| Description |
Beginning in 2010 the Arab Spring rapidly spread across the Arab world and it took most region experts by surprise. The commonly held belief prior to the uprisings was that due to some combination of social, political, religious, and foreign influences that authoritarianism was firmly entrenched in the region. That a widespread popular social movement challenging authority and making revolutionary claims was unlikely if not impossible. Yet that is exactly what occurred. This study will focus on the 2011 uprising in Egypt. It will use social movement theory with an emphasis on contentious politics in order to examine how the Egyptian people were able to effectively mobilize the population, construct a social movement with revolutionary claims, and explain why the regime was unable to contain the uprising. This study will use a selection of historic case studies in order to demonstrate a long history of Egyptians movements challenging authority, suggesting that the popular uprising in 2011 was not as unforeseeable as previously believed. By engaging in an analysis of the mechanisms and processes of contentious movement construction this study seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the social forces at work in Egypt during, and leading up to, the January 2011 uprising and connect them to an Egyptian history of contentious organizing when institutional divisions provided the political opportunity structure for a contentious social movement to mobilize and challenge those in power. |
