Rusha Latif, Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution (American University in Cairo Press, 2022).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Rusha Latif (RL): I felt called to pursue this project shortly after the January 25 revolution’s start. Not only was I drawn in by the moving scenes of my fellow Egyptians stepping into their power, but as a grad student at UC Davis studying social movements, I was also struck by explanations for how the eruption happened. The media narrative at the time was that this was a spontaneous, leaderless uprising, powered by social media. But much was also said about it being youth-led. The tension between these descriptions fascinated me: How could it be both leaderless and youth-led? Taking this question up as my research, I set out for Cairo. A few conversations with activists upon my arrival confirmed there was indeed some planning for January 25, but it was not until I met with a leading leftist activist that I learned the details. She described a brilliant secret strategy her group, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition (RYC), had executed on January 25 to draw the masses onto the streets. It was exciting and validating to hear this remarkable story, because it confirmed I was right to question the “spontaneous” and “leaderless” narrative. With this backstory—which is surprisingly still mostly unknown today—I realized I had the starting point for an important study on Egypt’s revolutionaries.
I had no intention of writing a book when I first began this project. What was supposed to be a master’s thesis ended up being more like a dissertation in scope, depth, and length. There was no question I had to complete the journey to publication: the story of the movement’s young protagonists could not be forgotten. It would have been a disservice not only to the Egyptian revolution but to movements everywhere that stand to learn so much from this experience. With the revolution’s defeat, this study was all the more urgent. These activists deserved their own book, since it is possible that without their efforts, we might not have an Egyptian revolution or even an Arab Spring to speak of today.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
RL: Tahrir’s Youth is an activist ethnography that explores the themes of leadership and organization in the 2011 Egyptian revolution, focusing on the RYC, the first and arguably most significant front born of the nationwide revolt. Forged in Tahrir Square during the eighteen-day uprising, the RYC comprised the political youth groups most active on the ground leading up to January 25 and whose collaboration had begun long before. Together, they strategized for the day of protest and were key in driving the revolutionary movement that ensued, especially as it unfolded in Tahrir Square and Cairo. The book challenges the notion that the uprising was purely spontaneous and leaderless. Moving beyond these reductive tropes, it takes for granted that there were, in fact, leaders in the Egyptian revolution—as in any movement—and instead focuses on understanding their agency: what enabled it, what constrained it, and ultimately what prevented them from achieving a winning outcome for their movement.
The book emphasizes the narratives of ten RYC leaders who reflect the diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and ideological leanings of the youth activists who participated. Anthropologically, it studies the revolutionary process through the leaders’ personal stories, political trajectories, and subjective transformations, taking into consideration questions of gender, class, religion, and ideology. Sociologically, it examines the horizontal leadership and organizing processes they engaged in—first as an informal network, then as the RYC—as they tried to direct and sustain the movement, with special attention to the internal and external challenges they faced along the way. To illuminate this experience, the book draws on social movement theories related to leadership and the classical Marxist theoretical literature on revolutionary organizing. It argues that, as the closest thing the revolution had to a vanguard organization, the RYC deserves our attention for the lessons it offers in revolutionary leadership and the viability of participatory democracy as its praxis—not just for movements in the Arab region but for struggles across the world.
An in-depth exploration of the motives, hopes, strategies, successes, failures, and disillusionments of the revolution’s leaders, Tahrir’s Youth offers insight into the political generation of Arab youth that emerged in 2010 and altered the trajectory of the region as they fought for a new world.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
RL: Born of an eleven-year labor of love, Tahrir’s Youth is not only my first book but my first academic publication. It grew out of a longstanding interest I had in social change—how it happens, what impedes it—and my search for how I might help effect it. This journey started for me several years earlier in Egypt, where I had moved to reconnect with my heritage, after completing my undergraduate studies. Through my engagement with ordinary Egyptians and my daily exposure to the dire socioeconomic conditions they were forced to endure, I became socially conscious and asked myself what it would take to shift the world toward meaningful change. This experience set me on an academic trajectory through which I was introduced to the study of social movements and that, to my surprise, would eventually bring me back full circle to Egypt—intellectually and emotionally, and in the most exhilarating and unexpected circumstances—to study a revolutionary outbreak in my country.
J: What was your experience like conducting this research?
RL: It was both challenging and life-changing. What made conducting this research such a challenge was not just the volatile revolutionary environment but also my complex positionality in the field. I traveled to Cairo naively thinking it would be easy to carry out this research because of my insider status as an Egyptian, but it turned out I was not as Egyptian as I had thought. I was a young, first-generation Egyptian-American/Muslim-American hijabi with provincial Nile Delta origins and a middle-class, suburban California upbringing. Tahrir made me get clear about this; it forced me to unpack my identity in relation to this space and its revolutionaries, because there was no comprehending either without understanding who I was.
That is the story behind my extensive methods chapter, “Encountering Revolution: Expectations and Reality.” It was the first chapter I wrote after my 2011 fieldwork. As I started working on it, I decided to be honest and vulnerable about my experience. I had to write this chapter to find my story within this larger story of revolutionary struggle, to process everything it stirred up for me, to understand why I was there and my responsibility toward the revolutionaries and their movement as a researcher. I am glad I wrote this chapter first because it helped me find my voice and set the tone for the entire study.
My original audience for this chapter was just my advisors; at the time I wrote it, I had no intention of publishing a book. When this became the plan, I hesitated to include this chapter, knowing academics typically do not write this honestly about their fieldwork experiences. In the end, I chose to keep it, in the hopes that readers might take it as a model for how to practice intersectional reflexivity as a researcher and show up authentically in their work.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
RL: I wrote Tahrir’s Youth with several audiences in mind. I hope the book will strike a chord with general readers, as well as those who followed the Egyptian revolution closely. At the forefront of my mind were the children who lived through the events—those who accompanied their families to Tahrir or watched events unfold on their TV screens. I wanted to preserve this memory for them and for future generations of young Egyptians who might take the baton. I hope this book will help them make sense of this experience and find their place in this unfinished story—the ending of which will likely be theirs to tell.
Tahrir’s Youth sits at the intersection of three main fields: Middle Eastern studies, youth studies, and social movement and revolution studies. With respect to the latter, the book makes a particularly important contribution to the understudied field of movement leadership—in fact, it is in part a response to a call in the literature for more empirical case studies. The book also engages with other fields, such as gender studies and urban studies. Naturally, I hope it will appeal to scholars as well as undergraduate and graduate students in all these fields and make its way into their courses. I would also be pleased if the methodology chapter were adopted in qualitative research courses and possibly courses on Arab-American/Muslim-American identity and experience. In all of these settings, the book should generate rich discussion.
Above all, I hope this book will resonate with activists, starting with the January 25 revolutionaries. I wrote it as an act of solidarity with them, first and foremost. Not only did I want to document their story for the historical record, but I also wanted to produce knowledge that would be useful in their ongoing struggle. If it contributes to broader conversations in the activist community—among Egyptian and Arab Spring revolutionaries and activists from other movements—this would be the ultimate reward. Tahrir’s Youth is a tool for us to think with, to problem-solve with. My hope is that the book’s insights help us imagine new modes of organizing to achieve revolutionary social change in the twenty-first century.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
RL: My next project engages with important questions raised by Tahrir's Youth. Through their experience trying to remake their country, Egypt’s revolutionaries have given us a gift: they revealed the limitations of existing theories for how to successfully carry out revolutions and the need to conceive of new ones. The many mass protest movements that have erupted across the globe since the Egyptian revolution have also demonstrated this. How might activists go beyond disrupting the status quo through protest to inducing structural change and transforming the social order? How do we think anew about questions of movement leadership, organization, and structure—beyond the binary of verticalism and horizontalism—and create enduring movements capable of surmounting the forces of neoliberalism, imperialism, and authoritarianism? I am invested in exploring the full complexity of this challenge alongside activists in an effort to envision new, creative pathways forward.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 4, “Youth Activists and Revolutionary Praxis,” pp. 109-110, 141-143)
It was just after sundown on February 11, 2011, when the end finally came, and rather swiftly. In a breaking televised address that lasted an entire thirty-two seconds, an ashen and grim-faced Vice President Omar Suleiman unceremoniously announced the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, jolting Tahrir Square and Egypt’s streets into wild jubilation. What just less than a month earlier had been a distant, almost absurd dream for many of Egypt’s young activists was now real: a popular revolutionary struggle had erupted—in part at their instigation—and forced the exit of the deeply entrenched dictator, effectively ending his suffocating thirty-year reign. How did this happen? How did what was expected to be a modest day of protest on January 25, 2011, turn into a millions-strong popular revolt that ousted the seemingly indomitable leader in a mere eighteen days?
Focusing on the period stretching from the weeks immediately preceding January 25 through February 11, this chapter examines the revolutionary movement process as it evolved from the perspective of the youth activists profiled in the previous chapter, who were deeply engaged in it as organizers. This process was characterized by a series of ups and downs determined by a fluid, changing reality that emerged with activist agitation, state reactions, the people's shifting perceptions and responses, and global solidarity and sympathy for their cause. This complex process unfolded in phases after critical junctures, which forced the actors involved to constantly negotiate and act around two recurring, corresponding questions: “What is happening?” and “How should we act?” The what question captures their evolving understanding of the emerging, transforming sociopolitical resistance phenomenon on the one hand, and their constant assessment of its revolutionary potential on the other. The how question refers to their attempts to figure out how they should respond and carry the resistance forward to affect the change they desired. The question of how in turn required them to consider who should be involved and in what configuration to ensure their project’s legitimacy and ultimate success. Also critical to this process was the question of where—the geographical spaces in which they should act to maximize their effectiveness.
Ultimately, what the activists were trying to figure out is what role they should play, if any, as leaders in this nascent revolutionary struggle. In this sense, the implicit questions they engaged with were no different from those that occupied celebrated revolutionary strategists from the Marxist tradition. These questions were specifically concerned with the extent to which leaders should mediate the people’s processes of spontaneity and consciousness to direct their action and secure their sustained participation in the resistance—the latter, of course, being crucial to the success of the revolutionary struggle. Wary of the ephemeral nature of spontaneous uprisings, Vladimir Lenin, perhaps the first to elaborately conceptualize what leadership should look like in revolutionary movements, argued that the masses needed guidance and leadership from professional revolutionaries tied to a highly disciplined and bureaucratically centralized vanguard organization. He insisted that without an organized intervention infusing them with revolutionary consciousness and orienting their activity toward overturning the system, the masses would remain short-sighted in their demands for change and fall short of abolishing the status quo. Lenin’s contemporary Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, had much more faith in the revolutionary will of the masses; she believed they were capable of achieving a radical revolutionary class consciousness on their own and becoming their own leaders through their engagement with the struggle.
How did these ideas play out among Egypt’s youth activists and shape their agency during the eighteen-day uprising? To what extent were the masses who participated in the 2011 protests able to self-organize and maintain their revolutionary consciousness without the help of an organized body leading them? Were the people capable of evolving from their spontaneous action into a revolutionary class on their own? Was it possible for the activists to lead without stifling the spontaneity, radicalism, and creative energy of the masses?
[...]
February 4–11: Leadership, Representation, and Voice in the Escalation of Resistance
The Battle of the Camel set the stage for the youth leaders’ repositioning and later maneuvering in the square. Up to this point, the young organizers behind January 25 had avoided the limelight, opting instead to try to direct and support the movement as it unfolded, seemingly organically, from behind the scenes. Apart from the fact that they were not convinced it was their place, they did this because they wanted to preserve the popular ownership of the revolution, which prided itself on being leaderless. Stepping to the forefront as leaders, they believed, would make it easier to discredit and delegitimize the movement and diminish from the people’s sense of agency and ownership. When I asked whether they felt like they could have taken a stronger, more visible lead, Zyad from the ElBaradei Campaign told me:
Look, it was a very difficult question. At the time we felt that if we announced ourselves as the leaders, this might make it easier to attack the square, because they’d say, “They’re just doing this because they want to be the leaders. They’re not doing this so things will be better.” So this might have weakened the situation in the square. The most important thing for us was that the square remained unified, so it was more important to play the role of leadership, directing them without saying you were the leaders, so you wouldn’t be attacked, so they wouldn’t discredit you politically.
This was an attitude youth activists maintained throughout the eighteen-day uprising. Promoting the idea of leaderlessness and keeping quiet about their own role was not just an ideological decision based on a rejection of the country’s political culture of the male, charismatic leader, but also a strategic decision to protect themselves against repression and to prevent the regime from mischaracterizing and delegitimizing the movement as orchestrated by a tiny subversive group.
But the lack of an official leading revolutionary body soon became problematic; the Battle of the Camel prompted a group of opposition figures and other prominent Egyptians to enter into negotiations with state officials over a settlement to end the political crisis. They called themselves “The Council of Wise Men”—note the conspicuous absence of women and youth—and positioned themselves as a collective that could rise above the fray and mediate between protesters and the government. They leaned toward a compromise in which Mubarak would immediately hand over his powers to his newly appointed Vice President Omar Suleiman for the duration of Mubarak’s term. For the youth activists who planned January 25, these developments showed that it was necessary to form a revolutionary organization that spoke to the public with legitimacy from the square and expressed its radical position to protect it from being sold out by the traditional politicians, many of whom had joined the movement late. As Mostafa of the Youth for Justice and Freedom Movement put it:
After the victory of January 28 and the start of the sit-in, it [a discussion] started that we must have an entity that could win the confidence and trust of the people. There had to be a transformation from [ad hoc] coordination to a coordinating entity, from just coordination among different groups to a body that expressed itself from behind a name.
What unfolded thereafter among the various opposition actors was a process of figuring out how to carry this movement forward in the absence of a unified leadership. Essentially, the questions they engaged with in this process were these: As we attempt to delegitimize and oust the current regime, how should we compensate for the absence of a leading revolutionary body in order to see this process through? What configuration of opposition actors might the people accept as the carrier of their collective will and support as the representatives speaking and working legitimately on their behalf to complete the revolution? How can we secure the sustained commitment of the masses to this revolutionary resistance?
Figure 4. Activists raise the first RYC banners from their stage in Tahrir Square shortly before announcing the formation of the coalition. Photograph by Hossam El-Hamalawy.
The Revolutionary Youth Coalition (RYC), known in Arabic as I’tilaf Shabab al-Thawra, formally announced itself in a press conference on February 6 (see figure 4). The first revolutionary organization to emerge from the square, it was essentially the institutionalization of the informal network of ideologically diverse youth factions that had been coordinating the popular mobilization long before January 25, which included the liberal-leaning April 6 Youth Movement, the left-leaning Youth for Justice and Freedom Movement, the liberal-leaning ElBaradei Campaign, young members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the liberal Democratic Front Party, the leftist Nasserist pan-Arab Dignity Party, as well as several independent activists. The RYC was launched with the express purpose of making it clear to the public and government that those who were meeting with Omar Suleiman and other government officials did not represent the square—incidentally, the famous declamation “la tafawud qabl al-rahil” (no negotiations before the departure) was their innovation—and to declare that despite the deadly assault, they would continue to occupy the square until their demands were met. According to Zyad, “The people started to leave, so someone had to say, so that the square would continue, someone had to say that we were going to carry on. In the middle of the attacks, we said no, we are going to complete this [so that the people keep on going].”