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Since the military overthrow of President Mursi in mid-2013, Egypt has witnessed an authoritarian rollback. Through a combination of repression and nationalist securitizing discourses, popular pressure for reform was successfully channelled into a state-centric model of governance. But despite state violence and the restriction of public spaces, protests have anything but ceased. Contested Legitimacies explores this resilience of protest despite unprecedented repression through an approach attuned to the physical and discursive interactions among key players in Egypt's post-revolutionary arena. Starting with the successful Tamarod uprising against President Mursi, to the unsuccessful Islamist resistance against the military coup, to the Rabaa massacre and the shrinking spaces for protest under Al-Sisi's authoritarian rule, to the resurgence of popular resistance in the shape the Tiran and Sanafir island campaign, it investigates the rise and fall of different coalitions of contenders and explores their impact on Egypt's political transition.

Frontmatter -- Protest and Social Movements -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Conceptual Choices and Theoretical Framework -- 3 Brothers and Rebels -- 4 Coup and Anti-Coup -- 5 Myths and Martyrs -- 6 New Sheriff in Town -- 7 A Tale of Two Islands -- 8 Conclusion and Implications -- Appendix: A Mixed-Method Approach to the Study of Contentious Interaction -- Bibliography -- Index

Since the military overthrow of President Mursi in mid-2013, Egypt has witnessed an authoritarian rollback. Through a combination of repression and nationalist securitizing discourses, popular pressure for reform was successfully channelled into a state-centric model of governance. But despite state violence and the restriction of public spaces, protests have anything but ceased. Contested Legitimacies explores this resilience of protest despite unprecedented repression through an approach attuned to the physical and discursive interactions among key players in Egypt's post-revolutionary arena. Starting with the successful Tamarod uprising against President Mursi, to the unsuccessful Islamist resistance against the military coup, to the Rabaa massacre and the shrinking spaces for protest under Al-Sisi's authoritarian rule, to the resurgence of popular resistance in the shape the Tiran and Sanafir island campaign, it investigates the rise and fall of different coalitions of contenders and explores their impact on Egypt's political transition.

Roger Mac Ginty: Everyday Peace: How So-called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict. Studies in strategic peacebuilding. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2021. 978-0-19-756339-7

This dissertation examines the issue of mobilisation in the context of authoritarian contraction through the lenses of hegemony theory. It explores the shifting coali-tions of contenders in Egypt since the 2013 military coup and their contending conceptions of political legitimacy. Its conceptual perspective is defined by the realisation that processes of social mobilisation are contingent on the dynamics of interaction between political contenders. This interaction takes place on the streets between demonstrators and police forces, and it takes place on a discursive level where contenders articulate competing narratives about contentious events in an attempt to establish hegemony for their reading of social reality. I argue that the trajectory of mobilisation and opportunities for cross-movement alliance building, as well as the scale of repression wielded by authorities against their contenders heavily depend on the outcome of this latter, discursive struggle. Ac-cordingly, in this dissertation project I investigate the unfolding waves of mobili-sation in post-coup Egypt in a nested research design that combines quantitative protest event analysis with in-depth qualitative analysis of the contested discours-es about events on the ground. By tracking the contentious dynamics in Egypt with the proposed analytical focus from the 2013 Tamarod-uprising, over the An-ti-Coup campaign against the deposition of President Mursi, to the restoration of an authoritarian order under the aegis of General Al-Sisi and, finally, to the 2016 Tiran and Sanafir island protests, I highlight the impact of shifts in the discursive architecture of contentious politics on the conditions of possibility and the oppor-tunity structures for both, resistance and repression. The aim of investigating pro-cesses of political contestation both in the discursive and the performative arena is to illustrate how the narratives established around contentious events crucially account for variances in the reaction of movements to regime action, of ...

This is the sixth post in the blog series "Movements and Institutions". How is it that the actions of institutions come to be perceived as unjust by a critical mass? And how does this perception translate into collective action? Adopting a framing perspective, this article proposes to investigate the meanings that people attach to specific events as key for understanding interaction dynamics between social movement and institutions.

"Vier Jahre nach dem Arabischen Frühling herrscht in Nordafrika Frust: Die Hoffnungen auf ein gerechtes Leben und das Ende von Korruption und Polizeiwillkür haben sich nicht erfüllt. Außerdem behindern die neuen und alten Regime weiterhin grundlegende Reformen und beschneiden die Meinungsfreiheit." (Autorenreferat)

"The coming to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has provoked fears of an 'Islamization' of the Egyptian foreign policy. In fact, President Mohamed Morsi has lifted the spell of inertia that dominated the country's foreign affairs under the rule of the Mubarak regime. However, the new president's foreign agenda is not primarily shaped by ideology. This article illustrates how both economic calculations and logics of domestic legitimation are governing Egypt's foreign affairs today. Moreover, it examines the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on the country's foreign relations." (author's abstract)

Social movements and institutions are central actors in national and transnational politics as well as core categories of social inquiry. Despite their importance, both terms are still haunted by a lack of thorough definitions. We introduce a blog series with ten weekly contributions on their interrelation, outlining several innovative approaches and suggesting some vantage points for rethinking 'Movements' and 'Institutions' in a productive manner.