Between organization and spontaneity of protests: the 2010–2011 Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the role of social groups in mobilizing resources for protests in repressive contexts. In particular, it examines the impact of organizations and informal groups on individual engagement in the protests developed in 2010 in Tunisia and in 2011 in Egypt. The empirical analysis draws on the following data sources: the second wave of the Arab Barometer (2010–2011), two focus groups in Egypt conducted between 2011 and 2015 with members of trade unions and of Popular Committees who had participated in the 2011 protests in Egypt, eight semi-structured interviews conducted in 2017 to workers in Tunisia who had engaged in the 2010–2011 protests, and interviews conducted in January and February 2011 to 100 women in Tunisia within a study tackling police violence against women during the Tunisian uprisings.

Findings show that both in Egypt and Tunisia protests were neither spontaneous nor fully organized as formal organizations and informal and spontaneous groups strictly interconnected in sustaining protests. In Egypt, established Islamic charity networks provided the structural basis for Popular Committees to engage in the 2011 protests and the initially spontaneous workers’ groups, institutionalized through the legalization of EFITU, were crucial for national wide protests occurred throughout 2011. In Tunisia, the major trade union UGTT was essential for mobilizing workers in the initial stages of protests but was backed by informal and spontaneous groups of workers during the process of protest diffusion.

Results remark that the 2010–2011 Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings were therefore well-grounded on intermediate mobilizing structures capable to survive in the interstices of an authoritarian context. Findings suggest to consider that, in repressive context, spontaneous groups and more established and formal organizations continuously switch from one form to another, overlap, and transform themselves faster than they would do in democratic contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Protests
• Arab uprising
• Egypt
• Tunisia
• organizations
• informal groups
• social movements

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. For security reasons, we prefer to keep the names of the individuals involved anonymous and provide fictitious names. These focus groups were part of a broader research by Giuseppe Acconcia (2018) conducted between 2011 and 2015 on Popular Committees and Independent Trade Unions in Egypt.

2. The eight semi-structured interviews were part of a broader research by David Leone Suber (2017) and the extracts of the 100 interviews were part of a broader project in which Henda Chennaoui collaborated (Chennaoui & Baraket, 2011).

3. For a definition of the process of mobilization implying the passage from passive individuals to active participants in political life cf. Tilly (1978, p. 69).

4. The sampling design included stratification (by governorate and urban-rural) and clustering. Interviews were distributed proportionally to population size. For further methodological details see the Arab Barometer Project, http://www.arabbarometer.org/ .

5. For a discussion on the direction of the relationship between organizational membership and protest engagement and between informal ties and protest engagement cf. the Online Methodological Appendix.

6. Case 1, Interviewee 7, Cairo.

7. Case 1, Interviewee 1, Cairo.

8. Case 1, Interviewee 1, Cairo.

9. Case 1, Interviewee 7, Cairo.

10. Case 1, Interviewees 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7, Cairo.

11. Case 1, Interviewees 4 and 5, Cairo.

12. Ibid.

13. Case 1, Interviewees 2, 3 and 4, Cairo.

14. Case 1, Interviewees 5 and 6, Cairo.

15. Looking at the correlation between specific categories of workers who joined protests in Egypt, results in model 1 of Table 1 show that professionals were significantly more likely to protest than students. Indeed, as mentioned, professionals had been largely active in organizations such as Kifaya in Egypt during the years prior to 2011.

16. http://www.madamasr.com/sections/politics/whatever-happened-egypts-independent-unions. Last time accessed on 10 May 2016.

17. Case 2, Interviewees 3, 4 and 9, Mahalla al-Kubra.

18. Case 2, Interviewee 5, Mahalla al-Kubra.

19. Case 2, Interviewees 1, 2 and 6, Mahalla al-Kubra.

20. Case 2, Interviewees 3 and 7, Mahalla al-Kubra.

21. The effect is positive and significant at p=0.11; therefore, it is not shown in Table 1.

22. Case 3, Interviewee 1, Ben Arous.

23. Case 3, Interviewee 3, Ben Arous.

24. Case 3, Interviewee 7, Yasminette.

25. Case 3, Interviewee 4, Medinat Jedida.

26. Case 3, Interviewee 8, Yasminette.

27. Case 3, Interviewee 7, Yasminette.

28. Case 3, Interviewee 7 and 8, Yasminette.

29. Case 3, Interviewee 2, Ben Arous.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katia Pilati

Katia Pilati is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Research (DSRS) at the University of Trento, Italy. Before joining DSRS, she was a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Geneva, and a FRS-FNRS research fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her research interests include political participation, social movements, social networks, immigration. Her works appeared, inter-alia, in Acta Sociologica, European Journal of Political Science, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Mobilization. She is the author of three books (Armando 2010; Palgrave Macmillan 2016; Il Mulino 2018).

Giuseppe Acconcia

Giuseppe Acconcia is a researcher focusing on the Middle East, Post-Doc University of Padova, Visiting Scholar University of California (UCLA - Center for Near Eastern Studies), Teaching Assistant at Bocconi, Lecturer at Cattolica University in Milan (ASERI). He holds a PhD at the University of London (Goldsmiths). He is the author of The Great Iran (Exorma, 2016), Egypt. Military Democracy (Exorma, 2014) and The Egyptian Spring (Infinito, 2012). He published in MERIP, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Sada), Policy Press and Palgrave.

David Leone Suber

David Leone Suber is a researcher focusing on the Middle East and North Africa. He holds an MA in Comparative Middle East politics from Tübingen University and the American University of Cairo (2017). As a full-time contributor to the Brush & Bow graphic-journalism collective, he currently reports about the issue of refugee’s return to Syria from the Syrian-Lebanese border. His works appear on Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Index (2018), Refugee Review (2017), Al Araby al Jedeed, Al Jadaliyya, Middle East Monitor and Salon Syria.

Henda Chennaoui

Henda Chennaoui is an independent journalist and scholar specialized in human rights and social movements. Since 2013 she has been working with Nawaat, an independent collective blog. She writes, inter-alia, on injustice, environmental problems, corruption. Currently, she is the moderator of the Middle East Forum in Tunisia of Open Democracy and she is pursuing a master of research in Sociology at Ibn Charaf University, Tunis.