When the Dust settles: Trajectories and Biographical Consequences of Participation in Egypt’s 2011 Revolution

A decade after Egypt’s 2011 revolution and authoritarianism has staged a full-fledged comeback to the country, heralding the defeat of the revolutionary project. Governing through repression strategies such as surveillance, censorship, and militarization, ElSisi’s regime has been regularly chipping away at the revolution’s memories and symbols, and stymieing spaces of contestation. Notwithstanding these systematic erasures, the revolution in Egypt was a seismic event that marked the biographies of its participants, leaving behind social legacies that are still unfolding. This dissertation adopts a processual approach to studying the biographical consequences revolutionary participants endure in their subjectivities, affective ties, and career paths. To do so, it theoretically weaves the notions of political socialisation, transformative events and “Midan moments,” and the biographical outcomes of activism, illuminating the meso and macro levels where individuals are embedded and delineating the revolution’s catalytic role. Methodologically, the dissertation analyzes 21 life histories of rank-and-file participants to chart their trajectories for their foray into politics to their withdrawal. It follows interlocutors hailing from diverse geographical backgrounds in Egypt, specifically big urban cities like Cairo and Alexandria, and peripheral governorates in the Suez Canal and the Nile Delta. In doing so, the dissertation underscores the temporal, spatial and affective elements that patterned these trajectories. As such, it finds that most rank-and-file participants were pre-disposed to join revolutionary politics given the political socialization processes at home, mosques and universities (bar few first movers) and through intimate watersheds and historical events like the second Palestinian Intifada. These sites and events interlaced interlocutors’ participation trajectories enabling them to transfer seamlessly across groups and organizations where they accrued skills, networks and social capital. As the revolution and its “Midan moments” crisscrossed their lives, it set in motion experiential, relational-cognitive, polarization and diffusion-related, and spatial processes that transformed their gendered sense of self-hood, the dynamics of their affective ties and their professional paths. My interlocutors reformulated their subjectivities, acquired feminist consciousness, mental health and spatial awareness, and reinterpreted religion and social codes. They took up alternative career paths through which they could uphold and embody the revolutionary values and ideals they endorsed. In their relational world, they experienced disruption, alienation and estrangement as they navigated their personal changes. The dissertation posits that some of these biographical consequences were exacerbated for participants coming from peripheral locations, heeding the role of space and spatial marginalization as a fundamental force in shaping how revolutionary processes are experienced. Female interlocutors, from peripheral governorates in particular, continue to bear the brunt of their political engagement having delayed personal, professional or material goals, due to their double marginalization across gender and regional lines. This dissertation contributes to the study of biographical outcomes of revolutionary participation in the SWANA region by applying a processual approach that heeds interwoven processes, multiplicity of causality, temporality and spatiality in the co-production of outcomes. More importantly it contributes to understanding the outcomes that revolutionary processes have in the lives of the less committed after the dust settles and when the “revolutionary dream is defeated.”