New Logics of Popular Sovereignty and Subaltern Alternatives to Egypt’s “Thug State”

Paul Amar, Associate Professor, Global Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara

New Logics of Popular Sovereignty and Subaltern Alternatives to Egypt’s “Thug State”, Paul Amar

This paper will aim to articulate subaltern forms of sovereignty -- social banditry, vigilantism, community self-policing, and football-fan militancy -- that have emerged in Egypt following the uprising of 25 January 2011. These forms of autonomous organization have generated novel kinds of political assertion, created a new vocabulary for representing stateness and governmentality, and unleashed a range of forms of political and social violence and resistance. This piece aims to contribute to the political anthropology of the state and the political sociology of revolutions by looking beyond the limits of the optics of civil society and identity politics, beyond the “pragmatism” of Bourdieuvian notions of logics or social capital, and will grapple with the realities of violence, sexuality, and class that neo-institutionalists tend to ignore.   In this context, I will trace the military junta and Islamist parliament’s deployment of discourses of hypermasculinity, thuggishness, predatory sexuality, and moral respectability that attempt to discredit and justify extreme repression of these “anarchic” forms of youth and community self-organization.  And I will draw upon my new ethnographic fieldwork to articulate what novel theories of governance, horizontal organization, autonomy, collectivity, and nationalism emanate from these local assertions, as they are characterized by their practitioners.  Can these be the seeds of a counterhegemonic formation of popular sovereignty that could substitute for the limitations of both militarized emergency rule, and Islamic piety-centered electoral/representative politics?  Or are these local, subversive appropriations of “thug politics” doomed to be ephemeral phenomena?

Biography

Paul Amar , Associate Professor in the Global & International Studies Program, specializes in comparative politics, international security studies, political sociology, global ethnography, theories of the state, and theories of gender, race, and postcolonial politics. He holds affiliate appointments in Feminist Studies, Sociology, Middle East Studies, and Latin American & Iberian Studies. Prof. Amar's research, publishing and teaching focuses on the areas of state institutions, security regimes, social movements, and democratic transitions in the Middle East and Latin America, and traces the origins and intersections of new patterns of police militarization, security governance, humanitarian intervention, and state restructuring in the megacities of the global south.  His recent publications shed light on the gendered nature of new forms of security governance, reconceptualize how security-sector transfers shape state formations in the Middle East, offer new frames for explaining the link between institutional changes in the military and security apparatuses of Middle Eastern states and the revolutions of the “Arab Spring,” and interrogate the nature of sovereignty and the robustness of authoritarianism vis-a-vis humanitarian intervention and mass uprising. His books include: The Security Archipelago: ‘Human Security’ States, Sexuality Politics and the End of Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2012); Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East (American University in Cairo Press, 2006) with Diane Singerman; New Racial Missions of Policing: International Perspectives on Evolving Law-Enforcement Politics (Routledge, 2010); Global South to the Rescue: Emergent Humanitarian Superpowers and Transnational Rescue Industries (Routledge, 2012); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (University of Minnesota Press / LeftWord Press, 2012), with Vijay Prashad; and The Middle East and Brazil: Forging New South-South Alliances, Reviving Transregional Public Cultures (Indiana University Press, 2013).

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network hosted by the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies

Contact email: rs94@soas.ac.uk