Explore the vast range of titles available.

Under what conditions did the first Islamist movements organize? Which social and institutional contexts facilitated such mobilization? A sizable literature points to social and demographic changes, Western encroachment into Muslim societies, and the availability of state and economic infrastructure. To test these hypotheses, we match a listing of Muslim Brotherhood branches founded in interwar Egypt with contemporaneous census data on over 4,000 subdistricts. A multilevel analysis shows that Muslim Brotherhood branches were more likely in subdistricts connected to the railway and where literacy was higher. Branches were less likely in districts with large European populations, and where state administration was more extensive. Qualitative evidence also points to the railway as key to the movement’s propagation. These findings challenge the orthodoxy that contact between Muslims and the West spurred the growth of organized political Islam, and instead highlight the critical role of economic and state infrastructure in patterning the early contexts of Islamist activism.

Focal days of protest are increasingly common to episodes of revolutionary mobilization. This paper explores the significance of focal days in patterning sustained protest in Egypt and Tunisia from 2011 to 2012. In Egypt, resource-poor activists exploited the confluence of worshippers on Fridays to mobilize mass transitory protest. This reliance on ritualized action hindered cross-sectoral coordination and meant mass protest often failed to inflict a direct economic cost. In Tunisia, there was no focal day of protest, in large part due to the coordinating hand of trade unions. In consequence, mass protest was more likely to span multiple sites, sectors, and tactics. These results suggest that oppositions can sustain mass mobilization even absent organizational capacity, but a reliance on a focal day limits the potential of protest over a political transition. Supplementary analyses point to the applicability of our findings to a number of other Arab Spring countries.

On 28 January 2011 the Egyptian army was deployed onto Cairo's streets following three days of escalating protests. Upon entering Midan al-Tahrir, a column of newly arriving army tanks and APCs was attacked by protestors. Throwing stones and dousing the vehicles in petrol before setting them alight, protestors pulled soldiers out of their vehicles and beat them. Seizing ammunition and supplies, protestors even commandeered a tank. Minutes later those same protestors were chanting pro-army slogans, posing for photographs with soldiers and sharing food. How protestors respond to the deployment of security forces assumed loyal to a regime determined to end protest is often summed-up in the dyad of “fight or flight.” In this paper, I consider a third option: fraternization. Through a social interactionist lens, I explore the prevalence of pro-army chants, graffiti, the mounting of military vehicles, physical embraces, sleeping in tank tracks and posing for photographs with soldiers in and around Midan al-Tahrir during the 25th January Egyptian Revolution. I draw on the contentious politics literature, as well as micro-sociologies of violence and ritual, to suggest that fraternizing protestors developed a repertoire of contention that made immediate, emotional claims on the loyalty of regime troops. From initial techniques of micro-conflict avoidance, protestors and their micro-interactions with soldiers forged a precarious “internal frontier” that bifurcated governance from sovereignty through the performance of the army and the people as one hand in opposition to the Mubarak regime.

Focal days of protest are increasingly common to episodes of revolutionary mobilization. This paper explores the significance of focal days in patterning sustained protest in Egypt and Tunisia from 2011 to 2012. In Egypt, resource-poor activists exploited the confluence of worshippers on Fridays to mobilize mass transitory protest. This reliance on ritualized action hindered cross-sectoral coordination and meant mass protest often failed to inflict a direct economic cost. In Tunisia, there was no focal day of protest, in large part due to the coordinating hand of trade unions. In consequence, mass protest was more likely to span multiple sites, sectors, and tactics. These results suggest that oppositions can sustain mass mobilization even absent organizational capacity, but a reliance on a focal day limits the potential of protest over a political transition. Supplementary analyses point to the applicability of our findings to a number of other Arab Spring countries.

What are the determinants of ethnic violence? Existing research has forwarded a range of often competing explanations, from political opportunism to economic competition to state incapacity. We argue that this diversity of accounts is attributable, in part, to scholars’ tendency to lump together distinct forms of ethnic violence that have different underlying determinants. We propose that scholars instead disaggregate ethnic violence and put forward a typology based on the target of the attack (properties vs. individuals) and whether assailants use arms. We demonstrate the utility of this typology by applying it to an original dataset of ethnic attacks against Christians in Egypt from 2013 to 2018. In addition to a set of shared factors, we find that unarmed attacks against property (“burnings”) are the product of political mobilization, unarmed attacks against individuals (“beatings”) are related to socioeconomic tensions, and armed attacks (“bombings”) follow the strategic logic of terrorist violence.

Who joins extremist movements? Answering this question is beset by methodological challenges as survey techniques are infeasible and selective samples provide no counterfactual. Recruits can be assigned to contextual units, but this is vulnerable to problems of ecological inference. In this article, we elaborate a technique that combines survey and ecological approaches. The Bayesian hierarchical case–control design that we propose allows us to identify individual-level and contextual factors patterning the incidence of recruitment to extremism, while accounting for spatial autocorrelation, rare events, and contamination. We empirically validate our approach by matching a sample of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters from nine MENA countries with representative population surveys enumerated shortly before recruits joined the movement. High-status individuals in their early twenties with college education were more likely to join ISIS. There is more mixed evidence for relative deprivation. The accompanying extremeR package provides functionality for applied researchers to implement our approach.

Scholarship on political Islam suggests that support for early Islamist movements came from literate merchants, government officials, and professionals who lacked political representation. We test these claims with a unique tranche of microlevel data drawn from a Muslim Brotherhood petition campaign in interwar Egypt. Matching the occupations of over 2,500 Brotherhood supporters to contemporaneous census data, we show that Egyptians employed in commerce, public administration, and the professions were more likely to sign the movement's petitions. The movement's supporters were also overwhelmingly literate. Contrary to expectations, the early Brotherhood also attracted support from Egyptians employed in agriculture, albeit less than we would expect given the prevalence of agrarian workers in the population. A case study tracing Muslim Brotherhood branch formation and petition activism in a Nile Delta village illustrates how literate, socially mobile agrarian families were key to the propagation of the movement in rural areas.

On August 14, 2013, supporters of deposed President Muhammad Mursi were massacred at two protest camps in Cairo and Giza. In the subsequent four months, the Muslim Brothers have regrouped to launch a wave of popular protest the likes of which has not been seen in Egypt since the January 25 revolution. Under the banner of the National Alliance to Support Legitimacy, the Brothers have mounted over 1,800 actions in 26 of Egypts 27 governorates to call for Mursis restoration to office and justice for his dead supporters. These protests have continued in spite of an ongoing crackdown that has claimed the lives of hundreds more and seen thousands of Brothers and pro-Mursi supporters detained.

On August 14, 2013, supporters of deposed President Muhammad Mursi were massacred at two protest camps in Cairo and Giza. In the subsequent four months, the Muslim Brothers have regrouped to launch a wave of popular protest the likes of which has not been seen in Egypt since the January 25 revolution. Under the banner of the National Alliance to Support Legitimacy, the Brothers have mounted over 1,800 actions in 26 of Egypt's 27 governorates to call for Mursi's restoration to office and justice for his dead supporters. These protests have continued in spite of an ongoing crackdown that has claimed the lives of hundreds more and seen thousands of Brothers and pro-Mursi supporters detained. Adapted from the source document.

The literature on civil resistance finds that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed than violent insurgencies. A parallel literature on democratization poses mass mobilization as exogenous to political liberalization. Contributing to both literatures, we propose the category of unarmed collective violence to capture an empirically recurring form of unruly collective action used by civilians and then use a mixed methods research design to examine its impact on democratization. An event history analysis finds that riots are positively associated with political liberalization in 103 nondemocracies from 1990 to 2004. Attacks by civilians on police stations during the January 25 Egyptian Revolution illustrate one way in which unarmed collective violence can bring about a democratic breakthrough. A qualitative examination of all 80 democratic transitions held between 1980 and 2010 also reveals the salience of unarmed collective violence by civilian forces. These findings contribute to research on the dynamics of contentious democratization and suggest that remaining unarmed may be more consequential for a democracy campaign than adhering to nonviolence.