In Bread and Freedom, Mona El-Ghobashy offers a lucid, detailed, and deeply informed analysis of Egypt's revolutionary situation of 2011–14, along with an insightful treatment of the periods before and after the interregnum. This is essential reading for specialists of Egyptian politics and theorists of revolution, as well as scholars of authoritarianism, contentious politics, and regime transition.
Bread and Freedom pushes against summary judgments that would fault one faction or another for a failed democratic transition. Rather than holding court over who is to blame, judging the period against the benchmark of a “real” revolution, or assessing the outcome against the expectations of democratization theory, El-Ghobashy examines how the exigencies of extreme uncertainty shaped political outcomes. The analytical frame of “revolutionary situation”—a circumstance wherein a breakdown of authority ushers in a scramble among social forces with competing claims to sovereignty—serves her purpose well. The framework trains our eyes on the radical contingency of each juncture and it illuminates how uncertainty shaped the decision-making calculus of central players within the state and society.
The book is sure to ruffle feathers because it questions many familiar narratives of the period, particularly those that would blame Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood for squandering the revolution. El-Ghobashy does not whitewash the missteps and overreach of Morsi and his Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), but she seeks to understand the decisions of all key actors in the politics of the moment. Her deeply contextual treatment illuminates pivotal events, such as the FJP decision to field a candidate in the 2012 Presidential elections (despite prior assurances to the contrary) and the infamous “Constitutional Declaration” that Morsi issued to shield the Constituent Assembly and his executive decrees from judicial review.
In a similar vein, El-Ghobashy probes why the opposition found it easier to align with like-minded judicial organs, and ultimately the military, rather than work with the FJP. In her account, escalation and polarization were driven by pragmatic concerns. “The time-perspectives of Egypt's actors…compelled them to act quickly to secure advantages or simply remain viable politically, in the face of an undefined future” (262), a dynamic that was further underwritten by a history of political exclusion. The book deftly traces shifting coalitions of actors in state and society alongside important crosscurrents within factions and parties. Likewise, the book considers how revolutionary developments outside of Cairo—in Alexandria, Ismailiya, Suez, Qina and elsewhere—impinged on decision makers in the center. El-Ghobashy advances her arguments through a wide variety of primary source material, including party manifestos, court judgments, military communiques, parliamentary debates, statements from civil society groups, and contemporaneous media coverage.
Bread and Freedom is divided into three periods: Mubarak's Egypt (chapter 2), the revolutionary situation of 2011–14 (chapters 3–5), and the counterrevolutionary period through 2020 (chapter 6). Chapter 2 provides a useful primer on the politics of the Mubarak era, with attention to repertoires of contention through state institutions, such as courts and elections, and against them, by way of sit-ins, strikes, riots, roadblocks, and other tactics. El-Ghobashy's analysis underlines the long pedigree of contentious politics that preceded mass mobilization in 2011. Readers will find her examination of litigation as a repertoire of resistance particularly helpful.
Chapters 3–5 trace key developments of the frenzied struggle to constitute political authority from the fall of Mubarak to the imprisonment of Morsi. The lion's share of attention is focused on parliamentary and presidential elections and the two controversial rounds of constitution-writing. Here, El-Ghobashy's deep knowledge of Egyptian legal terrain enables her to illuminate important dynamics that have gone unnoticed, underappreciated, or misunderstood in other treatments of the period. In particular, she demonstrates how “…political struggles are conducted through juridical form” (237). She traces how law was commissioned as an instrument to invalidate the People's Assembly and the first Constituent Assembly, two developments that dramatically upped the ante in the struggle to shape a new political order. El-Ghobashy's spotlight on high politics may disappoint some readers, but this focus is essential for advancing her core arguments concerning the conundrums and dilemmas that central decision-makers faced at pivotal moments.
In chapter 6, El-Ghobashy's goal is to trace how Egypt's revolutionary situation ended in a nonrevolutionary outcome, with the military reconquering a disheveled state to build a new counterrevolutionary order. She examines how the regime crushed protests, hollowed-out elections, subordinated courts, and eventually anchored new machinery of repression within the Constitution itself. El-Ghobashy is adamant that “the counterrevolution is neither an upgraded version of Mubarakism nor the direct negation of revolution but a surprising blend of familiar autocratic modes of rule and new administrative and ideological arrangements” (209). Explaining that “[c]ounterrevolution is a creative endeavor” (238), El-Ghobashy theorizes what she sees as the regime's new master narrative, haybat al-dawla (state prestige), which recast “revolution-as-turmoil.” Resistance is not wholly broken, as illustrated in several examples through the period. Nonetheless, El-Ghobashy underlines a fundamental transformation in state-society relations.
In setting the terms of the study, El-Ghobashy tells her readers, “I do not offer yet another dramatic exposition nor my own distribution of praise and blame, preferring to steer clear of the inquisitorial mode of historiography…” (33). For the most part, she delivers a remarkably sober and nuanced examination of a controversial chapter in Egyptian politics. However, El-Ghobashy's aspiration of remaining above the fray begins to break down in her rendering of the military, “the actor with the most to lose” (260). Nonetheless, all but the most ideological readers will find her devastating critique in chapter 6 appropriate and insightful. Indeed, some will go a step further to advance the position that the military had always been in control; in other words, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) was simply biding its time before reimposing itself in earnest. In this frequently-invoked retrospective view, political jostling between civil forces from 2011–13 was a sideshow of little consequence for the exercise of real power.
El-Ghobashy challenges this interpretation, insisting that it is all too easy in hindsight to minimize the degree to which revolutionary forces had incapacitated basic state functions, including policing. Indeed, her examination of the “tsunami of mini-revolutions” (chapter 3) captures the fact that state functionaries were themselves in active revolt in myriad spaces of Egypt's sprawling state. El-Ghobashy's analysis suggests that, caught on its back foot, SCAF worked to slow the pace of revolutionary change. The military thus played an elemental role in shaping the sequencing and timing of elections and constitution-writing, but it was far from the only force shaping the fundamental parameters and dynamics of Egypt's revolutionary situation. In El-Ghobashy's recounting, SCAF was reliant not only on political maneuvering and severe repression. Regaining control was equally contingent on the fragmentation of civil forces that were once united for change.
Bread and Freedom is a book that will stand the test of time. It helps us understand one of the most profound, if confusing and controversial, periods in contemporary Egyptian politics. Some readers will inevitably take issue with interpretations of key junctures and events. But even skeptical readers will come away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Egypt's revolutionary period. Bread and Freedom will spur important conversations. And hopefully, with time, it will facilitate the shared understandings that are necessary for Egyptians to build a common future.
