Youth Activism and Contentious Politics in Egypt

Nadine Sika is Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at the American University in Cairo (AUC), and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Egyptian Institution for Public Opinion Polling 'Baseera'. She was previously Humboldt Foundation Visiting Fellow at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin (SWP), and was also a guest scholar at the Political Science Institute at Universität Tübingen. She is the co-editor (with Eberhard Kienle) of The Arab Uprisings: Transforming and Challenging State Power (2015). Her recent articles have appeared in Mediterranean Politics, The Journal of North African Studies and the British Journal of Middle East Studies.

• Introduction; 1. New approaches to contentious politics; 2. The context of mobilization; 3. Repertoires of contention; 4. Political attitudes of youth activists; 5. Mobilization networks; 6. Activism and contentious politics in Bahrain, Algeria, Jordan, and Morocco.

'Whatever their immediate outcomes, the experience of the upheavals that began in 2011 will shape the Arab world for generations to come. What prompted youth activism in these authoritarian settings? And what accounted for the regime responses? In this rich and nuanced study, Nadine Sika draws on original surveys and interviews with young Egyptians to provide revealing insights into the impetus to political protest, the limits of both the regime's accountability and the opposition's aspirations, and ultimately, the prospects for political reform in the Arab world.' Lisa Anderson, American University in Cairo