The Dynamics of Egyptian Politics

Introduction

Two thousand and eight was an eventful year in Egypt’s politics. It began with a nationwide strike by 55,000 property tax collectors to demand decent wages and working conditions. By that point, strikes and slowdowns were a routine practice among both industrial workers and civil servants, but the tax collectors’ strike was unusual for organizing a large 10-day encampment in the heart of Cairo that drew sympathetic media coverage, leading the government to concede strikers’ demands. On April 6, a highly anticipated general strike coordinated by Cairo youth activists and textile workers in the labor stronghold of Mahalla al-Kubra was thwarted by security forces. Police arrested the Cairo activists and violently suppressed protests by Mahalla townspeople, leading to three deaths. The failed general strike birthed a new political actor, the April 6th Youth Movement, an off-shoot of the social movement Kifaya (Enough!) that was agitating against President Hosni Mubarak’s plans to transfer power to his son Gamal.

Two days later on April 8, municipal elections that were delayed by 2 years took place amid a sweeping campaign of arrests and beatings of opposition candidates. It was the first time that the Mubarak regime had broken with its clockwork scheduling of national and local elections to regroup after a bruising general election result in 2005 that saw the highest opposition representation in parliament in 30 years. The election result saw the president’s National Democratic Party put a lock on 97.5% of local government seats. During the summer, a high-profile campaign to protect the local environment was at its peak in the port city of Damietta. A cross-class coalition of residents was effectively opposing the building of a fertilizer complex, a deal that the local governor had made with an international consortium as a showcase for attracting foreign investment (Elmusa & Sowers, 2009). As the year drew to a close, opposition and independent news media hailed a court decision that The New York Times reported with more puzzlement than cheer: “An Egyptian court on Tuesday ordered the government to stop piping natural gas to Israel, saying the 15-year contract was improperly awarded because it was not approved by parliament” (El-Naggar, 2008). The suit was brought against the government by cause lawyers and opposition activists, succeeding in blocking Egypt’s sale of natural gas to Israel for 3 years until a higher court struck down the decision as encroaching on executive privilege.

With the hindsight of Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in 2011 as part of the regional wave of uprisings that began in Tunisia, scholars looked back on Egypt’s 2008 in one of three ways. One approach narrates pre-2011 politics as a dry run for the 2011 mass rising, retrospectively investing every worker strike and street demonstration with epic importance. “The 2011 uprising did not come out of nowhere,” declared Jeroen Gunning and Zvi Baron, “but emerged from a decade of intense protest waves which had forged, and been forged by, activists in ever-widening protest networks. Each wave built on the previous ones, strengthening existing networks, extending network links and bringing in more sectors of society” (Gunning & Baron, 2013, pp. 94–95). Another approach treats 2011 as year zero, seeing everything that came before as a void filled with fear and paralysis. Digital media scholar Zeynep Tufekci (2017) wrote that “Egyptian media did not report news that reflected badly on the government, especially news about protests. People feared talking about politics except with their close family and friends—and sometimes even with them” (Tufekci, 2017, p. 13). A third view, reminiscent of Soviet studies scholars after 1991, reflected on why Middle East political science “missed” the Arab uprisings. In mid-2011, Gause concluded, “Explaining the stability of Arab authoritarians was an important analytic task, but it led some of us to underestimate the forces for change that were bubbling below, and at times above, the surface of Arab politics” (2011, p. 90).

All are variations of a common fallacy that attaches to momentous, unexpected events such as the 2011 uprising: the hindsight bias that recasts what happened as bound to happen. All that came before the Big Event is either inflated as a dress rehearsal or deflated as having no impact on the spectacular eruption of mass discontent. This article proposes an alternative approach to Egypt’s pre-uprising politics that analyzes them on their own terms. It avoids retrospectively reading back into them what we know about 2011 and what came after, arguing for a dynamic conceptualization of politics in authoritarian regimes freed from the dual fixation on regime stability or overthrow.

Ways of Seeing

Gause was referring to the dominant paradigm in Middle East political science in the decade preceding 2011, a group of studies broadly referred to under the heading of “authoritarian resilience.” Abandoning the earlier question of why Arab polities were not transitioning to democracy, these scholars focused instead on the morphology of actually existing ruling regimes. Joining the renewed emphasis on institutions in the political science discipline, Middle East specialists dissected rulers’ divide-and-rule strategies toward opposition parties (Lust-Okar, 2005; Posusney & Angrist, 2005); refurbishing presidential parties to contain elite conflict (Brownlee, 2007); manipulating constitutions to enable rather than constrain executive power (Brown, 2002); compelling citizens to participate in outlandish public spectacles as a projection of regime power (Wedeen, 1999); instrumentalizing civic associations to foster support for the government (Jamal, 2007); creating exclusive ties with crony businessmen to reap the benefits of economic growth (Haddad, 2011); and maintaining limited elections instead of no elections as a creative way to solve a cluster of governance problems (Blaydes, 2011). Instead of a teleological conception of autocracies as anachronisms hopelessly out of sync with democratic modernity, or the cartoonish image of tin-pot dictatorships held together by blood and iron, the collective portrait of Arab authoritarianism emerging from this literature is one of crafty, ever-flexible rulers centering themselves in complex webs of domestic and international alliances; managing opposition through alternating doses of repression and co-optation; and learning quickly from each other’s best-practices and mistakes. In a word, “Adaptable autocrats” (Stacher, 2012).

What is wrong with this picture? It is not that it ignored change, but that somewhere along the way, taking modern authoritarianism seriously as a complex form of rule turned into a version of structural-functionalism, where every practice, institution, group, or policy in political life was appraised solely in terms of how it contributed to the maintenance and reproduction of the overall authoritarian structure. Since the focus of the research program was the political system as a whole, defined as the presence of the same leader or dynasty in power for decades, the research question came with a built-in answer: how does the system maintain itself? Elements of political life that drew scholars’ attention were scrutinized for the role they played in reinforcing the whole. If the part did not have a visible, direct, and dramatic impact on a leader’s grip on national power, it was deemed insignificant. Conflict in the system was not ignored, but reconceptualized as dissension among elite factions, since opposition forces and the broader public were deemed too weak or neutralized to pose a challenge to ruling elites. ¹ If with Rule (1988, p. 279) we define theory as offering “some distinctive way of slicing up reality for analytic attention,” the authoritarian resilience paradigm sliced up the reality of Arab politics to focus attention on the strategies, institutions, and personnel of “authoritarian upgrading” (Heydemann, 2007). If Arab leaders remained in power for decades, the work of explanation was to show how institutions enabled them to do so.

The Dynamics of Contention (2001) (DoC) program, or a relational contentious politics approach sees the political world through different lenses. Its starting point is that political life consists of relations rather than durable systems that unfailingly absorb and assimilate all new or unusual inputs. The unit of analysis is not a structure, institution, or idea, but a relation bringing together at least two actors or social sites, and often many more. In that sense, it bypasses the sharp structure-agency dichotomy that organizes so much of modern social-political explanation, or the interminable dichotomy between ideas and interests as spurs of action, where the analyst approaching a problem must decide at the threshold whether she will be adopting one or the other point of view. ² As I see it, three core premises characterize the relational approach to politics. First, interaction is the stuff of politics. ³ A party makes a claim on another party, with the government involved as a target, initiator, or monitor of the claim. In practice, many more than three parties constitute an interaction; politics is often driven by the proliferation of parties to a dispute. In Egypt, the government figured overwhelmingly as the target of insistent public demands, but as we will see below, it was ever-present as a monitor to every political interaction, and sometimes organized and facilitated claim-making, as when the president’s party organized counter-rallies hailing his leadership to offset opposition demonstrations.

A second premise is that political interaction is conflict-filled. Governments control substantial coercive means, so “large-scale violence always remains a possibility, however faint,” (Tilly & Tarrow, 2015a, p. 9). ⁴ Egypt’s government did not hesitate to use violence to break up the planned April general strike and to prevent opposition candidates from contesting municipal polls. Even when state violence was not activated, making claims on the government invites conflict; the Damietta environmental campaign and the lawsuit against selling gas to Israel obstructed the Mubarak government’s core objectives of clinching deals with foreign corporations and other governments, compelling government officials to scramble and devise responses and assurances to its international partners. The third premise concerns ontology, or DOC’s conception of the character of the socio-political world. Given its conceptual foundations in interaction and conflict, it is not surprising that DOC sees continuous change as the way the world works. Perhaps this is the most obvious difference between the structuralist ontology of political science institutionalism and DOC’s understanding of political life as “active sites of creation and change” (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 22). Charles Tilly’s (2008, p. 123) resounding declaration that recurrent structures, sequences, and teleological processes do not exist must sound very odd to the ears of a social scientist trained to focus on institutions:

Boundaries of social units are porous; structures keep changing; sequences never quite repeat themselves; ostensibly directional processes stop, reverse, or split; what has happened before affects the character of the next structure, sequence, or process.

Where the authoritarian resilience paradigm saw stable albeit self-renovating elites and their control structures, DOC would see continuous, dialectical change in the character of both governments and the diverse social groups over which they ruled. Through their incessant interaction, governments, oppositions, interest groups, media, and a host of other actors do not remain the same, instead undergoing transmutations through reciprocal influence. DOC descends one level down from the abstraction of structuralism, capturing a host of interactions, confrontations, and substantive issues that structuralism cannot see, or is not interested in seeing. To be precise, then, authoritarian resilience did not ignore change. But instead of tracing it at the level of political interactions, it saw change solely as an attribute of governmental elites, parsing how they adapted and shape-shifted to remain stable, but not doing the same for governments’ interlocutors, missing how the latter altered or developed their conceptions of state power and authority. The critique of authoritarian resilience as “missing” the Arab uprisings itself misses the mark, for no paradigm can predict when and how such upheavals will occur and unfold. Rather, authoritarian resilience depicted Arab politics as a limited one-way affair, the doings of state elites as they cultivated their allies, managed their clients, and manipulated their oppositions to augment their power. It was caught off guard by the 2011 uprisings not because it did not predict them, but because it had no map for the range of conflicts and repeated confrontations that caused the risings and continued to proliferate after their outbreak. ⁵ It had no such map because it assumed a priori the insignificance of collective actors that were not in the top ruling echelon.

To see how authoritarian-era politics looks different when peered at through DOC lenses, the remainder of this article offers a tour d’horizon of the 10 years prior to Mubarak’s fall, replacing the 2008 events that opened this article back into the broader streams of political contention from which they came. As an organizing device, the exposition centers on protests, elections, and courts as three sites or arenas where the collective political struggle that is meant by “contentious politics” unfolded. ⁶ Streets, courtrooms, and electoral contests are spaces where we can observe not:

linear sequences of contention in which the same actors go through the repeated motions of expressing preestablished claims in lock-step, but as iterative sites of interaction in which different streams of mobilization and demobilization intersect, identities form and evolve, and new forms of action are invented, honed, and rejected as actors interact with one another and with opponents and third parties (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 30).

By widening the lens to take in a broader range of actors and arenas than the standard focus on elites in the executive and opposition counter-elites, we gain a better understanding of how political power and authority are made and remade within authoritarian polities.

Streets, Elections, and Courts: The Sites of Contentious Politics

In 1981 when Hosni Mubarak became president, few would have predicted that two-thirds of the way into his 29-year tenure, there would be three recognizable spaces of political conflict whose constitutive practices eventually undermined his rule: streets, elections, and courts. These were not self-evident, existing arenas where Egyptians went to “do their politics,” rather they are my analytical selection and reconstruction, to show how they came into being through continuous interaction over time between an expanding set of actors: government agents at various levels, loyal and disloyal oppositions, pro- and anti-government interest groups, activist organizations, public campaigns, a diverse press scene, international actors, and various opinion publics. This account projects forward in time what the late economic historian Roger Owen presciently predicted in 1991 that Egyptian politics would follow a path “whereby a widening scope for opposition can still be reconciled with the continuation, even the strengthening, of one-party rule.”

On March 5, 2000, on her way back from school, 15-year-old Samah Mostafa Abdallah was struck and killed by a truck as she crossed the hazardous Cairo-Alexandria highway where it bisected her town of Mit Nama in Qalyoubiyya province. Three thousand townspeople assembled and blocked the highway, demanding that authorities build a pedestrian footbridge to prevent recurring road fatalities. Security officials ordered the use of tear gas, injuring 25 people and arresting 75. Prosecutors later referred 77 “rioters” (plus 13 minors) to the Supreme State Security Court. ⁷ One week later, in the town of Awlad Seif in neighboring Sharqiyya province, a speeding tour bus careened into a group of women waiting to cross the highway, killing 15-year-old student Doaa’ El-Sayed and 19-year-old textile worker Hanan Abdel ‘Al. One resident announced the news on the mosque’s loudspeaker, bringing out a crowd to the scene. They blocked the highway for 4 hr, torched the tour bus, and stoned a train that happened to halt near the scene. Residents clashed with firemen and security forces, and 17 were arrested. The Sharqiyya governor ordered the swift disbursement of compensation to the families of the dead and injured girls. ⁸

No accounts of politics before or after the 2011 revolution mention the Nile Delta towns of Mit Nama or Awlad Seif. Their residents’ direct actions are coded as “disturbances” and relegated to the crime pages of government newspapers and the municipalities’ pages of the opposition press, reflecting an entrenched legal, policing, and reporting tradition in Egypt that parochializes such events as riots (ahdath shaghab) and criminalizes them as unlawful assembly (tagamhor). Yet as Hobsbawm (1952) famously argued about 18th century popular action, the purposefulness of crowds’ actions points not to spasmodic eruptions of rage but targeted pressure on authorities, “collective bargaining by riot.” ⁹ The Mit Nama and Awlad Seif events exemplify a genus of neighborhood- or town-based protests that reflect broader trends in Egypt’s political economy in the new millennium. By that point, the government’s IMF-sponsored Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Program begun in 1991 had altered the state’s role in economic management from direct producer, public goods provider, price-setter, and employer to seeker of foreign investment, implementer of austerity programs, and privatizer of state-owned assets. What that meant for a majority of citizens were higher costs of living, shrinking public services, chronic unemployment and precarious employment, and mass evictions. ¹⁰ Residents in the two towns decried the lack of safe crossings on hastily-built new highways, part of infrastructure policies to facilitate commerce with no regard for the impact on locals’ daily lives and no mechanisms to incorporate their input during decision-making. In other towns, residents held disruptive public gatherings to demand potable water, wreck mobile phone towers erected without their consultation (fearing their rumored carcinogenic effects), and protest the demolition of their homes by municipal authorities. ¹¹

The potential for local protests to scale up to the national level was revealed by an episode from Coptic politics at the tail end of 2004. Egypt’s largest minority community of Coptic Christians had long chafed under official discrimination and social bigotry and began airing their grievances in confrontational collective action. In November 2004, the wife of the priest of Abul Matameer town in Beheira province left her home and did not return. When news surfaced that she had converted to Islam and was in police custody in Cairo, Coptic protesters packed into buses and made their way to the seat of the Coptic Papacy in Cairo, beseeching Pope Shenouda to pressure the police to return Constantin to the church. The crowd camped out in the Cathedral courtyard for 6 days and clashed with riot police. Even after police detectives acceded to their demands and handed over Constantin (she was secluded in a monastery), the Pope remained in seclusion to signal his displeasure and draw attention to other Coptic grievances, particularly government restrictions on the building of churches and the trend of Coptic women’s conversion to Islam, which Copts believed were coerced and sectarian Muslims insisted were voluntary. ¹² The Constantin case shifted Coptic politics from a pattern of closed-door deliberations between church elders and government officials to visible, contentious bargaining powered by the disruptive direct actions of the Coptic citizenry. ¹³

A second genus of protests was workplace-based collective action in government bureaus and industrial plants. With the onset of a privatization push in 2004, protests spread among workers fighting their redundancy and precarity by the sale of state-owned enterprises to politically-connected foreign and Egyptian businessmen. Joel Beinin tracked a wave of labor protests from 2004 to 2008 that saw more than a twofold increase in the incidence of workplace actions, from 266 to 609 (Beinin, 2010, pp. 17–18; Beinin & El-Hamalawy, 2007). Resistance to the downgrading of labor was not confined to the industrial sector. Middling and lower-ranking civil servants protested their poor employment conditions as their higher-status peers in other government units received much higher pay for equivalent work, a reflection of widespread structural inequalities within Egypt’s administrative hierarchy. ¹⁴ The chief demand of the striking tax collectors mentioned in the introduction was pay equity with their better-compensated counterparts in the Ministry of Finance. After they won this demand, half of them went on to found an independent tax collectors’ union in 2009 that was the first autonomous union in Egypt since 1957. By the spring of 2010, groups of striking and protesting civil servants hoping for similar gains were camping out across from parliament for weeks on end, and by the summer, the Ahmed Nazif government that had renewed the privatization drive in 2004 quietly announced the end of the policy. ¹⁵

The third type of protests might be classified as associational, that is, demonstrations and other forms of action organized by professional associations, student unions, and networks of political activists. The label “political” is often assigned to such actions to distinguish them from the “economic” or “local” demands of the above two types of protest. However, as we have seen, workplace and neighborhood-based protests were anything but unpolitical in their grievances and modes of action. By DOC’s definition, the involvement of government agents as targets and monitors at every protest renders it political, whether or not protesters make claims on national power-holders. Classifying Egypt’s protest infrastructure by base of mobilization rather than content of demands helps us appreciate the sheer diversity of grievances and police responses, while understanding when and how different types of protest merged, or were prevented from merging.

Regional wars and the Egyptian regime’s response to them propelled an intense wave of associational contention from 2000 to 2003. The second Palestinian Intifada of 2000 and the two major invasions in the 21st-century Middle East—Israel’s reinvasion of the West Bank in 2002 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003—were crucial feeders of Egypt’s emergent protest culture. The televised suffering of Palestinians and Iraqis under military occupation did not only redefine the framing of public issues, as Marc Lynch (2006) has shown, but led to a surge of politicization among both politics-prone and politics-shy sectors of the Egyptian and broader Arab publics. ¹⁶ Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s reinvasion of the West Bank on March 29, 2002 spurred a 6-week surge of nationwide demonstrations that journalists called an “Egyptian Intifada.” Nearly every university witnessed large demonstrations, leading to the police killing of one student with live ammunition. Countless public meetings were organized, a stream of protest letters and petitions were lodged with the American and European embassies, and a coordinated consumer boycott of businesses supporting Israel eventually forced the Sainsbury’s British supermarket chain to shutter its 100 outlets in Egypt.

To deal with the surge, the government diversified its set of responses. Top-tier authority figures appropriated popular solidarity innovations. The president’s wife Suzanne Mubarak personally fronted a street procession of government officials to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza, and along with other presidential wives, organized an “Arab summit for women,” ostensibly to support Palestinian women. ¹⁷ The president’s son Gamal and other grandees led a “mass rally” inside Cairo Stadium in the lead-up to the American-led war on Iraq. Realizing that they could no longer physically prevent multiplying street demonstrations without fatally overstretching their resources, police switched to a strategy of minimizing their consequences. The technique was to encircle protesters within associational headquarters, street corners, or dead-end streets with thick corrals of riot police to prevent demonstrators from spilling out onto streets and merging with bystanders. In police thinking, activists’ agitation was tinder to ambient public grievances, liable to erupt into instant conflagration. “People can shout as much as they want inside,” said a police officer about a thousands-strong public meeting at the bar association against Israeli policies. “But we won’t let them out and risk major chaos in the streets.” ¹⁸

Soon after the first U.S. cruise missiles were dropped on Baghdad on March 19, 2003, crowds descended on Tahrir Square in a 20,000-strong throng, for the first time outnumbering the startled contingent of anti-riot police deployed continuously near the Square since 2001. ¹⁹ In hindsight as well as in the moment, the 10-hr occupation of Tahrir Square on March 20 registered as a signal event. Journalist Amira Howeidy captured the scene. “For 10 hours, the capital’s most famous and strategic square was occupied by people from all age groups and walks of life; activists’ politicians; students; children; passersby; families; housewives; professors; beggars; journalists; and downtown Cairo residents.” ²⁰ Politicians delivered fiery speeches against U.S. war-making, activists sang 1970s-vintage protest songs, young people chalked the pavement, and dozens of candles were lit at sunset. By the next day, police had regained their footing and used overwhelming force to clear Tahrir and abort any further mass demonstrations. In the ensuing running street battles with police, a quick-moving band of protesters tore down a huge poster of Mubarak from the government party headquarters. Police violently dispersed a sit-in at the nearby bar association and arrested two parliamentary deputies, along with 800 activists and at least six children. ²¹

Much can be said about these protean protests and my rough classification by organizational base rather than content of grievances, but here I highlight one point. There was no uniform policing tactic of repression or co-optation. Sometimes, the forces of order broke up gatherings by force; other times, they corralled protesters to prevent them from swelling their ranks with curious onlookers; other times, they arrested them or referred them to prosecutors; and still other times, they appropriated the protest performance, as when the first lady led a procession to express solidarity with Gaza. At all times, police agents were present and active, monitoring, channeling, negotiating, and wielding force. As Moustafa (2004) observed at the time, “Although the Egyptian government still hems in demonstrations with an overwhelming security presence, the mere fact that protests are tacitly permitted outside the gates of university campuses marks a qualitative shift in Egyptian political life.” At the peak of the labor strike wave, the Minister of Labor acknowledged the frequency of protests and framed them as a product of “the democratic climate experienced by Egypt for quite a while.” ²² Both rhetorically and materially, ministerial officials and on-the-ground police tacticians alike expended considerable effort to manage the heightened mobilization on Egypt’s streets, reminiscent of Charles Tilly’s insight about “the co-evolution of spatially organized policing with prevailing routines of popular politics” (2000, p. 137). Unlike retrospective accounts that either inflate or erase prerevolutionary protest patterns, the stream of confrontations sketched here shows how carefully police calibrated their responses to each encounter. From this microscopic vantage, ostensibly uniform structures such as “authoritarian policing” break down into their constituent interactions, revealing police improvisation and adaptation not as a mechanical “upgrade” of authoritarianism but close on the heels of various groups’ increasingly assertive claims to public space.

Axial Elections

For the authoritarian resilience paradigm, Egypt was among a handful of cases exemplifying how authoritarian incumbents instrumentalized elections to manage the division of spoils among the ruling elite; co-opt opposition forces by rendering them more invested in the system; and gain information about opposition strongholds and regime support bases (Gandhi & Lust-Okar, 2009). Earlier studies had taken a less functionalist perspective, foregrounding how elections “are an important arena of struggle,” as Marsha Pripstein Posusney argued, one that provided “new opportunities for political mobilization” (2005, p. 35). The 2005 election cycle was the most critical of Mubarak’s tenure in this regard, an axis around which pre- and post-election mobilization turned. Mubarak was expected to seek a fifth 6-year term in 2005, and in February announced a switch from single-candidate plebiscitary elections to a multi-candidate poll, billing it as the centerpiece of his regime’s steady march to democracy. No one expected an open-ended competition for the presidency; the reform was widely understood as a step in the regime’s careful preparation for Mubarak’s son Gamal to inherit power in the next 2011 cycle through a stage-managed poll.

The electoral calendar for 2005 contained three important dates: a May constitutional referendum authorizing the switch to multi-candidate presidential elections, the new presidential elections in September, and parliamentary elections at the end of the year. The uncertainty in these contests lay not in who would win and govern, but in the nature of the struggle; by what margin would the president claim a victory over his ostensible challengers? How many seats would the opposition secure in parliament? How would judicial supervision of elections, the game-changing new rule stipulated by a landmark court ruling in 2000 (Moustafa, 2007), impact the outcome?

The regime’s own electoral scheduling offered the opportunity for mobilization. On December 12, 2004, a small, silent but attention-grabbing protest on the High Court steps in downtown Cairo brought together 500 activists and cause lawyers who had forged ties in the pro-Palestine and anti-war protest networks. They called themselves the Egyptian Movement for Change, or more popularly Kifaya (Enough), and sought to build a critique of the president as a lackey of United States and Israeli interests and to “become a thorn in the side of Mubarak’s re-election,” as a spokesman told a reporter. ²³ Kifaya’s signature performance became a weekly Wednesday anti-Mubarak protest in some central Cairo location, always encircled by hundreds of policemen and sometimes personally monitored by Cairo police chief Nabil al-Ezabi. On referendum day, May 25th, a Kifaya crowd chanted “Down with Hosni Mubarak!” and urged the public to boycott the vote. Counter-demonstrators organized by the president’s party charged into the Kifaya crowd, dragged and beat protesters, and sexually assaulted scores of women activists as plainclothes policemen facilitated and joined the attack. The government violence became the lede of the news story to an international audience; First Lady Laura Bush’s coincidental visit to Cairo in the same week had further riveted media attention on Egypt. The government tried to redirect the narrative to its image of a regime marching toward democracy, claiming 54% turnout and 83% approval. That prompted a faction of 1,500 independent judges (out of a total ~7,000) overseeing the vote to issue their own counter–count in a scathing report, finding judicial supervision in 5% of polling stations and turnout not exceeding 3% (HRW, 2005).

More unpleasant surprises surfaced in the September presidential election. A handful of loyalist opposition party leaders had been handpicked to lose against Mubarak, but a relatively young liberal politician named Ayman Nour entered the race unbidden. With the support of the Muslim Brothers (MBs), the opposition movement with the largest voter base, Nour came in a distant second with 7% of the vote to Mubarak’s 88%. Soon after, he was tried on politicized charges and sentenced to a 5-year jail term. Even those anticipating more surprises during the November parliamentary elections did not foresee the actual chain of events. To the astonishment of their own leaders and despite government violence that caused 14 fatalities, candidates of the MB secured 88 seats, a fivefold increase of their parliamentary representation in the prior election cycle. Factoring in seats won by non-Islamist opposition, the total proportion of opposition seats in the 2005 parliament was 27%, the highest since the return of multiparty general elections in 1976. In no small part, this outcome was enabled by the concerted mobilization of independent judges who asserted their authority to oversee the count. In one of the most high-profile districts pitting a Mubarak crony against an MB candidate, a supervising legal officer blew the whistle on government ballot-tampering to favor their man, publishing her account, endorsed by 137 of her colleagues, in a credible independent daily. ²⁴

The three elections mattered both for what happened inside polling stations on election day and the unpredictable interactions between a large number of actors long before and after polls had closed. From a relational perspective, the significance of a loose network such as Kifaya was less what it did than what it compelled others to do. It invited government violence; the taboo-breaking violence against women activists drew copious negative media coverage and increased sympathy for the movement among various publics. It prompted Egypt’s largest opposition organization, the MB, to take calculated risks and organize what was described as their first street demonstration on domestic issues, quickly broken up by police. ²⁵ This febrile political atmosphere in turn activated the dissident judges to confront the government on its election rigging, publicizing evidence of electoral fraud and offering their alternative turnout figures. International observation teams relied on the judges’ work to produce their own assessment of the polls; “the role of the judges was perhaps the most encouraging element of the presidential election,” concluded a U.S. election-monitoring organization (International Republican Institute, 2005). The signal that a robust and independent core of judges would protect ballots in turn motivated opposition candidates and their supporters to brave police violence, leading to the highest opposition representation in parliament since 1976.

Thinking dichotomously, the Mubarak regime was the same before and after the three elections of 2005, ably weathering the domestic political turbulence. Thinking relationally, a new collective actor had begun to emerge in Egypt’s politics, a loose “negative coalition” thrusting together opposition deputies, networks of confrontational activists, and dissident judges who had together constructed the Mubarak regime as an “isolative, corrupt, and repressive clique of rulers” (Dix, 1984, p. 445). International media and civil society certified this coalition by supporting its existence and validating its claims, though pivotal foreign governments (the United States and European Union) stopped short of withholding their support of Mubarak. It was to disassemble this emergent alliance that the government went after the dissident judges immediately after the elections, fearful that the presence of respectable, non-radical state officials could pull in more social interests into an anti-Mubarak bandwagon.

In early 2006, when judges used the platform they had gained during elections to press their long-standing demand for independence from the executive, the government censured two of their most outspoken representatives and brought them before a disciplinary tribunal. The judges’ association escalated. Borrowing a disruptive tactic from humble workers’ repertoire, they announced a sit-in at their downtown Cairo headquarters, Nadi al-Quda (the Judges’ Club) to protest the disciplining of their two colleagues. Hundreds of judges from across the country descended on the Club to take turns manning and financially supporting the sit-in, which lasted for 4 weeks in a public relations fiasco for the government. For 1 month in Spring 2006, the Club became the beachhead of the anti-government coalition; the New York Times called it “a stately building that has become a kind of headquarters for people calling for more democracy” (Slackman & El-Naggar, 2006). Kifaya led solidarity marches and erected a tent sit-in across from the Club. Delegations of admiring social worthies visited the Club’s leadership, including the newly elected opposition MPs. If the Mubarak government had hoped to intimidate judges into quiescence, it had instead brought them national and international adulation. “All rise for the judges of Egypt,” hailed The Christian Science Monitor. ²⁶

Legal Mobilization

Administrative courtrooms may seem an odd arena to see contentious politics, but not when we define what they do. Derived from the French model, these specialized courts adjudicate disputes between private citizens and public officials, from the lowliest clerk in an obscure government unit up to cabinet ministers, the Coptic Pope, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, and the president. Administrative judges ascertain whether official acts conform to the laws and constitution, and also have the authority to review legislation and election procedures. That creates a latent adversarial relationship between administrative judges and executive branch officers, a relation that litigating citizens have exploited and activated to induce rulings in their favor. Between 2000 and 2009, cases filed before the administrative courts went from 13,470 to 59,200, a 440% increase. ²⁷ To be sure, this aggregate figure can hold multiple interpretations, from the ever-widening governmental regulation of social and economic life to routine daily disputes between individual complainants and the administration. Our concern is with the subset of cases affecting social groups, and the mechanisms by which administrative litigation turned into a political instrument in the hands of cause lawyers and opposition activists to induce court rulings against government policies.

Take the area of privatization of the commons, where starting in the 1990s, cabinet ministers and provincial governors inked agreements with investors to appropriate public spaces without any form of public notice, much less consultation. In Egypt’s second city of Alexandria, a citizens’ group called The Society of Friends of the Environment (SFE) began filing lawsuits against the governor’s decisions allotting public gardens to developers erecting malls and high-rises. SFE’s successful litigation on these issues was transmitted by opposition journalists, who translated the copious but dense information in the judicial rulings into accessible feature stories exposing the opaque government-business dealings hastening environmental degradation. ²⁸ Journalists thus helped create a public information role for administrative litigation, at the same time shaping public understanding of the courts as a significant institutional counterweight to insulated bureaucrats. When the SFE secured a ruling against the privatization of prime beachfront properties in Alexandria’s tony Rushdi neighborhood, a leftist weekly narrated it as a “historic court decision.” ²⁹ The opposition press made resort to the courts visible. Newspapers published photos of workers and shantytown residents massing on the steps of the newly constructed administrative courthouse, chanting slogans against the government to draw public attention to their lawsuits. ³⁰ Later in the aughts, with judges’ permission, television cameramen and news anchors were allowed into courtrooms on the days of verdicts on what came to be called “public opinion cases” (qadaya ra’i ‘am).

Another area of concerted litigation concerned the regime of fees, duties, tolls, and taxes imposed by the government in its creeping privatization of public services. Quarry truck drivers, pensioners, and plaintiffs all filed and won suits against new service fees, but the case that drew sustained national attention was the sudden policy pegging new sanitation fees to consumers’ electricity bills. This was the government’s attempt to pass on to consumers a new 15-year contract agreement subcontracting trash disposal to multinational companies, despite the existence of efficient, indigenous trash-collectors (zabbaleen) in every major Egyptian city. Citizens’ groups in Alexandria, Giza, and Cairo filed separate lawsuits disputing the corporatized waste collection scheme, and in December 2004, “to the government’s utter confusion and shock,” the Supreme Administrative Court harmonized conflicting lower court rulings into a final decision invalidating the new fees as illegal and unconstitutional. ³¹

Contesting public policies made out of public view eventually moved to the most insulated domain of all: the Mubarak regime’s foreign relations. Take the lawsuit targeting the export of natural gas to Israel mentioned at the beginning of this article. As soon as the gas began to flow in May 2008, a group of Kifaya activists led by a former diplomat filed suit, on the narrow grounds that the government was selling the gas at below-market prices. Their political purpose, however, was an extension of their street demonstrations: to harass and discredit the Mubarak regime before public opinion. The court ruling came in the midst of intense region-wide anger at the Israeli military’s bombing of Gaza in winter 2008 to 2009, and Mubarak’s complicity in enforcing Israel’s blockade on Gazans. The ruling generated a 2-year debate over Mubarak cronies’ role in selling Egyptian natural resources to Israel and the lack of parliamentary oversight over such export agreements; the gas was to be sold by a consortium co-owned by top Mubarak crony businessman Hussein Salem. Ultimately, the Supreme Administrative Court overruled the lower court decision in 2010, ruling that the export agreement was a sovereign act beyond the reach of judicial scrutiny. But the plaintiffs got what they wanted—a protracted, loud public controversy, with numerous televised court sessions, late-night talk show debates, and opinion pieces that dragged out into the open what stakeholders worked to shield: the deep economic and personal ties underpinning Egypt–Israel cooperation.

The year 2010 saw a spate of anti-government court rulings on high-profile public policies. Courts invalidated the sale of state-owned land to a another powerful Mubarak crony; ordered police officers removed from university campuses, a long-standing battle by academic freedom groups; called on the government to institute a minimum wage; struck down the Interior Minister’s banning of mobile phones in police stations, facilitating the public’s increasing use of phones to record police torture practices; and struck down the Coptic Pope’s banning of a second marriage for divorced Coptic Egyptians, a case brought by Coptic laypersons against their patriarch. One of Egypt’s two major independent dailies headlined its year-in-review that courts were “the hero that ruled Egypt in 2010.” The court reporter enthused, “Instead of resorting to parliament and its members to solve their problems, or appealing to dispute resolution committees within ministries, citizens in 2010 found refuge in Majlis al-Dawla (administrative courts) to compel the government to abide by the law and roll back its unconstitutional decrees.” ³²

The obvious question is whether the government implemented any of these decisions, as well as cases where the courts upheld government acts. Tracking the winding path of each ruling through the phases of government appeal, claimants’ counter-appeals, delays, and partial implementation requires a separate extended study. Here, let me underscore the rationale of resorting to administrative litigation as a political instrument, apart from the disposition of each case. To be sure, plaintiffs delighted in anti-government rulings, but the disposition of cases was less important to them than the open and protracted play of claims and counter-claims in the court of public opinion. Cause lawyers and activists purposely sought the drawn-out procedure of lodging a case, writing their brief as a form of claim-making, attending multiple court hearings which were now televised, massing on courthouse steps to display signage and chant slogans, appearing on talk shows and penning opinion pieces, and then repeating the whole series during the inevitable appeals process. In effect, they sought to leverage administrative litigation as a form of public agenda-setting. Timothy Mitchell’s conceptualization of democratic contention developed in another context captures the political logic of activist Egyptians’ administrative-litigation-as-mobilization:

Democratic struggles become a battle over the distribution of issues, attempting to establish as matters of public concern questions that others claim as private (such as the level of wages paid by employers), as belonging to nature (such as the exhaustion of natural resources or the composition of gases in the atmosphere), or as ruled by laws of the market (such as financial speculation) (2011, p. 9).

In a similar vein but via different routes, political theorist Norberto Bobbio frames democracy as an insurgent “advent of visible government” in a long history of invisible power, the arcana imperii or “need to make major political decisions in secret, far from the public’s indiscreet eyes” (Bobbio, 1984, p. 10). From this vantage, the nub of administrative litigation is the effort to reduce the social distance between rulers and ruled, by ensnaring them in legally mediated controversies contrived expressly to unmask the arcana imperii. In Tilly’s terms (2007, p. 140), resorting to courts to contest public policies compels the state to behave in conformity to the expressed demands of its citizens.

Reupping Repression

It would be tempting to remember the final years of Mubarak’s rule as a crescendo of popular mobilization that culminates in the 2011 uprising, but that would skip over some stubborn facts. The year 2008, which introduced this article, was also the beginning of a government counter-offensive aimed at demobilization, or reducing the resources aggregated by political actors for their claim-making. The mobilization process that peaked in 2008 was not unstoppable or irreversible but spurred government counter-action, exemplifying Tilly’s point above that “ostensibly directional processes stop, reverse, or split.” The government campaign was both reactive and preemptive, a response to the incipient coalition-building of 2005 to 2006 and seeking to preempt any renewed mobilization in the lead-up to general and presidential elections in 2010 and 2011. Power-holders sought a pacified political arena as the moment of leadership succession approached, putatively to Gamal Mubarak.

In the arena of protest, the government’s swift break-up of the April 6th general strike before it could get off the ground may be explained as its effort to abort brokerage, the “linking of two or more currently unconnected social sites by a unit that mediates their relations with each other” (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 157). Youth activists attempted to connect the Cairo-based associational milieu of demonstrations from which they came with the labor tradition of workplace strikes epitomized in the textile town of Mahalla. But the government was not about to tolerate that kind of dangerous linkage between Egypt’s different protest subcultures. Repression continued for weeks after the breakup; 49 demonstrators were tried in an exceptional court and 22 of them were sentenced to three- and 5-year jail terms. Security forces prevented the sit-in of hundreds of engineers at their union in downtown Cairo, and began experimenting with the communications shutdown it would implement more fully in 2011, blocking Kifaya’s website and issuing new regulations requiring internet café users to provide detailed personal information before accessing the web. ³³ Nevertheless, a new political actor emerged out of the episode, a confrontational offshoot of Kifaya calling itself The April 6th Youth Movement. The youth activists organized demonstrations on that date in 2009 and 2010 that police met with mass arrests, and they were one of the frontline organizers of the nationwide January 25, 2011 protest action that led to Mubarak’s ouster 18 days later.

In the electoral arena, as we have seen in the introduction, the government engineered total control over municipal polls in 2008. Its next target was parliamentary elections in 2010 to deprive opposition forces of a platform in the national legislature from where they could harass the incoming presidential heir. The central plank of the government’s plan to control general elections was removing judges as poll monitors, the wildcard actor that had exposed the government’s election rigging and enabled unprecedented opposition gains in 2005. First, the constitution was amended to wrest responsibility for vote-counting from judges to state functionaries under the aegis of a Higher Election Commission with no authority beyond announcing election returns. Then, the government moved to shut down the locus of judicial mobilization, sparing no financial or human resources to defeat the dissident judges in their Club’s internal elections. ³⁴ The results were immediate: the president’s party secured 93% of seats and loyalist opposition parties 3%. Not a single member of the outgoing parliamentary opposition retained his seat, but together they styled themselves a “parallel parliament” (barlaman muwazi). On December 14, 2010, as Hosni Mubarak addressed the inaugural session of the parliament packed with his loyalists, a score of ex-deputies arrayed themselves on the steps of the administrative court building, the now commonsense gathering space for Egypt’s wronged and evicted, and recited in unison the parliamentary oath to protect the republic and defend the people’s interests.

Conclusion

What is noteworthy about Egypt’s politics in the decade surveyed here is not that the government was in “decay” while the opposition was winning. Nor the mirror image of this hopeful story that the government exerted steady control and remained unaffected by the “resistance from below.” It is how many political actors emerged, amalgamated, collided, cooperated, split, and disappeared, increasing the density of Egypt’s public politics as can be detected in the arenas of streets, elections, and courts. Put another way, a range of social conflicts were finding political expression. If we think of authoritarian regimes as existing to suppress and re-divert socioeconomic conflicts into safer channels, then the Mubarak regime was simultaneously succeeding and failing. It succeeded in the sense that it vigilantly tracked and managed every arena of contentious politics, but it failed in tamping down conflict once and for all. Every time it cracked down or co-opted a claim-making group, the claimants regrouped later or mutated into a different form, and sure enough government agents followed hard on their heels. Then in 2011 came a breakthrough. For the first time, resourceful political groups and large segments of the broader citizenry outflanked and defeated the police, induced a split in the ruling coalition, and compelled its military wing to step in and oust the longtime president before protesters could capture the state. In the ensuing revolutionary situation, the conflicts that had proliferated under Mubarak multiplied and intersected in ways that we have yet to fully understand.

The DoC program centers conflict as the meat of political interaction ³⁵ and thus the object of explanation, leading it to ask different, almost childlike questions: “What are they shouting about?” This master question about the substance of political conflict calls up other seemingly simple, but philosophically profound questions about the building blocks of politics: how do political actors form, change, and disappear? How do they acquire and change their collective identities? How do they interact with other political actors, including holders of power? How do existing institutions promote, inhibit, or shape all these processes? ³⁶ The last question is the closest DOC comes to political science institutionalism, but its agenda is different. Institutions in DOC do not tower over the political arena, setting rules, constraining actors, molding identities, all while themselves evolving very slowly or being transformed in sudden explosive bursts that then return to a new equilibrium. As deposits of human interaction like everything else, they are rarely placid, they can be causes but also effects, and most important, they co-evolve with the varieties of popular politics that they facilitate and contain.

“It is still true that every way of seeing is a way of not seeing,” writes civil rights scholar Charles Payne (2007, p. xx). By definition, structuralist approaches to authoritarian institutions downgraded the political interactions surveyed here. They did not see them because they were fixated on systemic factors of stabilization and reproduction. ³⁷ But even if they had widened their scope of vision, they would still not have attributed the same significance that I am attributing here to these forms of contentious politics. Similar to observers of capitalism who conceive of change in dichotomous terms of survival or breakdown, authoritarian resilience analysts do not tend to think dialectically about the political world, tracking the mutual influence of governments and social groups. Reasoning that vast power asymmetries between regimes and oppositions ruled out meaningful reciprocal influence, they trained their sights on how ruling coalitions renovated themselves, ignoring the broader environment of conflicts that shaped both governments and oppositions. In fixating on the already powerful, rulers and their retinues, they missed how political oppositions, activist networks, and citizen collectives were assertively extending their influence over public politics, not least through the power of obstruction. It was these small, uncoordinated acts of obstruction that scaled up to a revolutionary situation, when the anti-Mubarak coalition captured Tahrir Square in January to February 2011 and compelled the military generals to first remove Mubarak, then improvise a cohabitation with an emboldened, heterogeneous protest movement.

My purpose in juxtaposing two ways of looking at Egypt’s politics is not to announce some grand resolution of their differences. It is to preserve and sharpen those differences by underlining their contrasting ontologies. Conceptual and theoretical frameworks train us to notice certain facts as meaningful and to leave others by the wayside. “Even where a particular theory conveys no clear-cut positive or negative evaluative tone to its subject,” Rule reminds, “it endows the empirical world with meaning it would not otherwise have” (1988, p. 320). The implication is that the authoritarian resilience paradigm and the DOC research program do not exhaust how we understand politics in authoritarian regimes. If the former trains attention on how rulers amass power and the latter replaces rulers as one of multiple centers of power, other approaches might linger on more precisely defining what power and authority are, returning us to a foundational question in the history of government.