King's College London Middle East & North Africa Podcast

A public lecture delivered by Christopher Barrie (University of Oxford) at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, King's College London.

Prevailing understandings of labour protest and strikes take as their focus stable democratic settings where autonomous trade union structures are an established component of the organizational resources available to workers. We extend the analysis of labour mobilization to a radically different context: Egypt in the year of the 25th January Revolution, when workers mobilized en masse in the absence of union leadership. For this, we use a catalogue of 4,912 protest events reported in Arabic-language newspapers. State-level signals of opportunity and aggregate shifts in economic conditions are poor predictors of labour activism in this context. Instead, local and national mobilization advancing both labour and non-labour demands is shown to inspire subsequent labour protest. These findings speak to the value of understanding labour protest and strikes not as delimited domains of action but as parts of a wider universe of contentious politics.

CHRISTOPHER BARRIE is a DPhil Candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

A public lecture delivered by Dr John Chalcraft (LSE) at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, King's College London in February 2017.

This lecture aims to develop conceptual understandings of the relationship between mobilization and the political environment. It presents an alternative to conventional social movement theorizing on political opportunity. A political extension of Gramsci’s writings on hegemony provides the conceptual framework. Research on movements in the Middle East and North Africa provide the main empirical base. Hegemonic incorporation is understood to be a process whereby established political institutions, procedures and norms win consent among the subordinated members of a given political community. This article identifies and elaborates five incorporation mechanisms: participation, delegation, legitimation, nesting, and co-optation. These mechanisms are enabling conditions for consent and contained contention; they drive forward hegemonic incorporation, thickening and stabilizing hegemonic political structures. When these mechanisms breakdown, disincorporation follows, a process which destabilizes hegemonic structures, and provides enabling conditions for either withdrawal or transgressive mobilization. This analysis aims to get theorists beyond instrumental, static, and deterministic concepts of political opportunity structure, without accepting existing alternatives rooted in culture, attribution, or relationality. These constructionist alternatives do not give political power and structure its due, and they suffer from subjectivism, voluntarism, excessive interactionism, and a too a-structural use of mechanisms. This article aims to open up a new way to understand and research the relationship between the political environment and shifts between transgression, consent, contained contention, and withdrawal.

JOHN CHALCRAFT is an Associate Professor in the History and Politics of Empire/Imperialism at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Previous posts include a Lectureship at the University of Edinburgh and a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His research focuses on labour, migration and contentious mobilisation in the Middle East. He is the author of The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: crafts and guilds in Egypt, 1863-1914 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), The Invisible Cage: Syrian migrant workers in Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2009), and Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2016). His current research focuses on protest and hegemony.