Egyptian Students and Politics beyond Protest

Abstract The legacy of the student movements in Egypt in the twentieth century makes some forms of political activity among Egyptian students, namely protests for national or regional causes, familiar and even expected. However, the significant neoliberal turn in the Egyptian economy in the late 1990s changed the structure of higher education and with it the status and behaviour of students. The usual analytical lens used to examine Egyptian students’ political activity by looking at protests, does not capture the realities of contemporary higher education nor the complexities of the impact of the major critical events of 2011 and 2013. This book uncovers politics and politicization processes in diverse locations where students act and organize such as student unions, partisan student organizations, student clubs and associations including simulation models, in addition to activist groups, by drawing on interviews conducted in Egypt between 2013 and 2015 with members of these groups and ethnographic observation of their activities. Proposing a dynamic theoretical framework to make sense of student politicization in authoritarian neoliberal contexts marked by sociopolitical change, this book argues that students collectively and individually negotiated the scope of their political activities as well as the meanings they attributed to these activities. The resulting student politics were, not only diverse and unexpected, but reflected the intertwinement of the historical representation of students as leaders of the nation, the neoliberal imperative to prepare for a competitive job market, and the impact of the revolution of 2011 and of the post-2013 context.