What caused the revolution in Egypt? | Duncan Green

Demographics, technology, foreign policy, legitimacy of the state, torture, corruption and other factors all played a part in bringing discontented Egyptians out on the streets When interpreting something like the Egyptian upheaval, people tend to project their own passions on to the screen. The twitterati see a social media revolution, the foodies see food price hikes at its core, others see a hunger for democratisation, human rights groups see a backlash against routine torture and abuse. So I thought I’d try to pull together and categorise the full range of different “drivers of change” involved in bringing about a revolution. First, consider the demographics: an explosive mix of high population growth, leading to a “youth bulge”, combined with urbanisation, jobless growth partly linked to structural adjustment, and the rapid expansion of university education has produced what the BBC’s Paul Mason calls ” a new sociological type , the graduate with no future”. Two-thirds of Egyptians are under 30, and each year 700,000 new graduates chase 200,000 new jobs. Then there’s the technology. Although I instinctively share Malcolm Gladwell’s scepticism on this, social media (and new old media like al-Jazeera) have clearly played an important part. Ranil Dissanayake on Aid Thoughts writes: “… the ordinariness of how it [demonstration] starts was quickly made apparent to people across the world through the media but also through social networking (and this could be the real impact of FB [Facebook] and Twitter, rather than any organisational function – they emphasised that demonstration and revolution were being undertaken by ordinary people, demystifying the process).” Egypt’s foreign policy has also been an important factor – divorced from public opinion for many years, particularly on Israel and Palestine. According to Oxfam’s Cairo-based Adam Taylor-Awny, this cemented the feeling that the government was a US puppet government and delegitimised it in many eyes. The erosion of legitimacy went much deeper than foreign policy, though. An increasingly sclerotic state plus an ageing president have produced a threefold institutional deficit summarised by Sufyan Alissa in a 2007 paper for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as “institutions that influence the work of the bureaucracy, institutions that shape politicians’ behaviour by punishing or rewarding certain types of behaviour – influencing the accountability and transparency of politicians – and institutions that widen political space and participation for Egyptian citizens”. That sclerosis undermined the state’s legitimacy and made it unable to respond quickly and effectively to the rising tide of protests. At a more visceral level, the routine and growing presence of torture and corruption became the common enemy that bound protesters together across classes. And the army, which appears to have emerged with its reputation enhanced (at least so far), failed to back the president, while Washington’s confusion and contradictory messages reduced its influence. But various other events brought deeper rumblings to the surface. The most celebrated event of the protests (other than the overthrow of two presidents and counting) was of course the sacrifice of Mohammed Bouazizi , the Tunisian street vendor whose self immolation sparked Tunisia’s Jasmine revolution, and the ensuing domino effect across the Arab world. Others include the impact of the WikiLeaks revelations that US diplomats saw Tunisia as a “mafia state” run by President Ben Ali and his hated wife, Leila Trabelsi – did that weaken elite support for Ben Ali? And how did all these factors interact? What were the pathways and dynamics of change? The most striking aspect is path dependency – how a sequence of events and actions were able to overcome the deep-rooted (and well-justified) fear of potential protesters, getting enough people onto the streets to give them a degree of immunity. In Egypt, small groups put on simultaneous “flash mob” demonstrations in numerous locations, outmanoeuvring the security forces in a new kind of urban, social media-driven guerilla protest. Finally, protesters used humour – a weapon that always seems to baffle autocrats. I’m left with lots of questions, of course: what was the level of “granularity” of the protest movement (mass movements are almost never entirely homogeneous, but “lumpy”, with smaller, more durable building blocks such as workers and farmers organisations, mosques, youth groups, etc)? According to Oxfam’s Ihab El-Sakkout: “The vast majority of the demonstrators were at quite a distance from any organised activist group. On the other hand, the fact that some of the protestors were parts of organised groups played an important role at critical points. The example that best springs to mind is on 2 and 3 February, when the protestors were attacked viciously by regime thugs – the Muslim Brotherhood and organised football fan groups … played a key role in defending [Tahrir] Square, which helped to turn those in the square from a mass of individuals into a cohesive group able to defend itself.” What degree of interaction did the protest movement have with factions of the political or business elite? What was the gender breakdown of the protests – men seemed to dominate the TV images (El-Sakkout guesstimates the proportion of the women in the protests at 10, which may well be high by the region’s historical standards). And of course, the biggest question of all: what happens next? I’d particularly welcome two kinds of comments: what’s missing from this analysis and what do you think of the framework – does it add anything and how can it be improved? Egypt Middle East Protest Tunisia Duncan Green guardian.co.uk

Posted by on February 17, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry