{"id":68174,"date":"2025-02-04T17:19:54","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T17:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/anthropology\/lessons-from-tahrir-for-activists-and-their-allies\/"},"modified":"2025-02-04T17:19:54","modified_gmt":"2025-02-04T17:19:54","slug":"lessons-from-tahrir-for-activists-and-their-allies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=68174","title":{"rendered":"Lessons from Tahrir for activists and their allies"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Reflections on Rusha Latif\u2019s Tahrir\u2019s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution<\/em> (American University in Cairo Press, 2022).<\/h4>\n
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After more than 13 years of devastating civil war, it took just an astonishing 11 days for Syria\u2019s Bashar al-Assad to fall from power under the assault of the Turkish-backed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, in late 2024. With al-Assad gone, Syrians at home and abroad who had long opposed the repression, injustice and corruption of al-Assad\u2019s rule experienced a liberation of which they had long dreamed. Amid their jubilation, Syrians nevertheless also faced enormous uncertainties that continue to preoccupy all concerned with revolution and emancipation from authoritarianism, in Syria and beyond: what would come next? Would the ousting of a dictator lead to futures of greater social justice?\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Syrians are not the first to face these questions in an already tumultuous 21st<\/sup> century. Among the leaders who would (eventually) fall in the region, the extraordinary mass protests of Tunisians, and then Egyptians, also ousted decades-long dictators in astonishingly swift denouements in early 2011. At the time of writing, it is not yet possible to know if Syrians will experience, as have Tunisians and Egyptians, the subsequent counter-revolutionary undermining, over different time scales and through different means, of revolutionary dreams of emancipation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The prospect of such inquiries raises weighty questions that concern not only the conceptual nature of revolution and its impacts, but also methodological and ethical dilemmas. How can one study revolution and its effects?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
But there are some aspects of the swift fall of longstanding authoritarian rulers in Tunisia and Egypt that we perhaps may already anticipate for Syrians: the fall of the old regime may attract an increase in the number of researchers seeking to study communities of Syrians\u2019 experiences of revolution. The prospect of such inquiries raises weighty questions that concern not only the conceptual nature of revolution and its impacts, but also methodological and ethical dilemmas. How can one study revolution and its effects? And, as sociologist Mona Abaza (2011) has cautioned, whose (un)recognised labour is at stake in ensuing claims to expertise?<\/p>\n
The questions of what will come next, and how to study and learn from these processes, that loom large for Syrians make it all the more timely to learn from experiences elsewhere. One book that addresses these concerns is Rusha Latif\u2019s study of young Egyptian activists who helped organise the 2011 revolution: Tahrir\u2019s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution<\/em> (2022). Compelling for its argument that experienced youth activists helped instigate a revolution that was neither fully planned nor fully spontaneous, the book also offers a candid examination of how<\/em> to study a revolution. This methodological interrogation makes the book especially thought-provoking for anyone contemplating their own, or their advisees\u2019, fieldwork about social justice movements, as well as for broader discussions around the politics and ethics of field research.<\/p>\n
Those interested in revolutionary social change will find this book rewarding for its careful probing of the contingencies and paradoxes of revolution. Latif\u2019s six months of fieldwork in Egypt in the latter part of 2011, a time of ongoing protests and contested electoral campaigns, allowed her to carry out extended interviews with 25 youth activists, ten of whom became the focus of the book. Drawing on their life histories in order to understand the historical context and impacts of Egypt\u2019s 18 days of revolution, Latif offers a nuanced analysis of the \u201cmaking and unmaking\u201d (pp. 187) of revolutionary activists.<\/p>\n
In early January 2011, the youth activists in question had already been planning a protest for Egypt\u2019s forthcoming national holiday of January 25th<\/sup>; but after Tunisians ousted Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali on Jan 14th, the Egyptian activists became determined to scale up the forthcoming protests. Militants drew on their backgrounds of cross-partisan activist networks, cultivated over the ten preceding years (which Latif carefully traces), to help organise protests that, she argues, were crucial for the ousting of Hosni Mubarak on February 11th<\/sup>.<\/p>\n
Revolutionaries do not only seek to break with the past, then, but must also draw from the past. Elsewhere, I have traced how revolutionaries repurpose and recycle social relations to build revolutionary state power (Wilson 2016). For Egyptians in 2011 and its aftermath, however, these possibilities remained elusive. In Latif\u2019s assessment, the youth\u2019s horizontal leadership style, that sought to accommodate ideological diversity, disadvantaged the emergence of a revolutionary opposition government. In assessing such paradoxes, the book brings to the fore the \u201cmessy, human, relational\u201d (Latif, 2022, pp. 9) character of revolution.<\/p>\n
This approach allows Latif to debunk misleading representations of Egyptians\u2019 2011 revolution as \u201cleaderless\u201d and a \u201cFacebook revolution\u201d. Pointing out that such accounts are ahistorical and neglect the agency of Egyptians, Latif instead foregrounds the specific historical circumstances and forms of Egyptian agency that made the revolution possible. The book thus contributes to vital projects of retrieval: of the contingency of actors and events that lead to revolution (el-Ghobashy 2021), and of the agency of revolutionaries before and during their mobilisation (Takriti 2013), as well as in the aftermaths of revolution (Wilson 2024).<\/p>\n
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What made the expanded protests and, ultimately, the revolution, possible, then, was not \u201cthe internet\u201d, but skills and experience.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Specifically in the case of Egypt, Latif argues, through ten years of prior militancy and network-building, activists had developed the skills and contacts to organise and scale up protests. What made the expanded protests and, ultimately, the revolution, possible, then, was not \u201cthe internet\u201d, but skills and experience. The latter included the ability to frame grievances (Latif 2022, pp. 11, 61) that would appeal to wide groups of Egyptians who, across divergent positionalities of class, gender and religion, were suffering from neoliberal and authoritarian violence and corruption.<\/p>\n
At the same time, Latif observes, this movement \u2013 like other recent and contemporary oppositional peers \u2013 eschewed a rigid structure and leadership. This strategy offered a means of resisting a top-down state, while protecting key individuals from becoming targets of repression or being accused of furthering their own interests. As a result, it was expedient for these activists to project<\/em> the idea of a leaderless revolution, despite being \u201cpurposeful actors\u201d (pp. 153) who shaped and responded to historical events.<\/p>\n
To recognise revolutionaries\u2019 agency should not, however, romanticise it \u2013 and Latif\u2019s analysis carefully avoids doing so. She, along with her research participants, asks hard questions about the failings of the revolution to dismantle the authoritarian state that has returned, perhaps even stronger, under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Similarly, Latif acknowledges the constraints of putting revolutionary calls for social justice into practice. The complex implications of the revolution for gender emancipation are a case in point. Some activists encouraged participation in protests by appealing to normative masculine values of \u201cprotecting women\u201d, and reframed protest participation as legitimate within the scope of a \u201cdecent, proper\u201d woman (pp. 120-1).<\/p>\n
As a result of dwelling on these challenges, and on the very real disappointment, devastation and loss that revolutionaries came to experience, there is all the more depth to Latif\u2019s conclusion that strikes a note of \u201ccritical hope\u201d (Freire 2014). In the context of the 2011 revolution having changed citizens\u2019 relationship to the state (Latif 2022, pp. 257), and of Egypt\u2019s new generations of high school and university students being increasingly willing to stage protests (pp. 256), the story of Egyptians\u2019 struggles for freedom and justice may yet have a different outcome (pp. 259). Indeed, many Syrians believed as much of their own revolution, years before they could anticipate al-Assad\u2019s eventual downfall (al Khalili 2023). In Egypt, alternative futures may become possible in part precisely because of how much activists can learn from 2011 and its denouements (Latif, 2022, pp. 255-260). This conclusion resonates, for me, with the potential for the very messiness of revolutions to lay foundations for militants\u2019 lasting engagement with the emancipatory values that they hope and believe can transform worlds (Wilson 2023).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Alongside these contributions to understandings of revolution as a historical yet messy process, this book stands out for its searching discussion of another messy process: fieldwork. After her initial cautious optimism about how her background as an Egyptian-American would facilitate connections in the field, Latif learned through her fieldwork how much she had to relearn and reinterrogate cultural and linguistic codes, and her own relationship to them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Concerned with the ethical shortcomings of extractive research whereby outsiders \u201cmine\u201d locals for data, and then leave to become \u201cexperts\u201d, Latif radically revised, and extended, her fieldwork.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
As well as rethinking her own positionality and its impact on her research, Latif thoroughly questioned her methodological approach. Concerned with the ethical shortcomings of extractive research whereby outsiders \u201cmine\u201d locals for data, and then leave to become \u201cexperts\u201d, Latif radically revised, and extended, her fieldwork. Her close access to youth leaders came only after she gave up on \u201ccompeting\u201d (pp. 33) with the revolution in the quest for activists\u2019 time. She joined in their activist work, becoming a participant observer \u2013 mindful all the same of the differences between her engagement and that of research participants who were ready to die for the revolution.<\/p>\n
This book shows that the key questions that activists were asking of themselves \u2013 \u201cwhat is happening?\u201d and \u201chow should we act?\u201d (pp. 109) \u2013 are also the questions that must continually underpin scholars\u2019 ongoing reflection on fieldwork and research. These are revolutionary lessons from Tahrir that we must heed not only there, in Syria, and in many ongoing struggles for social justice in the region and beyond, but wherever we hope that scholarship can serve as an ally in those efforts.<\/p>\n
References\u00a0<\/h5>\n
Abaza, Mona. \u201cAcademic Tourists Sight-Seeing the Arab Spring.\u201d Ahram Online<\/em>, Sep 26 2011. https:\/\/english.ahram.org.eg\/NewsContentPrint\/4\/0\/22373\/Opinion\/0\/Academic-tourists-sightseeing-the-Arab-Spring.aspx.<\/p>\n
Al-Khalili, Charlotte. Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian Displacement, Time, Subjectivity.<\/em> London: University College London Press, 2023.<\/p>\n
El-Ghobashy, Mona. Bread and Freedom: Egypt\u2019s Revolutionary Situation.<\/em> Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2021.<\/p>\n
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed.<\/em> London: Bloomsbury, 2014.<\/p>\n
Takriti, Abdel Razzaq. Monsoon Revolution. Republicans, Sultans and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976.<\/em> Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.<\/p>\n
Wilson, Alice. \u201cOn Decolonising Revolution through a Lens of Afterlives.\u201d Pr\u00e1ticas Da Hist\u00f3ria <\/em>18 (2024): 17-51. https:\/\/praticasdahistoria.pt\/article\/view\/33421.<\/p>\n
Wilson, Alice. Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman.<\/em> Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023.<\/p>\n
Wilson, Alice. Sovereignty in Exile: A Saharan Liberation Movement Governs.<\/em> Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.<\/p>\n
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