False Ideas About 'Activism' in Egypt and the Case of Egypt's Copts: Outside the State and Within the Economy of Power.

Since the events of the 'Arab-Spring', a certain liberal discourse has been espoused that promotes and glorifies 'activism'. This liberal discourse limits, rather than purportedly enhance, the inculcation of subjectivity of citizens at large in Egypt. By privileging a liberal individualist ontology, power struggles are eschewed in a favor of a 'transitional' paradigm that is associated with struggles for rights and liberties, which are seen as future gains as part of the struggle 'activists' wage. 'Activists' not only fit in and spread this 'rights and freedoms' agenda, but they become the agents and sole guardians of that agenda and the power relations it develops and controls. By scrutinizing the case of Egypt's Coptic Christians, a link can be drawn as to how overly naïve such analysis privileges 'activists', by way of a 'transition' paradigm, and silences the voices it supposedly seeks to speak on whose behalf. Copts, I argue, do not feel 'liberated' nor do they welcome such missionizing attitudes to 'save' Copts. In looking at the case of 'activists' in Egypt who are fighting for the 'Coptic cause', the United States 'religious freedom agenda' is problematized This discursive link highlights how such liberal notions are vehicles for intervention that continue to survey the region, attempt to control, modify and mould subjectivity to a discourse that is apologetic to the West as the bearer of rights and religious freedoms. In deconstructing this discourse a genealogy of the religious freedoms agenda since 2011 is made with respect to Egypt's Copts, showing how 'activists' automatically and naively adopt this liberal discourse. These 'activists' then become the gatekeepers, as well as the sole authorized speakers, of each 'cause'. This archaeological exercise highlights the links 'activists' have, the discourse and apologia they espouse and how they fit with the new-found bedrock of United States Foreign Policy: religious freedoms. In pushing for such an agenda power struggles and subjectivity is normalized in which the United States is elevated as the guardian of the oppressed and the weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]