{"id":5902,"date":"2011-02-03T09:38:53","date_gmt":"2011-02-03T13:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=5902"},"modified":"2011-02-03T09:41:36","modified_gmt":"2011-02-03T13:41:36","slug":"from-cairo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/from-cairo\/","title":{"rendered":"From Cairo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The photos above are by our friend the poet Belle Gironda<\/strong> who is\u00a0teaching\u00a0at the American University in Cairo and returned to that city a or so week ago. Yesterday she took a whole batch of photos and posted them to her\u00a0facebook\u00a0page. So, if you have access to\u00a0facebook, go check them out there, i.e. click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nicole just sent over the following analysis on political\/historical background on Cairo events \u2014 a insightful article by Paul Amar<\/a><\/strong> on the Jadaliyy<\/em><\/strong> site. Below, the opening paras, you can read the whole piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

Why Mubarak is Out<\/h3>\n

The \u201cMarch of Millions\u201d in Cairo marks the spectacular emergence of a new political society in Egypt.\u00a0This uprising brings together a new coalition of forces, uniting reconfigured elements of the security state with prominent business people, internationalist leaders, and relatively new (or newly reconfigured ) mass movements of youth, labor, women\u2019s and religious groups.\u00a0President Hosni Mubarak lost his political power on Friday, 28 January. On that night the Egyptian military let Mubarak\u2019s ruling party headquarters burn down and ordered the police brigades attacking protesters to return to their barracks. When the evening call to prayer rang out and no one heeded Mubarak\u2019s curfew order, it was clear that the old president been reduced to a phantom authority. In order to understand where Egypt is going, and what shape democracy might take there, we need to set the extraordinarily successful popular mobilizations into their military, economic and social context.\u00a0What other forces were behind this sudden fall of Mubarak from power? And how will this transitional military-centered government get along with this millions-strong protest movement?<\/p>\n

Many international media commentators \u2013 and some academic and political analysts \u2013 are having a hard time understanding the complexity of forces driving and responding to these momentous events.\u00a0This confusion is driven by the binary \u201cgood guys versus bad guys\u201d lenses most use to view this uprising. Such perspectives obscure more than they illuminate. There are three prominent binary models out there and each one carries its own baggage:\u00a0\u00a0(1)\u00a0People versus Dictatorship<\/em>: This perspective leads to liberal na\u00efvet\u00e9 and confusion about the active role of military and elites in this uprising.\u00a0(2)\u00a0Seculars versus Islamists<\/em>: This model leads to a 1980s-style call for \u201cstability\u201d and Islamophobic fears about the containment of the supposedly extremist \u201cArab street.\u201d Or, (3)\u00a0Old Guard versus Frustrated Youth<\/em>: This lens imposes a 1960s-style romance on the protests but cannot begin to explain the structural and institutional dynamics driving the uprising, nor account for the key roles played by many 70-year-old Nasser-era figures.<\/p>\n

To map out a more comprehensive view, it may be helpful to identify the moving parts within the military and police institutions of the security state and how clashes within and between these coercive institutions relate to shifting class hierarchies and capital formations. I will also weigh these factors in relation to the breadth of new non-religious social movements and the internationalist or humanitarian identity of certain figures emerging at the center of the new opposition coalition.<\/p>\n

Western commentators, whether liberal, left or conservative, tend to see all forces of coercion in non-democratic states as the hammers of \u201cdictatorship\u201d or as expressions of the will of an authoritarian leader.\u00a0But each police, military and security institution has its own history, culture, class-allegiances, and, often its own autonomous sources of revenue and support as well.\u00a0It would take many books to lay this all out in detail; but let me make a brief attempt here.\u00a0In Egypt the police forces (al-shurta<\/em>) are run by the Interior Ministry which was very close to Mubarak and the Presidency and had become politically co-dependent on him.\u00a0But police stations gained relative autonomy during the past decades. In certain police stations this autonomy took the form of the adoption of a militant ideology or moral mission; or some Vice Police stations have taken up drug running; or some ran protection rackets that squeezed local small businesses.\u00a0The political dependability of the police, from a bottom-up perspective, is not high. Police grew to be quite self-interested and entrepreneurial on a station-by-station level.\u00a0In the 1980s, the police faced the growth of \u201cgangs,\u201d referred to in Egyptian Arabic asbaltagiya<\/em>. These street organizations had asserted self-rule over Cairo\u2019s many informal settlements and slums.\u00a0Foreigners and the Egyptian bourgeoisie assumed the baltagiya to be Islamists but they were mostly utterly unideological.\u00a0In the early 1990s the Interior Ministry decided \u201cif you can\u2019t beat them, hire them.\u201d\u00a0So the Interior Ministry and the Central Security Services started outsourcing coercion to these baltagiya, paying them well and training them to use sexualized brutality (from groping to rape) in order to punish and deter female protesters and male detainees, alike. During this period the Interior Ministry also turned the State Security Investigations (SSI) (mabahith amn al-dawla<\/em>) into a monstrous threat, detaining and torturing masses of domestic political dissidents.<\/p>\n

(continued here<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The photos above are by our friend the poet Belle Gironda who is\u00a0teaching\u00a0at the American University in Cairo and returned to that city a or so week ago. Yesterday she took a whole batch...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,813,52,61,71,1],"tags":[945,219,946],"class_list":["post-5902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arab-culture","category-demonstrations","category-human-rights","category-journalism","category-middle-east","category-uncategorized","tag-belle-gironda","tag-cairo","tag-paul-amar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5902"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5908,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5902\/revisions\/5908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}