Not as strong as we thought: The puzzling collapse of the Mubarak regime in Egypt

After nearly thirty years in rule, the regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt was considered by many to be as 1Cimmovable as the pyramids 1D (Hamid 2011: 102). However, the collapse of this regime in 2011, following a mere eighteen days of protests stymied many scholars who began to question how such a revered 18pharaoh 19 could have fallen so abruptly. In this thesis, I try to provide an answer to this question. I hypothesise that the collapse of the Mubarak regime was facilitated by four developments, which, when combined, exposed the true hollowness of the regime 19s coercive and persuasive powers. These four developments were: the declining legitimacy of the Mubarak regime; the defection of key internal and external allies from the regime; the coalescence of a broad and unified opposition; and the strategic use of social media by that opposition. Through the development of a theoretical framework and the subsequent application of that framework to the case study of Egypt, this thesis finds that all four of these developments were present and did in fact facilitate the collapse of the Mubarak regime by revealing the regime 19s lack of coercive and persuasive powers

Status Quo and Future Challenges for the Research Infrastructure in the Field of Culture

The term "culture" is notorious for the multitude of its meanings. This expertise strictly focuses on culture in terms of the arts. We adopt a sociological as well as an economic perspective. Research questions are subdivided into three spheres of action: artistic production and its organization; the distribution and valuation of culture; and the consumption and reception of culture. The data requirements and the availability of adequate data vary substantively, depending on artistic branches (music, performing arts, etc.) and specific research questions. In order to make the empirical investigation of culture a flourishing field, we recommend the following improvements of the data infrastructure: firstly, comprehensive surveys of artists on the one hand and cultural consumption on the other hand should be carried out with the support of public funding; secondly, a national cultural statistic should be established, illuminating the size, impact and evolution of the cultural sector in comparative perspective; thirdly, the public availability of organization-level data as well as communal surveys on cultural production and consumption issues should be improved; fourthly, the transparency of existing data sources and their accessibility should be improved by archiving them centrally, e.g. at the ZA.culture, arts, artists, production, distribution, consumption, reception, cultural sector, cultural industries.