Rusha Latif, author of Tahrir’s Youth: “The problems and grievances that drove the 2011 Egyptian revolution remain and are much worse today”
Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) — Born in the United States to Egyptian parents, Rusha Latif is an independent researcher based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is also the author of the book Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution, published by the American University in Cairo Press in 2022. In this conversation, we discuss Latif’s book together with the current situation in Egypt on the 14th anniversary of the January 25 uprising that culminated with the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak on February 11.
MM: You arrived in Egypt in June 2011, five months after the fall of Mubarak, and spent months there conducting interviews with young activists, with follow-up interviews later on. Can you explain how you remember this period and your research process?
RL: The revolution erupted when I was a graduate student at UC Davis, after I had just discovered and developed a fascination with the literature on social movement theory and decided I wanted to focus on movements for my research. The timing was uncanny. Naturally, because of my Egyptian background and connection to the country, I felt called to study the revolution for my project. I wanted to understand how it happened. What caught my attention was the way Western media was framing it. They kept describing it as a spontaneous and leaderless uprising, driven by social media, yet they also spoke about it being led by the youth. I was struck by the tension between these descriptions: how could it be both leaderless and youth-led? This question was the starting point of my research.
Rusha Latif
I was fortunate in that when I arrived in Cairo, Tahrir Square was still buzzing with protests, which allowed me to start networking immediately. I tried to find activists who could help me answer my question about leadership. I was eventually directed to some activists who shared the story at the core of the book, about an incredible protest march they secretly planned and carried out on January 25, which brought out a critical mass of protesters from the popular quarters in Cairo’s periphery. The story completely undermined the narrative that this was a spontaneous, leaderless uprising, and it confirmed I was right to question it. There was clearly leadership happening even though there was no clear vanguard, and I realized this was the story that needed to be told. I decided to focus on the group that had organized this demonstration, which was the Revolutionary Youth Coalition (RYC).
The problem with studying revolutionaries as they are carrying out their revolution in real time (especially the leaders) was that they kept getting snatched away to the frontlines whenever there was a flare-up; they were extremely slippery and hard to secure for interviews. The volatile political environment made it challenging to conduct research efficiently, so I had to adapt and come up with guerrilla research methods. I figured that if I could not get the interviews, participant observation could help me interpret the early 18 days of the uprising, the original focus of my study. So I started shadowing the activists whenever I could, at protests and other events. Eventually I got most of the interviews, after delaying my return to the US twice, and I gained extensive insight from my direct observation as I started to see parallels between the activists’ accounts of the challenges they faced in the early days and what was unfolding while I was there.
MM: Both in the book and in our interview, you always talk about the Egyptian revolution or the January 25 revolution. It could be argued that, considering the current political situation in Egypt, and the fact that the Egyptian army never lost its grip on power, the term “revolution” should not apply here. How do you understand the concept of “revolution”?
RL: There are two ways to understand the concept of “revolution”: revolution as movement and revolution as change. I use “Egyptian revolution” and “January 25 revolution” interchangeably to refer to the 18-day uprising and the revolutionary period that followed because these are the terms Egyptians themselves use to describe the movement activity they were engaging in as they were trying to overthrow the system. What we saw in Egypt was definitely a revolutionary situation, as the people collectively asserted their power and mounted a serious threat to the regime’s dominance. However, we did not see a revolutionary outcome —the kind of radical transformation in the state and the established political order that is usually associated with the completion of a revolution. A lot of us are very comfortable calling it a revolution not only because that is what the activists understood they were engaging in, but also because we understand that revolutions are very long processes that unfold in many stages and cycles. Even though, technically, the revolution has been defeated, that does not mean the defeat is permanent and that a revolutionary outcome will not happen at some point in the future. If we take a longue durée approach, it is still appropriate to call it a revolution with the understanding that change has not yet been achieved.
MM: In your book, you argue that discussions about youth participation in Egypt’s uprising have often been simplistic. How would you describe Egypt’s revolutionary youth?
RL: The impression Western media gave us early on, based on the “Twitterati” youth voices they were centering, was that the activists behind the revolt were highly cosmopolitan, English-speaking, tech-savvy young people who came from financially comfortable backgrounds and went to elite universities. However, my research revealed this was inaccurate. In fact, most of the RYC organizers, especially those who were key in instigating the January 25 uprising, did not fit this profile at all. They were members of the popular class. This makes sense, because it means the leading activists came from the very neighborhoods and identified with the very marginalized communities they were trying to mobilize. Their background gave them the class capital they needed for this undertaking. It gave them deep knowledge of the grievances in these popular neighborhoods and the fears its residents had of the police, which enabled them to come up with an elaborate strategy that accounted for them.
In terms of gender, the revolution was celebrated for the equal participation of men and women, but what I found is that, when it came to actual leadership, leadership was gendered. For instance, out of thirteen leaders in the RYC’s executive committee, only one was a woman. As for the religious and ideological leanings of the revolutionary youth, I assumed most of them would identify as secular, but this wasn’t exactly the case. “Secular” is a murky term in Egypt. RYC activists found ways to blend their faith (the majority were Muslim) with their liberal and leftist ideologies. The Muslim Brotherhood youth were a particularly fascinating case study.
MM: You explain that the January 25 revolution cannot be considered spontaneous because a series of protests in the 2000s paved the way to the 18-day uprising, also shaping the form youth activism would take in 2011. What was the importance of these early protests?
RL: The problem with the spontaneity trope is that it makes it seem like the revolution erupted in a vacuum. The truth is that January 25 was the culmination of a resistance movement that had been intensifying in the streets during the previous decade. If you were to ask any of the revolutionaries when the revolution started, they would not say January 25—they would date it back ten years earlier, to the start of the Second Intifada. Many of the activists I interviewed cited the Palestinian solidarity protests that took place in Egypt back then as the start of their politicization and activation. This protest wave later expanded to include the anti-Iraq War demonstrations, followed by the pro-democracy Kefaya Movement, struggles for workers’ rights, and protests against police brutality.
During these waves of protests, the youth started to come up with new protest strategies and tactics with the aim of drawing the masses—especially the lower and working classes—into the struggle. This is something that the older guard had failed to do but the youth saw as necessary for change to occur. The youth were critical of the senior activists’ approach, which they saw as elitist. For instance, the older generation used to hold protests in front of downtown government buildings in Cairo not easily accessible. The young activists tried to do the opposite: to bring the protests to the struggling Egyptians to make it easier for them to participate. They introduced the practice of flash protests in popular quarters. This was the tactic they implemented with their secret strategy on January 25, when they managed to subvert the police and assemble scores of protesters in the popular neighborhoods before moving to the city center—it’s what made the plan a great success. In the years before the uprising, they were raising the culture of resistance in Egypt to new heights as they were building a robust, decentralized, horizontal movement structure that made it easy for people to join the movement, act autonomously and creatively, and step up as leaders, which is what the activists themselves were doing. This fluid, flexible structure became the hallmark of this pre-2011 resistance movement, and it also came to define the revolutionary movement that emerged out of it. Ironically, this structure that was so advantageous during the early days of the revolt later became a liability. On the one hand, it allowed the activists to quickly mobilize the masses and generate an unprecedented revolutionary opening. On the other, it impeded them from taking advantage of this political opportunity, leaving the door open to more organized, reactionary forces to do so: the military and the Muslim Brotherhood.
MM: Your book focuses on the RYC, one of the most significant umbrella organizations during the Egyptian revolution. The organizations within the RYC, and the individuals active in it, were diverse in their socioeconomic backgrounds, level of education, and political views, including Socialists, liberals, and Islamists. This diversity, which was arguably an asset early on, became later more problematic, and the RYC dissolved after Mohamed Morsi was elected president. Can you describe this process of internal estrangement?
RL: The RYC consolidated ten days into the uprising, when the revolutionaries were focused on toppling Mubarak. This shared goal made it easy for them to put aside their ideological differences and work together. With Mubarak removed, the young revolutionaries lost the common cause that unified them. The rifts between them started to appear shortly after the 18-day uprising, and especially around the 2011 parliamentary elections, when things such as ideological competition, personal ambition, and even egotism prevented the RYC members who wanted to participate in the elections from agreeing on a common strategy. Basically, the RYC became undone by the same forces that had long made the opposition ineffectual. In the end, the divisions the RYC experienced were not unique to them and their movement. This is common in mass revolutionary movements that bring together diverse ideological groups. I think this is symptomatic of not having clarity about the shared vision they are fighting for and well-conceived organizational models that could help their participants manage their deep differences and keep them collectively on track until they reach their shared goal.
MM: In the book, you write that “the story of Egypt’s revolutionary struggle and the youth activists who championed it has been a tragedy in the heaviest sense of the world.” At the same time, you note that there are activists who continue to pursue change and that some of them gained valuable experience during and after 2011. How do you see Egypt’s future?
RL: There is no visible revolutionary movement in Egypt today. There is some activism related to trying to free activists and other Egyptians who have been unjustly imprisoned, in addition to efforts to document state abuses. That seems to be the extent of it. Nonetheless, the revolutionary sentiment is still there, and we saw this in October 2023, when the regime allowed some protests over Gaza and demonstrators exploited the opportunity to storm Tahrir despite the ban and echo chants from 2011. The problems and grievances that drove the Egyptian revolution still exist and are in fact much worse today. The repression is unprecedented, and elite corruption is massive. Many people believe the status quo won’t last—the question is when it might collapse. The problem is that the ruling class has decimated civil society, which means there are no political groups on the ground that could capture and direct any street energy that might erupt. In short, the future is highly unpredictable. I think our task right now is to reflect on the learnings we gained from the activists’ experience and to use them to imagine new ways for our movements forward.
MM: In Syria, the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime has generated a wave of hope. The Syrian case, with 14 years of civil war, is obviously very different from Egypt. Even so, the fall of Mubarak did not bring what the revolutionaries had hoped for, and currently Syria faces a very complicated future despite Assad having been forced out of the scene. Are there lessons from Egypt’s recent history that can be useful for the current situation in Syria?
RL: The main lesson is to beware the counter-revolution in its many forms. In Egypt, the counter-revolution came from the ruling elite. In the Syrian context, this will look very different because the old ruling class has been uprooted. The commonality between Egypt and Syria might be found in the role of Empire in revolutions and counter revolutions. One of the things that the Egyptian revolutionaries showed us is that it’s not really possible to have a successful revolution with the US Empire still intact. If a revolution is about capturing state power, what do you do when power is not contained fully within the hands of the ruling class of the country? In the case of Egypt, power was also in the hands of the US, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, etc. That was the challenge the revolutionaries found themselves up against. So I think the lesson is that revolutionary organizing never stops, and it must consist of simultaneously building and coordinating within an internationalist movement to figure out how to collectively topple Empire and imagine a world order beyond the one we have now, so decisively shaped by the nation-state. Without this clarity of project and vision, it will be difficult to figure out the revolutionary organizing needed to actualize it.