Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Ali Sonay
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint: I.B. Tauris
Weight: 0.438kg
ISBN: 9781784538668
ISBN 10: 1784538663
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 20 October 2017
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
With his work about the April 6 Youth Movement Ali Sonay describes a new social movement type. The mobilization strategies are strongly linked to everyday life of the activists; the organizational forms are fluid, informal and flexible; ideologically the movement has a cross-ideological nature, or anti- ideological nature. The form of articulations are globalized. The marginalized mode of resource mobilization results both in the strengths and weaknesses in the functioning of such movements. It is perhaps of these factors why this new movement type can spark revolutions in many cases but cannot maintain a revolution until the very end. - Rachid Ouaissa, Professor, Center for Middle and Middle East Studies, Philipps-Universitat Marburg, Ali Sonay's Making Revolution in Egypt is a fascinating anatomy of a 21st century youth movement. By tracing the genesis and transformation of the 6th of April Youth Movement in Egypt from a Facebook page, to a revolutionary group, to an on-the-ground movement, Sonay raises timely questions about the contentious and changing nature of social movements in this global age of uprisings. - Linda Herrera, Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Author of Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet
Author Information
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.
