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This book tries to answer three questions: 1) A ‘why’ question: the reason we have been surprised by the arrival of the ‘Arab Spring.’ Do we have the right conceptual lenses to understand the region and its different political interactions? 2) A ‘who’ question: the number and type of different groups that launched the protests and occupied Al-Tahrir Square. 3) A ‘how’ question: the way these spontaneous groups coalesced together, overpowered police forces and finally forced former President Mubarak to resign after almost 30 years in power. In addition to the introduction, the book's 13 chapters are regrouped into four parts. These deal with the resistance and limits of authoritarian rule, group dynamics in Tahrir, an attempt to go beyond the immediate and looking ahead. The book has a general bibliography and some appendices of several historical documents of the period as well as a sample of Tahrir slogans.

Sustainable development and environmental change have become two of the watchwords of the new century. But what do they mean for ordinary people living in some of the harshest environments in the world, where survival is the driving force? This book sets out to examine these issues and how they affect, and are affected by, Bedouin communities living in the arid areas of the Nubian Desert in southeastern Egypt. Written by a joint Egyptian, Russian, and British research team, the book seeks to examine how the Bedouin of this area have coped with the environmental changes brought about after the construction of the Aswan High Dam and resulting formation of Lake Nasser. After documenting the nature of these changes, the chapters show the practical and strategic ways in which the Bedouin have responded by adapting both their use of environmental resources and the social and economic dimensions of their community. The book argues that people in these communities are active agents of change and must not be seen as passive victims. For them, sustainable development and environmental change are not abstract academic debates, but real-life, everyday issues around which they must organize their lives.

This cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical book explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power on the mega-city of Cairo. Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public's role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and losses in the “march to the modern and the global” as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion to Cairo Cosmopolitan (AUC Press, 2006) further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies.

In the cities of the Arab world, while the media focus overwhelmingly on questions of religiosity and war, the future of urban modernity and political globalism is taking shape. As the Egyptian state reaches out to capture the apparent promises of neoliberalism, Cairenes struggle over and redefine their place, identity, and material welfare. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores what happens when new forms of privatization meet collectivist pasts, public space is sold off to satisfy investor needs and tourist gazes, and the state plans for Egypt's future in desert cities while stigmatizing and neglecting Cairo's popular neighborhoods. These dynamics produce surprising contradictions and juxtapositions that are coming to define today's Middle East. Luxury malls owned by the military or foreign investors compete with flourishing but criminalized open-air markets; Nubian, Upper Egyptian, and labor-migrant identities confront a renaissance of Arab nationalism; and chic new coffee houses, crumbling movie palaces, and resurgent working-class cultures offer radically clashing versions of public and gender sociability. This volume launches the Cairo School of Urban Studies, committed to fusing political-economy and ethnographic methods and sensitive to ambivalence and contingency, to reveal the new contours and patterns of modern power emerging in the urban frame. Cairo shows us that divergent cosmopolitanisms—both elite and working-class—are emerging across a broad spectrum of the polity, making new claims for political space.

In the era of globalization, change is the order of the day, but the conventional view of the Arab Middle East is that of a rigid and even stagnant region. This book counters the static perception and focuses instead on regional dynamics. After first discussing types of change, identifying catalysts, and tracing the evolution of the region over the last sixty years, the team of contributors go on to evaluate the development of Arab civil society; examine the opportunities and challenges facing the Arab media; link the debates concerning Arab political thought to the evolving regional and international context; look at the transformation of armed Islamist movements into deradicalized factions; assess how and to what extent women's empowerment is breaking down patriarchy; and analyze the rise of non-state actors such as Hizbollah and Hamas that rival central political authority. The book concludes with data tables that provide a quantitative guide to some aspects of these regional dynamics.

This work presents original research on cultural politics and battles in Egypt at the turn of the twenty-first century. It deconstructs the boundaries between “high” and “low” culture, drawing on conceptual tools in cultural studies, translation studies, and gender studies to analyze debates in the fields of literature, cinema, mass media, and the plastic arts. Anchored in the Egyptian historical and social contexts and inspired by the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu, it rigorously places these debates and battles within the larger framework of a set of questions about the relationship between the cultural and political fields in Egypt.

This book is a follow-up to a 1998 publication by the Economic Research Forum (ERF). Its significance lies in the contributors' reliance on fresh data and solid analytical techniques used to examine a wide spectrum of issues concerning the labor market in Egypt. The range of topics includes labor supply, employment and unemployment, youth labor market school-to-work transition, internal and international migration, earnings and inequality, and gender and education. The papers in the book are based on data collected in the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey of 2006, a follow-up to the Egypt Labor Market Survey of 1998.

This book has become a standard textbook in Middle East studies curricula all over the world. This third edition, with new material reflecting the earth-shaking events at the end of the Cold War and the continuation of violence and terrorism, examines foreign policies of nine Arab states in the context of globalization. The chapters first establish an analytical framework for assessing foreign policy, which are applied chapter by chapter to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, and Iraq.

Persistent societal problems and wealth creation in the Arab region are driving a new generation of actors to commit their resources for the greater public welfare. Widely known as philanthropy, voluntary contributions to causes that serve a public good are a longstanding and important aspect of cultures in the Arab region. What is of particular interest today is the proliferation of ways in which this private giving is being channeled into new institutional forms. In significant ways, some local philanthropy is becoming more strategic in its aims—by which is meant utilizing resources effectively to address the underlying causes of important social problems. Through an examination of philanthropic trends in eight key Middle Eastern countries, this book seeks to shed light on the forms of institutionalized giving that currently exist, as well as to provide recommendations for how charitable contributions can be most effective as vehicles of future social change. Drawing on data collected from endowed corporate foundations, public–private partnerships between business leaders and governmental agencies, and small-scale community-based organizations, this study marks attempts to map the dynamic contemporary landscape of philanthropy in the Arab region.

An estimated 200 million people in the world suffer from schistosomiasis (bilharzia), and according to the World Health Organization it ranks second behind malaria in terms of socioeconomic and public health importance in tropical and subtropical areas. The disease was present in Egypt in the Old Kingdom (c. 2600 BCE), and in 1998 it was estimated that almost six million Egyptians— one fifth of the rural population— were infected. Thus it remains one of the most serious public health problems in rural Egypt. This study paints a broad picture of schistosomiasis in rural Egypt. The research in three Nile Delta villages between 1991 and 1997 provides an in-depth community-level view of patterns of transmission and strategies for control. An analysis of recent research and policy presents the national context for the study. Schistosomiasis is primarily a behavioral disease, associated with human behavior in relation to water, especially canals; strategies for disease control and treatment need to consider what people do, where, when, and why. This book stresses an area of particular concern to social scientists: gender issues are most fully revealed at the local level, where an infection such as schistosomiasis is transmitted, diagnosed, treated, and ultimately (it is hoped) prevented.

Most governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region use trade policy to protect certain industries, provide tax incentives to promote a particular type of investment, and make subsidized credit available to firms of a certain size. Such government intervention, known as industrial policy, is the topic of this book. The aim is to assess whether state intervention leads to net benefits to society, why policymakers intervene, and how to bring about a healthier balance between states and markets. Answers to these questions are given in six chapters based on research papers that were presented at a conference held in Cairo in November 2005, and include case studies on Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, and Jordan.

This title presents a wide-ranging review of the relationship between the Egyptian judiciary and the government. If justice in the Arab world is often marked by a lack of autonomy of the judiciary toward the executive power, one of the characteristic features of the Egyptian judiciary lies in its strength and activism in the defense of democratic values. Judges have been struggling for years to enhance their independence from the executive power and exercise full supervision of the electoral process to achieve transparent elections. Recent years have seen growing tensions in Egypt between the judiciary and the executive authority. In order to gain concessions, judges went as far as to threaten to boycott the supervision of the presidential and legislative elections in the fall of 2005 and to organize sit-ins in the streets. The struggle between the two powers was in full swing in the spring of 2006, when a conference convened in Cairo in early April on the theme of the role of judges in the process of political reform in Egypt and the Arab world. The conference was organized by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) in cooperation with the Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD).

This is a retrospective look at a major investigation of the culture of a displaced people. In the 1960s, the construction of the Aswan High Dam occasioned the forced displacement of a large part of the Nubian population. Beginning in 1960, anthropologists at the American University in Cairo's Social Research Center undertook a survey of the Nubians to be moved and those already outside their historic homeland. The goal was to record and analyze Nubian culture and social organization, to create a record for the future, and to preserve a body of information on which scholars and officials could draw. This book chronicles the research carried out by an international team with the cooperation of many Nubians. Gathered here into one volume are chapters, which are reprinted, that provide a valuable resource of research data on the Nubian project, as well as photographs taken during the field study that document ways of life that have long since disappeared.

This new study weaves anthropological detail with hard facts and analysis as it takes the reader to visit the community schools of Upper Egypt. It offers a historical understanding of the initiative whilst carefully embedding it in the political and economic global context of the late twentieth century. The book first introduces the movement approach to development and carefully develops the notion of learning as a countermovement to the disintegrating world of today. It then moves on to describe how a community schools movement developed in the most deprived areas of rural Egypt; how such a movement is planned, mobilized, and sustained; and details the strategies and activities of the initiative. In the third part of the work, the book describes the impact of the movement on people's lives. The last chapter places the community education movement within the political economy of Egypt's educational reform and attempts to forecast the movement's long-term impact on the educational system.

This book aims at describing two major transformations that have been observed in the Middle East during the last thirty years: first, the accelerated changes in public policies toward neighborhoods characterized as irregular or illegal, and second, the claim that this form of housing in urban areas constitutes the ordinary condition. The precise description of interactions and routines sheds light on the way in which ‘bits and pieces’ of cities, or neighborhoods are reproduced and transform. In the context of the daily practices and legal documents negotiated by inhabitants, we observe a crossing of institutionalized borders, which are in turn blurred and remade with the cooperation of state agents. The first part deals with the study of ordinary forms and methods used to build and compose buildings in the shape of streets and neighborhoods. The second part looks at the normative conditions of daily practices related to land and tenure mobilization and thus of housing, transactions, and conflict resolution in the urban context, thereby offering a new reading of government action in and on cities through case studies. We seek to describe grammars of normativity, whether legal, when practices articulate formal rules and their local enforcement, or conventional, when negotiation and compromise allow neighbors to adjust and adapt to one another. This collective work, based on a praxeological method, aims at taking into consideration the forms of urban production, the practices which underlie them, and the norms which constrain them, in universal terms that can be understood well beyond the borders of the Middle East.

Basic education — considered essential for building democratic societies and competitive economies — has headed the agendas of development agencies in recent years. During the same period, Egypt topped the lists of recipients of development assistance and proclaimed education to be its national project. This book explains how Egyptian domestic political actors have interacted with and reacted to international development aid to Egypt's educational system, particularly when that aid is linked to sensitive issues of reform and cultural change. In recent years, international donors have called for changes that are inconsistent with the functions, structures, and culture of Egyptian institutions, resulting in a climate of suspicion surrounding foreign aid to education. In this analysis, the author looks at how problems are diagnosed, and reforms implemented and resisted. As she demonstrates, the low level of ownership and consensus among the various domestic actors and the failure to establish strategic coalitions to support the reforms result in poor implementation and incomplete internalization. Policy makers have to date not succeeded in achieving the minimum level of domestic consensus essential for embedding the values and culture that bring about true reform. From the debate over free education to conspiracy theories and the evolving definition of international norms, this book sheds new light on the conflict of ideas that surrounds donor-sponsored reforms.

Trying to make sense of the urban giant that is Cairo, this book moves beyond superficial generalizations about Cairo as a chaotic metropolis in the developing world into an analysis of the ways the city's 18 million inhabitants have, in the face of a largely neglectful government, built and shaped their own city. Using a wealth of recent studies on Greater Cairo and a deep reading of informal urban processes, the city and its recent history are portrayed and mapped: the huge, spontaneous neighborhoods; housing; traffic and transport; city government; and its people and their enterprises. The failed attempts of the State to create the new, modern Egypt in the deserts surrounding Cairo and their unintended consequences as a colossal speculative frontier are given a special focus. The book argues that understanding a city such as Cairo is not a daunting task as long as pre-conceived notions are discarded and care is taken to apprehend available information and to assess it with a critical eye.