Civil Society and Political Transformation in Egypt

Time to Think Again? A reflection by Alan Fowler

Tags: Africa
Additional tags: Egypy civil society civic driven change

“Why did diplomats, policymakers, analysts and academics fail to see and understand the growing popular unrest in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries? With this question in mind, Alan Fowler travelled to Cairo, Egypt. In this post, he shares a personal account of emerging insights and tough questions for supporters and researchers of civic action. 

It seems that the reasons why we thought a revolution impossible were wrong, our identification of the agents of change was misguided and our understanding of how collective mobilisation happens was too narrow. We need new ways to capture what is happening on the ground through the eyes of these countries' people.Informed by social movement theory about actors, agency and how change happens, we ended up asking the wrong questions as to why the people have risen. In Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, was there an organised social movement? Certainly not: Did they have visible leadership? No. Did they have a massive, or at least significant following? Not in the conventional sense of a mobilised constituency.Our analytical perspectives failed to enable us to ‘see like citizens' and understand that people were overcoming barriers of fear and reaching breaking point.”

(Mariz Tadros, IDS Bulletin 7 February, 2011)

With these words in the back of my mind, at the invitation of Plan International, in early May I went to Cairo.  My work required visits to the city’s slums and neglected neighbourhoods.  It involved (translated) discussions with young men and women who had been active on the streets during the revolution as well as listening to the experiences of savings and loan associations run by women and the stories of members of women’s literacy groups.  The post-revolutionary sense of empowerment was strong.  The youth made clear that their message to power holders was ‘listen and hear, or meet us in Tahrir!”, the focal point of protest.  The regenerative themes drawn by women in the literacy group had, I was told, become more assertive in tone and more public centred in terms of their hopes and demands.  Through their eyes and stories, the most important gain from all the unrest and violence seemed as much about restoring their dignity as it was about winning freedom.

Why did this political outpouring happen now, and not a year back or a year hence?  What is it that we, as observers and analysis of these unanticipated events, missed?  Explanations abound about the multiple contributory reasons for revolt:  high levels of youth unemployment; rigged elections and an illegitimate regime; endemic corruption; inflated food prices; abuse of human rights with impunity for the abusers; oppression of political parties; playing up fear of an ‘Islamic threat’; reported regime instigation of sectarian violence and bombings to justify continuation of emergency powers?  The list goes on. 

And what do observers’ search for in such processes?  We look for visible sites and the formal institutions responsible for all these issues.  We note people’s reactions to them in forms that we can understand because they resemble expressions of NGOs and formal civil society organisations with which we are familiar.  But what we do not see, or even look for, are what Jeffrey Goldfarb (2006) calls the ‘politics of the kitchen table’.  That is the discussions and struggles of families who function in all walks of life as they make sense of what is happening to and around them and decide where to put their energy.  Those taking to the streets were not ‘organised civil society’.  They were traders fed up with bribing the police.  They were office workers from corporations big and small.  They were middle class professionals from many fields alongside factory workers and small scale, subsistence farmers from along the banks of the river Nile.  They were the unemployed and unemployable.  They were people with disabilities.  They were, simply, Egyptian citizens who had, for years, been denied a sense of self-worth, who were collectively fed up enough to overcome fear and redefine the situation for themselves, not as power holders would have them believe it to be. 

The process was spontaneous and virtually leaderless.  Figure heads came and went but were not legitimated or, it would appear, needed to hold the day and point the way.  This ‘unconventional’ revolt was aided and abetted by the technologies behind social networks that can connect multiple sites of leadership in real time.  This new political space to self-organise seems now to be a reality.  Enhancing the capacity of Egyptians to make use of that space will be a major challenge with a long time frame. 

I came away with many lessons.  Three stand out for civil society researchers.  One is to look beyond the usual expressions of organised civil society to find the drivers and places of civic energy.  That is, to fully comprehend the organic stuff of power at micro level and its connections.  Second is to look for civic energy that is ‘uncivil’ and potentially destabilizing.  In the case of Egypt this means working through the paradox of using public disobedience as the means to achieve the civic ends of a new, non-autocratic political dispensation.  A third lesson is to rethink leadership and followership that an upcoming, ‘connected generation’ will value and trust.  Because, as Clay Shirky (2008) suggests, beyond the failure of political parties, in the socio-politics of organising ‘here comes everybody’