Making Revolution in Egypt: The 6 April Youth Movement in a Global Context

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The April 6th Youth Movement began as a Facebook page that sought to mobilize young Egyptians' support for striking industrial workers. Established in Egypt in 2008 when over 100,000 Facebook users joined, the movement consisted mainly of young Egyptians who had never been involved in politics before. The group's unprecedented popularity meant that it eventually coalesced into a political movement and played a key role in the revolution against Hosni Mubarak's rule. This book investigates the rise and fall of the April 6th Movement to explain the contentious dynamics of social activism in Egypt. Despite the Movement's initial success, it was banned by an Egyptian court and its main founders arrested after it later turned against the military-installed regime. The formal transition process following Mubarak's fall had posed ideological and organizational challenges to the Movement, leading to internal fragmentations and the gradual loss of its mobilizing capacity. But Ali Sonay argues here that social movements around the world faced very similar opportunities and constraints, and that the political and socio-economic dynamics in Egypt cannot be understood by referring to concepts such as the 'West' and 'Middle East'. Instead, according to Sonay, the Arab uprisings were embedded in the increasingly volatile global political and socio-economic context that reached way beyond the Middle East and was exacerbated by the financial crisis in 2008. Based on first-hand and in-depth empirical findings, Sonay sheds new light on the so-called Arab Spring and presents the April 6th Movement as a manifestation of a global political discourse.

Author Bio

Ali Sonay is Al Jazeera Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge. He was previously a research fellow for the Department for Arabic Studies at the Center of Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) at Philipps-University Marburg, where he completed his PhD. His MA in Political Science, Islamic Science and Economics at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Sonay has published in Middle East - Topics & Arguments and Youth Movements: Urban Resistance and Change in the Arab World.