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Frontmatter -- Contents -- LIST OF TABLES -- FOREWORD -- ACKNOWLEDGMENT -- A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION -- INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER 1 The Family, Politics, and the Familial Ethos -- CHAPTER 2 Reproducing the Family -- CHAPTER 3 Networks: The Political Lifeline of Community -- CHAPTER 4 Informality: Politics and Economics in Tandem -- CHAPTER 5 Politics as Distribution -- CONCLUSIONS -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

This cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical volume explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power on the mega-city of Cairo. Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public's role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and loses in the "march to the modern and the global" as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion volume to Cairo Cosmopolitan (AUC Press, 2006) further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies.

Uprisings are complex, rare phenomenon, and this article suggests that the shared regional diffusion of protest in the Arab Spring was lubricated by the economic inequalities of neoliberalism. Young people in Egypt and the larger Middle East have been disproportionately disadvantaged by neoliberalism and a demographic youth bulge. They were economically excluded by high unemployment and insecure jobs in the informal sector; they were politically excluded by authoritarianism and state repression; and they were socially excluded by the limbo of "waithood," or prolonged adolescence as marriage and entry into adulthood was delayed, in part due to the high cost of marriage. Yet, at the same time, these commonly shared grievances facilitated weak ties linking diverse constituencies together, as creative leaders built a "movement of movements." The April 6 movement, and Kefaya before it, creatively adopted a non-hierarchical model of collective action that was organically suited to the vast informal and subterranean networks already dominant within Egyptian life. Young women and men risked their lives pursuing regime change, and one of the master frames of the uprisings that demanded "dignity" may provide particular opportunities for the women's movement. A gendered concept, dignity suggests that the state must respect the integrity, safety, and autonomy of the body. Despite massive challenges to the women's movement and its allies in Egypt as conservative forces are also emboldened by the Arab Spring, the master frame of dignity may resonate across the Egyptian public since it is a revolutionary frame, as well, yet lays bare longstanding grievances of the diverse Egyptian women's movement.

Watching the uprisings unfold in the Middle East, as well as the opposition to them, leads me to appreciate the insights of social movement theory, which suggests that heterogeneous forces can unite in coalitions around super targets when political opportunities suddenly and serendipitously emerge. In this historic moment of change and resistance, will we see the unfolding institutional transformation of the state as it responds to a more participatory ethos, or will former regime stalwarts reconstitute themselves? Elected officials and new governance strategies will still confront serious distributional and economic challenges as states remain enmeshed in neoliberal policies. Political scientists are already studying constitutional change and debates about electoral design, party construction, and other institutional changes to democratize the polity, but we should also look to different transition models that seek to redress deep structural inequalities following decades of repression and rent seeking. Should principles of political or economic affirmative action be incorporated into new institutional designs of transitology?

What has warranted the Egyptian government's use of state security courts, military courts, military law, and exceptional regulation and control of political life over the course of more than five decades? Clearly, Islamist radicals who have been willing to use violence against the state and civilians outside the parameters of the law warrant strong measures…. [Yet] these laws have remained in place even as the government has claimed that its policies have vanquished the Islamist threat.