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Activism and Political Economy in the New–Old Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2015

Jeannie Sowers
Jeannie Sowers*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of New Hampshire, Durham, N.H.; e-mail: jeannie.sowers@unh.edu
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Extract

Under President al-Sisi, Egypt has revealed itself to be less tolerant of dissent and more successful at cloaking itself in nationalist sentiment than under either the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or Husni Mubarak. The massacre at Rabʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, the arrests, detention, and torture of youth and prominent activists, the proliferation of criminal and treason charges against journalists, nongovernmental organizations, and Muslim Brotherhood figures, the banning of various organizations, and the passage of restrictive laws on basic civil rights—these practices make clear that the regime has no commitment to democratization understood either as substantive participation or the safeguarding of basic civil liberties.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 140 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, “Proposed Government Law Makes NGOs Subordinate to Security and Ministry Control,” http://ecesr.org/en/?p=421969 (accessed 5 September 2014).

2 J. Sowers, Environmental Politics in Egypt: Activists, Experts, and the State (New York: Routledge, 2014), chap. 7; Ayeb, Habib and Bush, Ray, “Small Farmer Uprisings and Rural Neglect in Egypt and Tunisia,” Middle East Report 272 (2014)Google Scholar; Abu-Lughod, Lila, “Taking Back the Village: Rural Youth in a Moral Revolution,” Middle East Report 272 (2014)Google Scholar.

3 Porto El-Shaab's Facebook page, accessed 5 September 2014, https://www.facebook.com/porto.elshaab.

4 Mahmoud Gaweish, “Porto Bulaq: Take Selfies with Garbage and Sewage,” al-Masry al-Youm, 2 September 2014, http://www.almasryalyoum.com/news/details/514439 (accessed 5 September 2014).

5 Sowers, Environmental Politics in EgyptGoogle ScholarPubMed.

6 For the origins of the Toshka project, internal critiques at its inception, and the failures of implementation, see Sowers, J., “Re-mapping the Nation, Critiquing the State: Environmental Narratives and Desert Land Reclamation in Egypt,” in Environmental Imaginaries in the Middle East: History, Policy, Power, and Practice, ed. Davis, Diana K. and Burke III, Edmund (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011), 158–91Google Scholar.

7 World Food Programme and the Egyptian Cabinet Information and Decision Support Center, “Egyptian Food Observatory: Food Monitoring and Evaluation System,” Quarterly Bulletin 14 (2013)Google Scholar, http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/ena/wfp263322.pdf (accessed 5 December 2014). This quarterly report uses household surveys across all ten governorates to assess food insecurity. At time of writing, the final quarter of 2013 is the last period for which data has been made available.

8 The WHO defines stunting as measurements more than two standard deviations below median heights for age used by WHO; overweight is measured as more than two standard deviations above median weight for height. See The World Health Organization, “WHO Child Growth Standards,” http://www.who.int/childgrowth/standards/en/ (accessed 7 September 2014).