Book Review 1

Book Review
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Egypt in a Time of Revolution: Contentious Politics

and the Arab Spring
By Neil Ketchley
Cambridge University Press (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/egypt-in-a-time-of-
revolution/E820BDF2CAF0B42BF6CA9F35137A65A3). 2017. 201 Pages. US$29.99 paperback

Reviewer: Killian Clarke, Princeton University

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ver the past half decade, a dizzying number of articles, op-eds, monographs,

O and edited volumes have emerged seeking to make sense of Egypt’s 2011
revolution. With so much ink already spilled, is there anything new to be
learned? Neil Ketchley’s Egypt in a Time of Revolution leaves little doubt that
there is. His incisive and readable account of the events that shaped the fall and
subsequent resurrection of Egypt’s authoritarian regime is novel not only because
he lays out an impressive range of original empirical material on the subject but
also because his deft analysis of this material allows him to offer some surprisingly
fresh insights.
Ketchley makes his interventions in the manner of any good social scientist—
with carefully collected and rigorously analyzed data. How many people partici-
pated in the 18-day revolution? (Probably slightly more than a million.) When
did mobilization peak? (Depends on how you measure it—January 28 if count-
ing protests, February 11 if counting participation.) What was the dominant tac-
tic used? (Marches.)
Ketchley describes his approach as “conjunctural and interactive” (9). Drawing
on the analytical traditions of the contentious politics literature, he traces the rela-
tionships between a series of actors and social forces as they mobilized and coun-
termobilized during the tumult of Egypt’s revolutionary and postrevolutionary
period. One of his central claims is that by studying these types of bottom-up and
emergent micro-mobilizational processes, we may be able to better understand the
types of macro-level outcomes that tend to be of core concern to political sociolo-
gists: revolution, counterrevolution, regime change, democratization, and the like.
The empirical material is both qualitative and quantitative, though the bulk
of the analysis is based on a series of “event catalogues” that Ketchley compiled
from leading Arabic-language Egyptian dailies. This technique is most often
associated with Charles Tilly, who used it to great effect in his studies of protest
repertoires in France and Great Britain, and Ketchley deploys it in similar ways
to study the evolution of repertoires and the general arc of protest during several
key episodes of the revolution. He also draws on a number of interviews
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© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Social Forces 1–4
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved. For permissions, doi: 10.1093/sf/sox099
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 2 Social Forces

conducted with activists and political figures, and from videos and photographs
of protests collected from his informants and from the Internet.
Ketchley leverages these data to adjudicate a host of scholarly debates that
have emerged in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution, and the related wave
of revolutions and uprisings commonly termed the Arab Spring. In doing so, he
also lays to rest a number of popularly held (mis)conceptions about these events.
A good example is chapter 2, “Collective Violence,” which argues that
unarmed collective violence (mostly the burning of police stations) in Egypt’s
governorates was crucial for assuring the victory of protesters over the Mubarak
regime’s feared police forces. Many early accounts of the Egyptian revolution
have portrayed it as a largely nonviolent affair, pointing to crowds in Tahrir
Square who self-consciously chanted, “Silmiyya, silmiyya” (peaceful, peaceful)
in the face of teargas and pro-regime thugs. But away from the television cam-
eras and the international reporters, Egyptians around the country reacted to the
violent repression of early protests by attacking and, in many cases, burning to
the ground police stations and other facilities associated with the regime’s secu-
rity forces. Ketchley knows this because he has counted and analyzed the inci-
dents—84 in total—which were well documented in the Egyptian Arabic-
language press. Moreover, he is able to argue compellingly that the effect of
these attacks was to cow the police into virtual submission, providing the space
for the activists in Tahrir to safely launch their 14-day sit-in.
Another good example is Ketchley’s analysis of labor’s role in the revolution.
A number of scholars writing from a leftist or Marxian perspective have pro-
posed that labor strikes were the key factor in forcing Mubarak from power.
But Ketchley’s evidence offers little support for this theory. Indeed, his data
show that labor protests only spiked at the end of the 18 days, and were too dif-
fuse and parochial to affect the calculations of elite decisionmakers in Cairo.
For all that Ketchley’s quantitative event data are impressive, perhaps the
most interesting chapter in the book is the one based solely on qualitative mate-
rial. In chapter 3, “Fraternization,” Ketchley uses his interviews and an array of
visual material to document the important role of fraternization in guaranteeing
that the military did not pick up the mantle of the defeated police forces on
January 28 and continue their campaign of brutal repression. Through a variety
of creative and improvised tactics, protesters forged bonds with the soldiers who
took up positions at the edge of Egypt’s squares. In doing so, they were able to
protect themselves from further violence (though, as Ketchley points out, they
also established a discourse that would be cynically coopted by the generals who
assumed power after Mubarak resigned).
Occasionally Ketchley makes claims that his empirical material cannot quite
substantiate. For example, chapter 5, “Manufacturing Dissent,” focuses on the
role of the old regime, and particularly the security forces, in facilitating and sup-
porting the Tamarod movement, which organized a petition campaign demanding
the resignation of the Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, and called
for a major protest on June 30, 2013, the one-year anniversary of Morsi’s presi-
dency. The protest drew a massive outpouring of support (almost as many

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 Book Review 3

participants, Ketchley’s data reveal, as the number that participated in the 2011
revolution), and paved the way for the counterrevolutionary coup that deposed
Morsi and returned the country to military rule. Ketchley’s primary point in this
chapter is that the Tamarod movement and the June 30 protest operated under a
different logic than the 2011 revolution; rather than being driven by bottom-up
mobilization and popular grievances, it was somehow “manufactured” by old
regime elites. Though it is true, as Ketchley and others have documented, that
some Tamarod leaders met with and received assistance from Mubarak-era secu-
rity officials, and that many old regime groups, including the police, supported and
joined in the June 30 protests, it is also undeniably true that by the summer of
2013, opposition to the Morsi government was deep and widespread among every-
day Egyptians. Moreover, Tamarod did collect large numbers of signatures
(though almost certainly never as many as its leaders claimed); garnered support
from an array of social forces, movements, and parties (including the secular
National Salvation Front coalition); and organized a protest that drew hundreds of
thousands of participants. To chalk all of this up to elite manipulation and old-
regime instigation seems a step too far.
With all of these rich empirics at his disposal, Ketchley perhaps could have
done more to structure the book’s analysis around a major theoretical question
or puzzle. The chapters are each oriented around a discrete debate regarding the
Egypt case: Why did the security forces withdraw? Why did the military side
with the protesters? Why did the revolutionary coalition split? But these largely
empirical questions never fully boil up to a general theoretical one. Is the book
trying to explain the failure of democratic transitions, the limits of civic revolu-
tions, or the surprising tenacity of authoritarian regimes, or perhaps all three?
Ketchley does argue in the introduction that Egypt in 2011 ought not to be
considered a case of revolution. Even under the broader concept of “political
revolution,” which frames revolution as an episode of popular regime change,
Egypt does not count, Ketchley proposes, because “the Mubarak-era state was
never upended” and civilians never exercised “meaningful democratic control
over the state” (5). Instead, Ketchley borrows Charles Tilly’s term—a revolu-
tionary situation—to describe the conditions in Egypt from 2011 to 2013.
Certainly there are grounds for disagreement over this claim; Egypt did, after all,
have two genuinely democratic elections in 2011 and 2012, and for at least a
year a civilian government ruled the country, drafting laws, writing a constitu-
tion, negotiating with foreign allies, and otherwise holding the reins of state
power. But even if Ketchley is right, he never fully explains what the theoretical
implications of his proposed recoding ought to be. Coding a case in one way or
another only matters if it leads us to adopt certain modes of analysis, provides
us with one versus another set of theoretical priors, or draws us to compare with
certain cases and not others. Otherwise, whether Egypt is a case of revolution,
democratic transition, revolutionary situation, or something else is merely an
issue of semantics.
Ultimately the strength of the empirical analysis in Ketchley’s book more than
makes up for the missed opportunity to offer a big-picture takeaway. It is a rich

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 4 Social Forces

and important book, shedding light on an array of pressing debates regarding

some of the most complex and momentous events in Egypt’s modern political
history, and is a must-read both for scholars of the modern Middle East and for
those interested in the micro-dynamics of revolution, regime change, and
democratization.

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