“These days, I wonder even if he would turn into a cynic, observing how far the world has turned its back on the Arab Spring generation of young men and women who dared to hope. Many are languishing as political prisoners, often under horrendous conditions. I can’t ask what he thinks, though, because he’s been in prison for most of the past eight years.”
Tag Archives: Egypt
Zeynep Tufekci: “I Wish I Could Ask Alaa Abd el-Fattah What He Thinks About the World Now”
Posted in defeat, freedom, justice, Nota Bene, revolution, tragic politics
Tagged Arab Spring, Egypt
“Naomi Klein on How Egypt’s Failed Revolution Continues to Inspire Struggle Worldwide”
“But,” Alaa adds to his stark assessments, “the revolution did break a regime.” It defeated much of Mubarak’s machine, and the new junta that is in its place, while even more brutal, is also precarious for the thinness of its domestic support. Openings, he tells us, remain. In this way, Alaa acts as the revolution’s toughest critic and its most devoted militant.
Posted in defeat, Nota Bene, power, revolution, tragic politics
Tagged Egypt
Talya Zax: “How Did the Arab Spring Change Fiction?”
“That shift, from narratives of the revolution to stories about the psychological ramifications of those narratives, marks a natural evolution in the realm of Egyptian literature after Arab Spring.”
Posted in ethics, fiction, melancholy, Nota Bene
Tagged Egypt
Brecht de Smet: “Egypt’s Decade of Revolution and Counterrevolution”
“The fall of the Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, ten years ago today, was a triumph for popular mobilization. But the revolutionary forces lacked the political organization and vision needed to head off a counterrevolutionary backlash that restored the authoritarian state’s power.”
Posted in defeat, freedom, melancholy, Nota Bene, revolution, tragic politics
Tagged Egypt
William Dalrymple: Review of “The Buried” by Peter Hessler – Life, death and revolution in Egypt
‘In this scheme, the fall of Mubarak, the chaos of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the restoration of authoritarian rule under Sisi also follow rhythms familiar to Egyptian history. Hessler sees a mirror in the story of the pharoah Akhenaten – a failed revolutionary whose attempt to introduce monotheism was crushed in “what was possibly the first military coup in human history” by his general Horemheb, and whose tyranny was consolidated by Horemheb’s successor Ramesses II.’
Posted in Blog, governance, power, revolution, tragic politics, tyranny
Tagged Egypt
David D. Kirkpatrick: “Hopes Raised during the Arab Spring are being Revived Across North Africa”
“The hopes inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 soured long ago. But across North Africa, the reverberations are coursing through the region once again, shaking autocratic governments and posing new questions about the future. Veterans of the Arab Spring struggles say the scenes feel like flashbacks to chapters of a common story. … But the setbacks and disillusionment are familiar as well.”
Posted in freedom, governance, In The News, justice, power, resistance, rights, tragic politics, tyranny
Sara Salem: “Trajectories of Anticolonialism in Egypt”
“The forms of solidarity imagined by radical groups such as Egyptian feminists, workers, and students often broke free of the exclusionary imaginary of the nation state that always came back to exert itself on the articulations of leaders and state representatives. While both ends of this spectrum within anticolonial movements called for decolonization that was global, the ways in which they imagined this was vastly different.”
Posted in founding, freedom, gender, Nota Bene, revolution, tragic politics
Tagged Egypt, post-colonial
“The Failure of Egypt’s Revolution”
Steve Negus reviews Into the Hands of Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East by David D. Kirkpatrick (2018)
Posted in Blog, defeat, revolution, tragic politics
Tagged Egypt
Aidan Beatty: “Social Revolutions Beyond the Volga: Egypt and Ireland”
‘Indeed, as Immanuel Wallerstein has noted, revolution is a term that connotes “sudden, dramatic, and extensive change. It emphasizes discontinuity.” Yet, when many scholars come to study “revolutions,” what they often end up studying are the much slower, long-term social changes, that feed into ostensibly sudden rupture with the past. This has led Wallerstein to query the analytic utility of such a slippery and contradictory term.[9] At the very least, the study of a revolution should not be divorced from the formative events of preceding decades.‘
Posted in Nota Bene, revolution
