, outlining several innovative approaches and suggesting some vantage points for rethinking ‘Movements’ and ‘Institutions’ in a productive manner