ABSTRACT

While gathering an oral history about the 2011 Egyptian revolution, an interviewer asks Sameh Eldesoky, a 21-year-old youth from Cairo, if he had been involved in demonstrations before the mass protests in Tahrir Square, or in any prior political organizing. He replies,

Sameh Eldesoky’s narrative is typical of the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who filled the streets in January 2011-people with scant political capital and limited protest experience. Prior to the Arab Spring, these people may have been critics of regime and even practiced small “contentious acts of defiance” (Bayat 1997: 54-5) but never had taken to the streets to openly voice their opposition. Something profound happened to transform their everyday activities and shared perceptions of fear and risk into public collective challenges to the Mubarak regime. Eledsoky’s allusions to the police and jail indicate that fear was a major barrier. In this chapter we probe the social mechanisms by which fear is transcended in authoritarian situations so that collective action can occur.