From Cairo to Tottenham: Big Societies, Neoliberal States, Colonial Utopias

Abstract

While the August riots are quite readily understood as an outburst provoked by the negligence of the neoliberal state, there has been a widespread failure amongst Western commentators and politicians to understand the extent to which the Egyptian revolution should also be understood as an uprising against neoliberalism. This essay draws on cultural sources, journalism and socio-economic analyses to make the case that Mubarak’s Egypt could be understood in terms of neoliberal forms of the Big Society, especially, that of the gated community. In demonstrating the reliance of the neoliberal state on security policies based on policing, the essay goes on to analyse the riots in such terms. Even as the Egyptian revolution and the riots shared similar sources of frustration, their quite different manifestations are explained in terms of differing structures of feeling, those of dignity and pride. Finally, a postcolonial framework of analysis is brought to bear on the material considered by the essay to show the persistence of the colonial structures of neoliberal capitalism.

Notes

1. In this article, I use capitals for the policy (Big Society), and lower case for the phenomenon (big society), while the latter is more accurately a case of civil society.

2. This is what I discovered when based in Cairo, 2009–2010.

3. This was a perspective communicated to me by Egyptian writers, especially Sahar El Mougy and Khaled Al Khamissi.