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Bread and Freedom: Egypt's Revolutionary Situation
A multivocal account of why Egypt's defeated revolution remains a watershed in the country's political history. Bread and Freedom offers a new account of Egypt's 2011 revolutionary mobilization, based on a documentary record hidden in plain sight—party manifestos, military communiqués, open letters, constitutional contentions, protest slogans, parliamentary debates, and court decisions. A rich trove of political arguments, the sources reveal a range of actors vying over the fundamental question in who holds ultimate political authority. The revolution's tangled events engaged competing claims to sovereignty made by insurgent forces and entrenched interests alike, a vital contest that was terminated by the 2013 military coup and its aftermath. Now a decade after the 2011 Arab uprisings, Mona El-Ghobashy rethinks how we study revolutions, looking past causes and consequences to train our sights on the collisions of revolutionary politics. She moves beyond the simple judgments that once celebrated Egypt's revolution as an awe-inspiring irruption of people power or now label it a tragic failure. Revisiting the revolutionary interregnum of 2011–2013, Bread and Freedom takes seriously the political conflicts that developed after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, an eventful thirty months when it was impossible to rule Egypt without the Egyptians.
392 pages, Hardcover
Published July 13, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 29, 2025
"This book has taken uncertainty, which nearly every study on Egypt’s uprising mentions in passing, and placed it at the center of the analysis as its foundational framework, taking seriously what political interaction looks like in the midst of so many intersecting, opaque, and confounding circumstances."
Bread and Freedom is both thoughtful and thorough. El-Ghobashy believes the devil is in the details, and wants to reclaim a narrative of inevitability to instead look at the specific moments, decisions and environment that led to the failure of civilian government. She is working from a Maxist theory base, and references studies of Cuban, Russian and Haitian revolutions among others. But it is her deep knowledge and scholarship of Egypt which grounds this account, explaining much of how dynamics playing out among politicians, the judiciary and the police played put, as well as the shifting social bases. This clarity and analysis makes the various shifts and changing cast easy to follow for relevant novices, enabling a rich look which avoids oversimplifications. There are not easy answers here, but there is a lot to think about
Bread and Freedom is both thoughtful and thorough. El-Ghobashy believes the devil is in the details, and wants to reclaim a narrative of inevitability to instead look at the specific moments, decisions and environment that led to the failure of civilian government. She is working from a Maxist theory base, and references studies of Cuban, Russian and Haitian revolutions among others. But it is her deep knowledge and scholarship of Egypt which grounds this account, explaining much of how dynamics playing out among politicians, the judiciary and the police played put, as well as the shifting social bases. This clarity and analysis makes the various shifts and changing cast easy to follow for relevant novices, enabling a rich look which avoids oversimplifications. There are not easy answers here, but there is a lot to think about
September 14, 2021
Professor El-Ghobashy resurrects the often ignored (in the West), but crucial political concept - the Leninist idea of a "revolutionary situation" - to provide one of the more interesting interpretations of the Egyptian Revolution that I have read.
Perhaps the key takeaway from the book - for me, at least - is the assertion by the author that the military and the bureaucratic political elite would have behaved in the same obstructive manner regardless of the ideological character of the newly elected parliament and president. The emphasis on the Islamist-secular divide, while having some explanatory power, is myopic (many Islamists in Egypt were opposed to Morsi and the MB). The military was bent on ensuring a counterrevolutionary outcome.
Shortly after the fall of Mubarak, SCAF went on a deliberate campaign to extinguish the disruptive power of the masses and control the entry of civilian democratic forces into state institutions. The fear of exclusion, of civilian control, of having their interests jeopardized, of being held accountable for crimes would have persisted even in a polity dominated by liberals, Nasserists and/or communists.
The military took advantage of both the revolutionary situation and Morsi's unpopularity to install one of their own as president, thus ensuring the revolution's defeat and ending the possibility that power would be devolved into the hands of civilians from the military and entrenched political elites.
Perhaps the key takeaway from the book - for me, at least - is the assertion by the author that the military and the bureaucratic political elite would have behaved in the same obstructive manner regardless of the ideological character of the newly elected parliament and president. The emphasis on the Islamist-secular divide, while having some explanatory power, is myopic (many Islamists in Egypt were opposed to Morsi and the MB). The military was bent on ensuring a counterrevolutionary outcome.
Shortly after the fall of Mubarak, SCAF went on a deliberate campaign to extinguish the disruptive power of the masses and control the entry of civilian democratic forces into state institutions. The fear of exclusion, of civilian control, of having their interests jeopardized, of being held accountable for crimes would have persisted even in a polity dominated by liberals, Nasserists and/or communists.
The military took advantage of both the revolutionary situation and Morsi's unpopularity to install one of their own as president, thus ensuring the revolution's defeat and ending the possibility that power would be devolved into the hands of civilians from the military and entrenched political elites.
October 15, 2024
professor el-ghobashy is so eloquent, well spoken, and intricate in her complex and wholistic analysis of egypt's revolutionary state
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews