Unpacking the effects of repression: the evolution of Islamist repertoires of contention in Egypt after the fall of President Morsi

Abstract

The military coup against president Morsi in July 2013 sparked the largest wave of Islamist mobilization in Egypt’s modern history. As the ousted president’s supporters took to the street in what became known as the ‘anti-coup’ movement, they were met with fierce repression. This article retraces the contentious dynamics in the summer of 2013 in a nested research design and with a focus on contentious repertoires. Drawing on data for over 2400 protest events and debunking the myth of a swift defeat of the anti-coup protests, we show how repression, besides affecting protest levels, markedly changed the quality of contention. Most notably, three transformative events involving massive repressive violence impacted on protest spaces, tactics and timing: rather than binary notions of escalation vs. demobilization, adaptive mechanisms of decentralization, diversification and substitution dominated the anti-coup movement’s reaction to repression. Centralized mass protests evolved into smaller, more flexible, and highly decentralized forms that were better fit to skirt the regime’s repression efforts. Our findings have important implications for the theorization of the protest–repression-nexus. They prompt scholars to conceive of repression and backlash as multi-layered phenomena and study their effects in a disaggregate framework.

Keywords:

• Repression
• backlash
• protest tactics
• Egypt
• Islamist movements
• transformative events
• repertoires of contention

Acknowledgements

This study builds on the conceptual groundwork by the Centre for Middle Eastern and North African Politics at Freie Universität Berlin. We are especially grateful to Christoph König and Dimitris Soudias for their enriching contributions which made this project possible. In addition, we would like to thank the members of the Institut für Protest und Bewegungsforschung (IPB) for their support, Simon Teune, Donatella della Porta and Stephan Roll for methodological advice, and two anonymous reviewers for their highly constructive feedback.

Notes

1. The anti-coup movement was formally established on 27 June 2013 under the name of ‘National Alliance in Support of Legitimacy’ to defend then-President Morsi against calls for his resignation. After the coup, its primary function shifted to that of a coordinating mechanism for street protests. Spearheaded by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, the alliance comprised eleven Islamist and Salafi parties including the political arms of Gama’a al-Islamiya and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

2. The timeframe of one hundred day was adopted from political journalism to avoid analytical bias that might result from selecting on the dependent variable an investigation period whose beginning and end is marked by highly mediatized events.

3. Accordingly, we treat protest and repression as a sequence of responsive events. While the former comprises public performances by collective actors which embody dissent with the regime, the latter denotes formal or informal state action that aims at suppressing or channelling mobilization, including coercion and legal restrictions (Earl, 2003, p. 49).

4. Adopting a method suggested by Ketchley (2013), random samples of different sources were compared to uploaded video material to check for description bias. In the appendix to his analysis of post-revolutionary contention in Egypt, Ketchley (2017, pp. 164–65) provides an illustrative example of how streaming platforms worked as aggregators for anti-coup protest footage. This turned them into a valuable resource for assessing the reliability of reporting in different coding sources.

5. Arguably this coding decision carries the risk of inflating participant counts as the smallest protest is coded with the category mean of 5000. However, the fact that usually few large protests contribute most participants over a protest cycle (Biggs, 2016) has positive implications for our catalogue: the inclusion of all reported events without a quantitative threshold enriches our projection of protest rates, while affecting the projection of total protest turnouts only to a minor degree. We concentrated on eliminating duplicates of large events which would have severely distorted our empirical results.

6. The square is named after the eighth century Sufi saint Rabi’a Al-Adawiya who, in a historical twist, is said to have overcome hardship through faith. The forename Rab’ia in Arabic means fourth, hence the four-fingered hand gesture. The corresponding graphic sign comprises a black hand with four fingers raised on a yellow background.

7. The twin peaks in Figure 5 at the beginning of October can be attributed to ‘Armed Forces Day’ which exerted a strong mobilizing effect on the anti-coup protesters due to its symbolic character. The national holyday on 6 October honours the Egyptian army for its crossing of the Suez Canal and capture of the Israeli ‘Bar Lev’ defence line on Sinai in 1973. In an attempt to raise awareness for the army’s involvement in recent massacres, the anti-coup coalition thus organized numerous counter-events to the traditional 6 October celebrations and on the Friday prior to the anniversary.

8. Lower turnouts on weekdays can also be explained by protesters’ need to return to their jobs and provide for their families. For similar reasons, the anti-coup protesters gradually moved their activities on workdays to the time after working hours (Ketchley, 2017, p. 134).