Abstract
How did opposing actors struggle to rearrange power in one of contemporary Egypt’s most historic events, the 2011 revolution? In Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, Mona El-Ghobashy weaves an original narrative going beyond the common tropes of success and failure. Her account puts uncertainty (or contingency, a word oddly absent from the book) at the center of the analysis as its “foundational framework” (p. 243). Specifically, the book aims to show how an “unexpected uprising opened up several possibilities for how Egypt would be governed” (p. 28). In a time of grim fatalism, reintroducing this sense of possibilities and the inherent coexistence of multiple futures within revolutionary conjunctures is quite salutary.
Bread and Freedom opens with a prologue of vignettes from the famed “18 days” of the uprising (25 January to 11 February). The author then moves in Chapter One to situate her own project within the multitude of narratives of the uprising. She locates her work in the continuity of Charles Tilly’s distinction between revolutionary situations (RS) and revolutionary outcomes, which helps us understand situations of multiple competing sovereignties where different outcomes remain possible. Tilly’s approach also suggests thinking of revolutions as extra-ordinary outgrowths of everyday political contention rather than sui generis phenomena, reintroducing uncertainty and nonlinearity as important features of revolutions. The book proceeds with six chapters that loosely trail the timeline of contentious politics in contemporary Egypt, starting with public politics under Mubarak (Chapter 2) and ending with the consolidation of power by the new regime (Chapter 6).
Looking at the years leading to the revolution, the author prefers understanding the multitude of forms of contention in Mubarak’s Egypt “on their own terms” (p. 52), rather than trying to detect “changing relations between rulers and ruled” (p. 83). By rejecting common distinctions between economic, social, and political contention, El-Ghobashy remarkably excavates minor contentious episodes that would have otherwise been coded as petty crimes. She thus identifies two forms of social power built by interest groups while confronting the regime that emerged. The first was an anti-Mubarak coalition, whose goal was change in a political and institutional sense. The second was hundreds if not thousands of scattered protests by people targeting those who ruled them directly. Their goal was to disrupt daily functioning and compel the state to negotiate—which it often did.
When Mubarak stepped down, the military seized power; but various actors contested its legitimacy to rule. The power struggle between ancien régime personnel and new and old civilian contenders became the defining feature and the main producer of uncertainty during the first year of the RS. One of El-Ghobashy’s main arguments in Chapter Three is that this uncertainty shouldn’t be dismissed as noise; it should be at the center of our narratives. Uncertainty sheds light on how and why actors, with different social locations, interests, and stakes, act in certain ways. As she notes, the “social locations of the insurgent forces and the incumbents is what drives the conflict, not a free-floating ideational contest.” This line challenges many of the retrospective narratives that have espoused what the author aptly calls “prosecutorial” tones—that is, blaming one actor or another for the nonrevolutionary outcome.
Uncertainty also marred the rocky arrangements for transferring power to civilians in 2012, making it “the maximum moment of conflicts in Egypt’s revolutionary situation” (p. 130). This period, under close study in Chapter Four, witnessed heightened electoral and parliamentary activity. Unlike others, El-Ghobashy rejects the common distinction between a political process (constitution-writing, elections, institutional politics) and a revolutionary process (street action, contentious politics). She argues that elections and parliament shouldn’t be isolated from other contentious spaces but seen as “a new arena for multiple conflicts over state powers” (p. 131). By carefully reconstructing the interactions between the different protagonists, arguments such as the lack of vision of players or their ideological backgrounds as the main cause of the failure of democratization seem less convincing.
Chapter Five tells the story of Mohamed Morsi’s crisis-filled one-year presidency. The focus here is on “how the first civilian president struggled to build governing authority and mounting problems” (p. 169). Following on the previous chapter, El-Ghobashy steers away from the prosecutorial tropes and resorts to a more situational approach. Her account places Morsi’s year in office in a wider context, “that of a first-time elected civilian chief executive facing hostile entrenched interests” (p. 169). Comparing his presidency with other first-time elected civilian chief executives, El-Ghobashy underlines how, regarding the specifics of Egypt, similar contexts have yielded comparable results. Going back to the book’s main thread, she reminds us that uncertainty produced by the coexistence of many actors, with different stakes, understandings, and interests, can help us understand these situations.
In the book’s last chapter, El-Ghobashy shows how the RS terminated in a nonrevolutionary outcome. She describes how the military establishment moved to reconquer the state and strove to build a new counterrevolutionary order that isn’t a mere return to the Mubarak regime. Behind the moniker of “state prestige,” she explains the current regime’s action as emanating from its will to “overwrite the parenthesis of the revolution” (p. 238), seeking to erase the changes that had occurred in the relations between ruler and ruled and impose a new, unquestioned form of sovereignty, free of deliberation.
Bread and Freedom is an engaging, remarkably well-written, political-historical account of the Egyptian RS. The book’s numerous qualities also elicit a stimulating debate. One point of debate is the book’s striking classicism. For Bread and Freedom does indeed hold a paradoxical quality: it is a novel and original book that is also deeply classical. This classicism expresses itself in several important ways; I’ll mention two. First, while interviews and observations have become staple methods within the qualitative sociology and political science of the Middle East, Bread and Freedom chooses to solely rely on the “torrent of documents” (for a list, see p. 44) produced by the revolution. Here, classicism is a virtue: the breadth of the documentation sheds light on episodes that have been absent from accounts of the revolution. However, the author’s justification for this choice is debatable. El-Ghobashy opposes a “hermeneutic study that recovers and represent subjects’ inner states (emotions and dispositions)” (p. 42)—that is, subjects’ self-understandings and her own “analytical narrative of events” (ibid). This dualism, almost reproducing classical (again) distinctions between objective and subjective, structure and action, seems to be more of an obstacle to research on revolutions than anything. Indeed, following authors like Ivan Ermakoff, whom El-Ghobashy cites in her theoretical conclusion, we can argue that subjects’ self-understandings are both an invaluable indicator and a crucial mechanism of the indeterminacy, volatility, and uncertainty she so aptly describes.
Second, El-Ghobashy’s main theoretical interlocutors are, beyond Tilly of course, classical authors of the transitology era. The younger generation of scholars of the Egyptian revolution remain largely absent from the theoretical discussions. The book tends to oscillate between, on the one hand, being a book of political history, documenting and organizing a series of events, and providing a renewed—and highly convincing—narrative of what went on in that period. And on the other hand, an analytic intervention, and a tentative explanation of revolutionary mechanisms, without necessarily engaging with the literature.
The methodological choices, the data, and the theoretical interlocutors all tend to produce a general trend: despite the vivid vignettes of popular politics, the narrative remains one of high politics. This is not a critique, per se, as El-Ghobashy acknowledges that, in her perspective, “[b]y definition, revolutions are about control over states,” making most of the narrative a nuanced and compelling (hi)story of how a variety of actors engaged to redefine how Egypt would be ruled. But it doesn’t exhaust other possible discussions of what revolutions are (also) about. In any case, Bread and Freedom’s classicism reminds us how classical tools and insights can produce novel arguments about the Egyptian Revolution, and that this classicism shouldn’t be an obstacle to Bread and Freedom becoming a classic.