Youth activists were at the forefront of the Arab uprisings of 2010–11. They were important first movers, organizing early days of protest through online and offline networks. Many revolutionary slogans were derived from grievances articulated by those young citizens disillusioned by the unemployment and lack of economic mobility perpetuated by corrupt regimes. Later, these activists broadcasted the regimes’ violence against protesters to an international audience through social media. Yet their mobilization did not exist in a vacuum, and their success was not preordained. Instead, youth activists emerged in reaction to specific aspects of authoritarian regimes, and their success depended on those reactions. In Youth Activism and Contentious Politics in Egypt, Nadine Sika analyzes the interdependence between youth movements and the authoritarian regime before, during, and after the 2011 uprising in Egypt. She traces how both the regime and youth protesters updated their tactics in response to each other: the repertoires activists had developed prior to the uprising were influenced by the coercive, co-opting, and legitimating strategies of the regime they protested, and regime strategies were subsequently influenced by the movements’ repertoires.
The book's argument relies on those made previously by social movement scholars such as Charles Tilly, Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Christian Davenport. Sika's key contribution comes from her original interview and survey evidence, which provides information about youth mobilization in remarkable detail. Chapter 5 highlights fifty-two semi-structured interviews with youth activists conducted between November 2012 and June 2013. Together, the data demonstrate how youth activists become engaged in social movements, the ways in which they network among themselves, and how they disseminate their ideas to the wider society. Perhaps most importantly, Sika permits the narrative of her respondents to guide her understanding of the 2011 uprising. The youth activists she polled and interviewed emphasized the importance of considering mobilization after 2011 as part of a continued history and made constant reference to what they learned from early mobilization against the regime in the 2000s. Through this evidence, the author outlines the mechanisms and processes of youth mobilization in authoritarian regimes. Likewise, Chapter 4 presents the results of a nonrandom sample of 700 students from four Egyptian universities in November and December 2012, which included both activists and nonactivists. The relationships between political behavior and demographic characteristics are interesting if intuitive. Respondents with a Facebook account were more likely to have voted in the 2011–12 parliament elections and to have participated in the 25 January protests, and female students were significantly less likely to vote or protest than men. In addition, students with an income source independent of their parents were more likely to have participated in the January protests, while those respondents with a mother who had been politically engaged were more likely to have voted in the 2011–12 elections.
These data are particularly fascinating when considering whether young activists constitute a “prodemocracy” movement. When asked about whether justice and equality are essential for democracy, whether women should engage in protests and strikes, and whether it is important to have friends from different religious backgrounds, student activists demonstrate high levels of agreement (between 74 and 92 percent) with procedural democracy and the importance of pluralism. But analyses reveal that that those who participate in voting and demonstrating do not necessarily hold emancipative attitudes: stronger agreement with the statement “women should have the same hereditary rights” is negatively correlated with protest, and stronger agreement with the statement “homosexuals should have more rights” is negatively correlated with both protest and voting participation. The text does not include descriptive statistics for these questions so it is difficult to know how response rates vary across the activist and nonactivist portions of the student sample, but the relationship is nonetheless noteworthy. This reader would have also benefited from additional information about the analyses, including more on survey weights and whether concerns about social desirability bias for potentially sensitive questions were addressed.
The survey results reveal a surprising lack of consensus on political attitudes among youth activists on issues central to the 2011 uprising. When asked about the ideal state model for Egypt, youth activists were split between an Islamic state based on principles of democracy (36.8 percent), a civil democratic state (30.1 percent), and a strong state regardless of the nature of the regime (24.3 percent). Protest organizers surveyed here were similarly divided along lines of ideology: 18.8 percent identified as liberal, 18.8 as Islamist, 7.43 as socialist, with a full 48 percent choosing “no category.” While activists were in near universal agreement that increasing employment opportunities and access to education were the most important issues facing the government, they also significantly disagreed about how best to implement reforms to achieve these goals.
This leads one to question whether youths should be studied together as a coherent unit of analysis at all. A question the author asks early in the text is “why” focus on youth movements, but she leaves unanswered the “what”—what is a youth movement? This may be more a critique of the broader social movements literature in which this inquiry is situated than of this particular piece itself. The author's first discussion of youth activism draws on definitions by Donatella della Porta, Karl Mannheim, Talcott Parsons, and Asef Bayat that highlight shared identity and beliefs as the definition of a movement. Yet, the rich survey data demonstrates that, at least in this sample of activists, there was no shared beliefs and solidarity—except perhaps as the negative coalition against the regime, rather than as a youth movement. The author also proxies youth activism by several measurements of age—alternatively, as a cohort or generation relationally younger than other cohorts or generations, as those between the ages of 18 and 35 similar to World Bank standards, or those between the ages of 18 and 22 in the survey. Alternatively, youth activism might constitute a movement mobilized on youth-specific grievances, such as employment. The near universal support documented among activists for the importance of economic and education reforms might be a starting point for this operationalization, but there is no direct evidence in the book that activists thought of these issues as only affecting youth. Chapter 3 traces the participation of young protesters (defined by their age) in movements mobilizing on causes such as opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq and support for free and fair presidential elections, neither of which are youth-specific issues. The author is ambiguous about what she means by youth mobilization, and as a result there is some conceptual slippage in the book.
How Sika defines youth activism is important, because the book's evidence suggests that there is no cohesive youth “movement” to speak of in Egypt. Instead, Egyptian youth activists hold a myriad of beliefs, participate in a myriad of movements, and mobilize on a myriad of issues. It is possible that the shifting unit of analysis contributes to this finding. But it is equally possible that the incoherence documented in this book is real and was an important part of why an uprising initiated by youths did not translate into a successful revolutionary outcome. As we now know, remnant elites and institutions seeking to overturn the gains of the 2011 uprising were able to divide-and-conquer would-be revolutionaries along ideological lines. As such, the author's rich and careful documentation of the diversity and contradictions in the mobilizational strategies and political attitudes of Egyptian youth activists before, during, and after the Arab uprisings is, in and of itself, an important contribution and makes this book worthy of a read.
