Following the overthrow of Husni Mubarak, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya and members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad created two political parties. This article investigates these groups’ organizational dynamics and internal dialogues in order to uncover the rationale of their political participation after the January 2011 uprising and its internal ideational legitimization. Based on interviews with leaders and members of these two groups and their political parties, this article argues that these formerly violent insurgent groups embraced nonviolent participation in democratic politics through an internal reassessment of the political opportunities afforded to them by Egypt’s brief political opening.
This article will examine the activism of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, or the “nude Egyptian blogger,” to reflect on the pause that naked bodies insert into civic life and to evaluate nudity as means of protest in Egyptian as well as transnational feminist politics. By “making visible what had no business being seen,” to quote Jacques Rancière, Elmahdy’s nude body reconfigures the body politic and reimagines the theater of the political. Her activism incorporates two distinct phases. Elmahdy initially launched her nude body into the blogosphere to mark the Arab revolutions as a highly sexualized topography. By elevating gender and sexuality to the forefront of local and global geopolitical conversations, Elmahdy brought sex to Tahrir Square, or underscored its primacy there. Her more recent alliance with the global feminist organization Femen reveals points of tension with her virtual revisioning of the body politic, given her affiliation with an arguably Islamophobic, neocolonial feminist agenda on the streets. Yet both phases of Elmahdy’s activism enlist her body where least expected in order to challenge the patriarchal cartography of Tahrir Square and the gendering of national space more broadly, as well as to re-member the global feminist public square.
In this paper, we examine the effect of the political instability witnessed subsequent to the Arab spring revolutions on the stock markets’ performance. We analyse the reaction of the Egyptian stock exchange to eight major political events in the post-revolution period.
The paper differentiates between political instability arising from factors within the ordinary course of political transition and under the government’s control (endogenous) and that arising from factors which are not within the ordinary course of political transition and outside the government’s control (exogenous).
The paper concludes that political instability imposes a significant effect on the performance of the Egyptian Stock Exchange and that the impact of events not within the course of political transition is more significant than that of events within the ordinary course of political transition.
This paper discusses the data limitations associated with the measurement of top incomes and inequality in the Middle East, with special emphasis to the case of Egypt. It has been noted that high inequality might have contributed to the Arab spring revolt movement. Some studies have argued however that measured inequality in Middle East countries is not particularly large by international standards, and that popular discontent mostly reflects the perceived level of inequality, and the perceived (un)fairness of the distribution. In this paper we review the evidence and present new estimates. We come with two main conclusions. First, data sources at the national level are insufficient to derive reliable estimates of top income shares in a country like Egypt(or in other Middle East countries). One would need reliable fiscal sources in order to make a precise comparison with other emerging or developed countries. Unfortunately, such sources are lacking in most of the region. Next, and irrespective of these uncertainties on within-country inequalities, there is no doubt that income inequality is extremely large at the level of the Middle East taken as whole-simply because regional inequality in per capita GNP is particularly large. According to our benchmark estimates, the share of total Middle East income accruing to the top 10% income receivers is currently 55% (vs.48% in the United States,36% in Western Europe, and 54% in South Africa). Under plausible assumptions, the top 10% income share could be well over 60%, and the top 1% share might exceed 25% (vs. 20% in the United States,11% in Western Europe, and 17% in South Africa). Popular discontent might reflect the fact that perceptions about inequality and the (un)fairness of the distribution are determined by regional (and/or global) inequality, and not only on national inequality.
State-society relations have seen significant upheaval in Egypt in the wake of the Arab uprisings of 2011. This paper examines the struggle over the labor movement and the status of minority groups, specifically the Coptic Orthodox minority and the Nubian community. In each of these issue areas, I argue that changes at the regime level since 2011 have had considerable effects on the processes of change that have been unleashed with the uprising of 2011, but that these processes are specific to state–society relations within these issue areas and not reducible to regime-level outcomes. Across these otherwise unrelated issue areas I argue that parallel sets of dynamics have been at work, owing to institutional legacies from the pre-2011 period. In the cases of the workers’ movements and the Coptic Orthodox minority, a legacy of neocorporatism has meant that these dynamics have been marked by 1) the struggle for control over the institutional legacies of the Mubarak period, and 2) a parallel mobilization of movements within each population that vie to break the respective elite monopoly over group representation vis-à-vis the state. Within the case of the Nubian community, on the other hand, low levels of incorporation and institutionalization did not prevent the community from making an unexepected breakthrough in the highly corporatist constitutional revision process of 2013.