Relational Dynamics and the Mixed Results of Civil Resistance in Egypt.

Over the past five years, Egyptian pro-democracy activists mobilized two major unarmed insurrections: one ending Hosni Mubarak's decades-long rule in February 2011, and the other precipitating a military coup against the newly-elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in July 2013. The former event was immediately recognized as a seminal moment in the wave of protest movements that swept across the Middle East and North Africa in 2010 and 2011, and as such it inspired significant scholarly conversation about its origins. But the latter event raises broader questions about the dynamics and outcomes of political transitions initiated by civil resistance campaigns. Prior research on similar revolutionary movements indicates that nonviolent methods succeed more often and are more likely to result in democracy than armed insurgencies. The general explanation is that civilian-based protest movements prefigure the democratic outcomes they seek. That explanation fits well for confirming cases but falls short for cases with negative or mixed outcomes, because prefigurative mechanisms operate in both successful and unsuccessful nonviolent movements. The causal pathways from the prefiguration to the realization of democracy need more scrutiny. This paper examines the mechanisms of civil resistance within the process of political transition in Egypt (2010-2015). Evidence from primary and secondary source materials demonstrates how historically contingent shifts in the relations among actors altered the effects of initially successful unarmed campaigns and hindered democratization. These case-specific findings are couched in a synthesized theoretical framework to produce important contributions to scholarly understanding of how civil resistance works and how it does not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]