Coups and Revolutions

In 2011, Egypt witnessed more protests than any other country in the world. Counter to the received narrative, Amy Austin Holmes argues that the ousting of Mubarak in 2011 did not represent the culmination of a revolution or the beginning of a transition period, but rather the beginning of a revolutionary process that would unfold in three waves, followed by two waves of counterrevolution. This book offers the first analysis of both the revolution andcounterrevolution in Egypt from January 2011 until June 2018. The period of revolutionary upheaval played out in three uprisings against three distinct forms of authoritarian rule: the Mubarak regime and the police state that protected it, the unelected military junta known as the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, and the religious authoritarianism of the Muslim Brotherhood. The counterrevolution occurred over two periods: the first under Adly Mansour as interim president and the second after El Sisi was elected president. While the regime imprisoned orkilled the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood and many secular activists during the first wave of the counterrevolution, it turned against civil society at large during the second: NGOs, charities, media, academia, and minority groups. In addition to providing new and unprecedented empirical data, Coups and Revolutions makes two theoretical contributions. First, it presents a new framework for analyzing the state apparatus in Egypt based on four pillars of regime support that can either prop up or press upon whoever is in power. These are the Egyptian military, the business elite, the United States, and the multi-headed opposition. Secondly, the book brings together the literature on bottom-up revolutionary movementsand top-down military coups, and it introduces the concept of a coup from below in contrast to the revolution from above that took place under Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Holmes has written a useful and extremely fine-grained analysis...Holmes served as a faculty member at the American University in Cairo during most of the events she analyzes, and the work is enriched by the author's eyewitness experience of Egyptian turmoil and her interviews of numerous participants in revolutionary activity., Among the myriad examinations of Egypt's historic January 25th Revolution and its aftermath, Coups and Revolutions stands out for its cogent empirical analysis. Moving beyond the debates on authoritarianism, Dr. Holmes provides an insightful theoretical frame for comprehending the waves of revolutions and counter-revolutions in Egyptians' continual quest for democracy., Coups and Revolutions is one of the best, most detailed accounts of how the counterrevolution managed to crush the Egyptian people's aspirations for political and social change. It is essential reading for scholars and revolutionaries alike to understand what went wrong with the revolt that shook the region ten years ago., In Coups and Revolutions, Holmes analyzes the recent waves of social mobilization in Egypt as a historical process. In doing so, she takes the reader on a journey to understanding the dynamic processes with which coups, revolutions, and counter-coups evolve and create their counter-currents. By drawing on extensive field work and interviews, Holmes offers a rich account of this trend as well as the micro-processes at play throughout Egyptian politics and society since 2011. This rich analysis adds an important lens to both the literature and the current debates on social movements and mass mobilization., For someone whose life was shaped by Egypt's revolutions and coups, Holmes' detailed account of—and insights into—Egypt's tumultuous years is both painful and illuminating.

Amy Austin Holmes is Associate Professor of Sociology at the American University in Cairo, Visiting Scholar at the Weatherhead Center of Harvard University, and Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is the author of Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945. Having spent a decade living in the Middle East through the period known as the Arab Spring, she has published numerousarticles on Egypt, Turkey, Bahrain, and the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Syria. She has written about human rights violations including the Rabaa/Nahda massacre which she witnessed in August 2013; the crackdown on civil society; as well as the issue of US military aid to Egypt.