A special Zoom lecture in EPL and Northwestern University's continuing series on the culture, politics, religion, and society of the Middle East and North Africa.
Please join the Evanston Public Library and Northwestern University's Middle East and North Africa (MENA) department for this free webinar with author and professor Joshua Stacher.
To participate, create a free account at https://zoom.us.
You will also need to click on the REGISTER button on this (EPL) page, and include your email address. Once you have registered here, you will be sent the meeting link, along with some tips for using Zoom. You do not have to appear via video if you don't want to - you can join using audio and chat only, if that is your preference. At the scheduled meeting time, click on the link you have been sent to join. Professor Stacher will present his lecture, and we will conduct a question and answer session using questions participants have submitted via the Zoom chat.
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In Egypt, something that fails to live up to its advertised expectations is often called a watermelon: a grand promise that later turns out to be empty talk. The political transition in Egypt after protests overthrew Husni Mubarak in 2011 is one such watermelon.
In this talk, political scientist Joshua Stacher will examine the uprising and its aftermath to show how the country’s new ruling incumbents deferred the democratic dreams of the people of Egypt. At the same time, he will lay out the circumstances that gave the army’s well-armed and well-funded institution an advantage against its citizens during and after Egypt’s turbulent transition.
Stacher will outlines the ways in which Egypt’s military manipulated the country’s empowering uprising into a nightmare situation that now counts as the most repressive period in Egypt’s modern history. In particular, Stacher will chart the opposition dynamics during uprisings, elections, state violence, and political economy to show the multiple ways autocratic state elites try to construct a new political regime on the ashes of a discredited one. Stacher will confront the totality of the military-led counterrevolution and illuminate why Egyptians rightfully feel they ended up living in a watermelon democracy.
Joshua Stacher is Associate Professor of Political Science at Kent State University. His scholarship focuses on politics, state violence, protests, mobility, and social movements in the Middle East and North Africa. He is the author of Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria (Stanford University Press, 2012) and Watermelon Democracy: Egypt's Turbulent Transition, which will be published in Spring 2020 in the Syracuse University Press series the Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East.
He is a regular contributor to and a former editorial committee member of MERIP's Middle East Report. He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) and serves on the Middle East Studies Association's active Committee on Academic Freedom. Stacher has made media appearances and written commentary for NPR, CNN, BBC, Al-Jazeera, Foreign Affairs, Jadaliyya, and The New York Times, among others. He is also a founding member of the Northeast Ohio Consortium on Middle East Studies (NOCMES), which focuses on public education in Northeast Ohio. In 2012-13, he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
AGE GROUP: | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Virtual | Authors & Book Discussions | Arts & Culture |
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