When Informal Powers Surface

The ‘Egyptian Revolution’ ² of 25 January 2011 (Thawrat 25 Yanāyr) challenged many myths about Egyptian politics. Egypt's ‘authoritarian resilience’ had previously been described as being rooted in a fierce and stable regime, but was also, at times, imputed to a supposed cultural ‘inertia’. Such arguments obscure significant dynamics of civic activism that have (at least partly) come to broader attention since the January Uprising. In some quarters, analyses of (non)democratization in the Middle East relying on such culturalist and/or purely proceduralist approaches remain popular (e.g. Lewis 2002). However, these have been extensively challenged (e.g. Bellin 2004), with alternatives presented proposing more sophisticated approaches to the regimes’ use of symbolic and material resources, ³ and models proposed holistically accounting for liberalization and de-liberalization in Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) regimes, bypassing the flawed democratization/authoritarianism dichotomy. In particular, Hinnebusch (1998) shows that MENA regimes’ liberalizing and de-liberalizing tactics should be understood as part of a more general strategy relying on cyclical ‘compression’ and ‘decompression’ of formal politics. This instrumental use of institutional forms suggests a focus on concrete political practices beyond the institutional (or cultural) surface, beyond the formal political arena, ‘shifting] attention away from questions of democratization and enduring authoritarianism’ and towards ‘understanding political participation as it exists under authoritarian regimes’ (Lust-Okar 2008; emphasis in original). A close examination of the Egyptian Uprising underscores the limits of either an essentialist emphasis on culture or a proceduralist focus on institutions, highlighting instead the role of players’ adaptations — both to the parameters of a particular system of power and to each other.