Author: csbarr

Lana Salman (Harvard University) A little over a decade after the Arab revolution, how have marginalized Tunisians claimed political space, at what level, and to which ends? What do these experiences of claiming political space show about democratic politics beyond the conventional procedural dimensions? And what, if anything, could these experiences add to our understanding …

Nancy Demerdash (Albion College) Many might argue that the prospects of a progressive politics and democratic governance that the 2011 Egyptian revolution sought to realize have completely vanished. Those revolutionary aspirations for social change, political justice, economic opportunity, or civic equality have disintegrated, for some, into disillusioned desperations. In turn, recent cultural discourse about Egypt’s …

Siobhan Shilton (University of Bristol) The revolutions that began to sweep across countries in North Africa and the Middle East in December 2010 – like other revolutions in diverse modern historical contexts – have often been articulated, internally and externally, in black and white terms of success or failure, liberation or constraint, for or against, …

Shereen Abounaga (Cairo University) In the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty first century women’s presence was conspicuous through the arts; terms like subjectivity formation and self-expression were not uncommon. With the advent of the sweeping protests in the MENA region, women could really carve a distinguished space …

How do common legacies and shared histories of repression shape the mobilization calculations of dissident elites in divided societies? What factors bind and fracture consensus formation and ethnic elite bargaining during democratic openings? Focusing on the anti-Ba’athist opposition that emerged following the First Gulf War, this presentation will explore the strategic interactions among ethnic dissident …

Ali Kadivar (Boston College) When the United States assassinated General Qasem Soleymani in Iran, the correspondents, TV anchors, and viewers all were stunned by the massive turnout in his funeral in Tehran. While at the first glance, this might have appeared as a spontaneous event, this event was one of the many state-led mobilization events …

Neil Ketchley (Oxford University) Following the 2011 Arab Spring, autocrats have sought to limit citizens’ ability to publicize offline protests over social media. In this paper, we explore how users can adapt to these restrictions. To do so, we analyze 33 million tweets sent from Egypt during the “Day of Anger” protests in September 2020. …

Fatima Sadiqi (Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University) The 2010-2011 uprisings in the Maghrib were instigated by new actors, and also by the new ambiguities that postcolonial rule in the region created. After more than a decade, substantial changes in feminist contestation strategies and practices are changing the post-uprisings era and transforming feminisms and gender politics …

Hind Zaki (University of Connecticut) Egypt is currently witnessing a moment of reckoning with sexual violence with women from different wakes of life coming forward to share their experiences with gender-based violence in the workplace, at home, and in the street. Facebook pages like Girls’ revolution, Instagram accounts like @Assault Police and @Rapists, and online …

Nermin Allam (Rutgers University) The literature on contentious politics has not traditionally engaged with the politics of the veil in protest movements. In this paper, I investigate how shifts in opportunities influence women’s choices around veiling within the context of contention politics. Using the case of the 2011 Egyptian uprising, I show the different mechanisms …