OPPORTUNITY WITHOUT ORGANIZATION: LABOR MOBILIZATION IN EGYPT AFTER THE 25TH JANUARY REVOLUTION*
Prevailing understandings of labor protest and strikes take as their focus stable democratic settings where autonomous trade union structures are an established component of the organizational resources available to workers. We extend the analysis of labor mobilization to a radically different context: Egypt in the year of the January 25th Revolution, when workers mobilized en masse in the absence of union leadership. For this, we use a catalogue of 4,912 protest events reported in Arabic-language newspapers. Our findings point to the importance of cross-sectoral demonstration effects in contexts of political disorganization—local and national mobilization advancing both labor and nonlabor demands inspired subsequent labor protest. This speaks to the value of understanding labor protest and strikes not as delimited domains of action but as parts of a wider universe of contentious politics. In addition, state-level signals of opportunity and shifts in economic conditions are also found to pattern the incidence of labor mobilization.
Contributor Notes
* This research was supported by a grant from the John Fell OUP Research Fund. The authors thank Anne Alexander, Mostafa Bassiouny, Dina Bishara, and Jeroen Gunning for sharing data and Sarah ElMasry for research assistance. We are grateful to Noah Waterfield Price for contributing his considerable Python expertise, Michael Biggs, Killian Clarke, John Ermisch, and Sidney Tarrow for their comments on a previous draft of the article, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions for revisions. We also thank Marco Giugni for his editorial guidance. A earlier version was presented at the 2016 annual conference of the Social Science History Association and at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, King's College London. An online appendix is available at https://osf.io/b8nyx/.
† Christopher Barrie is a DPhil Candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford; Neil Ketchley is Lecturer in Middle East Politics at King's College London.