Five Characteristics of the Egyptian Youth Movements

Cartoon by Carlos Latuff

The Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies has released a new paper in its “Strategic Studies” series on the youth movement and its role in contemporary Egyptian politics.

“Youth Movements and the January 25 Revolution” by Dina Shahata is a 40 page account focusing particularly  on the 2005 Youth for Change Movement and its role within the larger Kifaya movement. She argues that the new youth movements have five key characteristics:

1. These movements began independently of existing political parties and other political organizations such as trade unions and student organizations.
2. The movements have flexible, decentralized structured and fluid leadership. They are often divided into many highly independent, specialized subgroups of the sort I’ve been calling (in my anthropological way) sodalities.
3. The movements are “trans-ideological”; that is, they encompass anti-regime, pro-democracy advocates from many different ideological backgrounds.
4. These movements depend to a great extent on social media for communication.
5. While the movements initial leadership was drawn from men and women experienced in protest activities, they were able to draw in large numbers of participants who had never before engaged in a public political act.

The paper is, unfortunately for most of my readers, in Arabic, but there is an excellent summary on Al-Ahram On-Line.

The author is one of the few political scientists to actually be writing about youth movements before this year, so she’s the ideal author for something like this. I have this vague memory of having met her briefly at Georgetown in 2003, but I’m not positive (my memory is not very reliable…).

Reference:

Shehata, Dina. 2011. Al-Harakat Al-Shababeya wa Thawret 25 Yanayer (Youth Movements and the January 25 Revolution). Strategy Papers series no.218. Cairo: Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

El-Wardani, Mahmoud. 2011. Review: A Map of the New Youth Movements in Egypt. Ahram Online, 6 July.  http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/15667.aspx [accessed 9 July]