Contested Legitimacies: Repression and Revolt in Post-Revolutionary Egypt

Abstract

Contested Legitimacies: Repression and Revolt in Post-Revolutionary Egypt offers a novel reading of contentious politics in post-coup Egypt. The book successfully documents Egypt’s recent protest history in great detail, particularly two episodes that have been central in ‘‘influencing the trajectory of contentious dynamics’’ in post-revolutionary Egypt (p. 62). These are the resistance tactics against the July 3, 2013 military coup, spearheaded by the National Alliance to Support Legitimacy (NASL), and those of the Popular Campaign to Protect the Land (PCPL) in 2016, against the transfer of two Egyptian islands to Saudi Arabia. However, author Jannis Julien Grimm has done so much more than lay out the events of these episodes. By engaging with the concepts of ‘‘strategic interaction, discursive contestation, and political subjectivation’’ (p. 28), Grimm analyzes rich primary and secondary data to emphasize the ‘‘situatedness and contingency of social change’’ (p. 22). Unlike mainstream accounts that make clear-cut distinctions between the different contenders in Egypt’s postrevolutionary political arena, Grimm illustrates the inherent instability of discourses that shape the ever-shifting conduct and alliancemaking strategies of these contenders. In the introduction, Grimm presents his main argument: Contentious politics in Egypt in the past decade have centered on struggles around competing conceptualizations of Egyptian identity, and these are played out in ‘‘the performative and discursive interaction of diverse coalitions of contenders and their authoritarian counterparts’’ (p. 19). Crucial in these interactions is the role of ‘‘behaviors, strategies, and emotions’’ (p. 22) that sometimes result in successful coalition-forming across difference and at other times reinforce authoritarian practices. Grimm rejects prominent readings of counterrevolution in Egypt as a ‘‘journey back to square one’’ devised by ‘‘the wit of Egypt’s elites and the machinations of a deep state’’ (p. 35). He rejects the predetermined outcome of revolution in authoritarian contexts that these prominent readings purport. Instead, he underlines the contingency of the conditions of possibility based on how players and their political projects interact with one another. In Chapter Two, Grimm elaborates on this last point by employing a ‘‘constructivist approach’’ (p. 44) that centers the agency of different players, rather than resilient authoritarian structures, in determining the effectiveness of ‘‘cross-class and cross-ideological mobilization’’ (p. 46). Within this theoretical framework, the extent to which mobilization is successful is ‘‘understood as symptoms of subjectivation processes’’ (p. 49). The emphasis on agency allows for a nuanced understanding of the ways in which resistance informs the formation of new subjectivities and changes the conditions of possibility for the various contenders. By using discourse theoretical approaches, the book is very effective in showing how struggles over meaningmaking are a ‘‘constitutive element of the social center stage’’ (p. 55), particularly through the subversion of taken-for-granted discourses, which has the potential to ‘‘renegotiate the limits of what is thinkable . . . and doable’’ (p. 59). In Chapter Three, Grimm explores the transformative events in the period directly before the coup. Although this period reflects a country-wide rejection of President Mursi’s rule under the auspices of the security forces, Grimm argues that it was the coalition between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces a year prior that blurred the ‘‘boundaries between state and social players’’ (p. 85). This allowed the popular campaign against Mursi, Tamarod, to establish ‘‘a new political frontier’’ (p. 85) by redefining the meanings of revolution, democracy, and legitimacy in ways that pitted the Muslim brotherhood against all other Egyptians. Chapter Four demonstrates NASL’s efforts to garner wider support by responding to the Reviews 345