Activism Online and Off Confronts the Police: the Brutal Road to January 25
Christopher Haynes
06/5/12
Various causes have been cited for the uprising of January 25, 2011 in Egypt. Economic and
demographic reasons loom large in analyses. It is likely that these factors did play major roles in
bringing people out on January 25 and before. However, analyses that overlook the role of
authoritarianism are incomplete. Specifically, the role of the police, the agents of the regime,
needs to be considered among the major causes of the uprising.
Police brutality angered Egyptians sufficiently that they took to the streets in protest several
times before 2011. In many or most cases, they protested economic conditions such as low
wages and rising food prices. In most or all cases, whether or not their calls were eventually
answered and to what degree, police brutality materialised. The police prevented what could
have been the safety valve, protest, of popular indignation from opening. Moreover, those
protests that were specifically against police brutality met the same fate, frustrating those seeking
justice. Many observers say police brutality was the main reason for the protests of January 25,
2011. (Ross; Ali)
When online social media such as Facebook gave young Egyptians an outlet for their fury, the
number of people understanding and believing in the need for change swelled. Social media
alone cannot cause revolutions, but they can spread awareness of common problems, focus anger
on a target and rally people around an event. Among the common problems were police
repression, the target focused on was the regime of Hosni Mubarak, and the event promoted was
the protest of January 25.
This paper places the January 25 protests in a line of demonstrations against the state in Egypt. It
proposes two arguments. First, that police brutality was one of the main causes of the uprising,
and second, that while the use of social media may not have been the single or main causal factor
in the downfall of Mubarak, it was instrumental in making January 25, 2011 the beginning of a
successful movement.
To make these points, this paper considers the significance of the protests of the decade
preceding the Day of Rage, some of the movements that made them happen, how the police
inflamed public sentiment, how the April 6, 2008 Mahalla strike and the death of Khaled Said set
the country on the road to revolution, and how social media such as blogs and Facebook brought
all the key factors together.
The politics of the street
Opposition to the Mubarak regime became widespread in Egypt at the end of 2000, when its
apparent complicity with (or at least, consent to) the repression of Palestinians during the second
intifada led to a campaign against the Egyptian government characterised by tens of thousands of
protesters in Cairo and daily protests and sit-ins by university students. (El Amine) The US-led
invasion of Iraq prompted more mass demonstrations in 2003 and 2004. During one, some
30,000 protesters fought with police and even burned down a billboard of Mubarak. (Ibid.) Many
of the veteran protesters from these and earlier movements formed Kefaya, the Egyptian
Movement for Change, in 2004. Though Kefaya never became a mass movement, their
protesting and civil disobedience campaigns earned them considerable media attention. (Ibid.)
Kefaya became an organisation where activists could not only network but gain experience.
Ahmed Maher of the April 6th Youth Movement, the main youth group behind the January 25 th
protest, along with other leaders, started in Kefaya. (Ibid.)
But these protests were hardly regime-shaking. In fact, the government barely flinched. Mubarak
managed, rather than brutally repressed, the action against him. Mona El Ghobashy describes his
regime’s resilience as not due to “brute force or Orwellian propaganda, but because it had
shrewdly constructed a simulacrum of politics.” (El Ghobashy) Parties and civic organisations,
along with reasonably-free media, though controlled nonetheless gave an outlet to popular
discontent. Citizens could participate in politics without threatening the dominance of Mubarak
and his clique. Thus, Mubarak seemed unshakeable.
But for the vibrant civil society growing in Egypt. Dozens of protests took place in Egypt every
year; by 2008, there were hundreds. (Ibid.) Angela Joya of York University said 222 industrial
actions took place in 2006, 580 in 2007 by blue- and white-collar workers in a variety of sectors
and over a thousand in 2008. (Joya) The lid was shaking long before the pot boiled over in 2011.
Protests were not limited to the hardcore activists; they cut across social lines. El Ghobashy
names three categories of protests since 2000. The first is workplace action, where labourers,
civil servants, students and a variety of groups of tradespeople protested in a number of ways.
Second, neighbourhoods protested, in groups of farmers, Coptic neighbourhoods, Bedouins, and
sometimes entire towns. The third group of protesters are associations, from syndicates of
doctors and lawyers to social movements such as Kefaya to the youth wings of political parties
such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Ghad party. (El Ghobashy) Egyptians honed their skills
and their knowledge of the politics of the street.
Kefaya perhaps embodied the protests of the decade as well as any other group. It was a
decentralised, cross-ideological group of citizens concerned with the actions of the government
and brave enough to risk state violence to address them. It promoted the politics of protest, the
public denouncing of authoritarian government, and the publicising of its crimes. According to
Manar Shorbagy of the American University in Cairo, Kefaya redefined Egyptian politics by
leaving behind the legally-neutered political parties and the parliamentary talking shop and
focusing on the street. “With its blunt slogans and creative street action, Kefaya in fact has dealt
with the most acute of Egypt’s political problems, namely, political apathy on the part of the vast
majority of Egyptians.” (Shorbagy, 191)
The government fought back. In October 2007, public dissent was widely repressed. Journalists,
labour activists and Muslim Brothers were detained in one of the largest crackdowns on dissent
in a decade. (Murphy) Governments may find it useful to lash out unusually harshly from time to
time, in order to scare those thinking they could dissent publicly without fear of repression.
Accusations that the police used torture against detainees were well publicised. The Christian
Science Monitor quoted Aida Seif al-Dawla, a psychologist who founded and runs the Nadim
Center for the Psychological Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence in Cairo, on why this
crackdown, and the brutality that was to accompany it, was so harsh. "It's hard to explain why,
except that torture becomes a habit. But there's no question that police abuse has gone through
the roof. For the past month, we've been getting one or two cases every day. For every case that's
reported to us, there's bound to be many more we never hear about." (Ibid.) The more such
abuses occurred, the more the public knew and was supposed to want to avoid the risk. But all
this may have served to sharpen the call for justice and its ultimate success against an oppressive
regime and its agents.
The police
The police are essential to the security of any state, particularly one under continual popular
pressure to change. But the police in Egypt were more than just guards for the elites. Every
group that had experience with protesting, along with virtually everyone else, had experience
with police venality and violence. Police issued passports, drivers’ licenses, birth and death
certificates. They fixed elections. They vetted graduate school candidates and academic
appointments. They observed football matches and Friday prayers. They maintained networks of
informants in poor neighbourhoods to insure against unauthorised organisation. They extracted
money from taxi and microbus drivers, shopkeepers and businesspeople. They had their hands
out to collect money from the drug trade. (El Ghobashy) “The national police were widely
reviled long before their brutal crackdowns at the inception of the January 25 revolt because they
represented, in essence, a nationwide protection racket. Ordinary citizens had to bribe police
officers all too ready to confiscate licenses and invent violations.” (Anderson) They were, in
short, “the chief administrative arm of the state” (El Ghobashy), with the power to use violence
against anyone not well connected to the elites.
The leaking of US diplomatic cables on Egypt revealed to the world what Egyptians already
knew. “Police brutality in Egypt against common criminals is routine and pervasive,” began one.
(Guardian) “Torture and police brutality in Egypt are endemic and widespread.” (Ibid.) It listed
suspected criminals, political prisoners, demonstrators, Muslim Brothers, and “unfortunate
bystanders” as victims of torture. It provided a variety of examples. Women detainees were no
more fortunate than men, having faced sexual abuse. (Ibid.) Egyptians had been hearing of
incidents on the news repeatedly before Wikileaks made them public. A popular television soap
opera had even featured a police detective who beats up suspects to gather evidence.
Unsurprisingly, US embassy interviewees spoke of a culture of impunity, where the police are
free to use whatever harsh methods they like.
In late 2007, two controversial movies played in theatres to raucous applause. The first was Heya
Fawda, about an iron-fisted police officer who controls the Cairo neighbourhood of Shubra. The
second was Heena Maysara, about the plight of street children. “The movies depicted the
brutality of the Egyptian state and the failure of its policies”. (Joya) As art, they reflected the life
of the dispossessed Egyptian majority. Egyptians had been suffering under a kleptocratic state
against which they had no recourse.
What were the effects of this unassailable power of the state? Humiliation. A humiliated
population, as Mohamed Delkatesh explains, is both a tool and an effect of power. (Delkatesh,
58) He cites humiliation as a cause of both the Iranian Revolution and the Arab Spring. Iranians
were humiliated to be ruled by a corrupt, foreign-backed dictatorship. (Delkatesh, 57) Egyptians
were subject to the same humiliations, ruled by an aging, US-supported dictator and his thuggish
police, economically backward due to two decades of neoliberal policies, subject to violence
whenever they protested their condition. Egyptian youth knew they would face beatings,
imprisonment and even death on January 25, but their cause was to regain their pride.
Freedom, pride, dignity and so on are not usually stolen in one fell swoop. Indeed, Egyptians had
lived under forms of autocracy for thousands of years. But the increased civil society action
against the state testified to the rising intolerance for its ruinous economic policies, the stark
inequalities of wealth in society and the repressive state apparatus. One day in April 2008 was a
turning point that set Egypt down the path to revolution.
April 6
Textile workers have a long history of industrial action in Egypt. In 2006, they went on strike for
higher wages and won. This victory led to a wave of strikes in textiles and other industries. (El
Amine) It may also have emboldened workers at the largest textile mill in the Middle East, in the
city of Mahalla, to call for a general strike. The strike was to be in protest of inflation, corruption
and police brutality. (El Ghobashy) While a full-on general strike did not materialise, the textile
workers resorted to mass action that took the government two days to put down. (El Amine)
These strikes began on April 6, 2008. A group of young people calling themselves the April 6
Youth Movement attracted 70,000 people to their Facebook group in support of the protesters.
(Reese, 1) The result of these strikes were further strikes, sit ins and protests for months in other
parts of Egypt, leading to the first independent trade unions in Egypt. (El Amine) A further result
was the permanence of the April 6 Youth Movement.
Since the 2008 demonstrations, April 6 has continued the struggle for Egyptians’ rights. One of
the group’s founders, Mohamed Adel, says that it has gone through three phases. First, it lobbied
for political reforms; next, it became, in his words, a “youth resistance movement with a street
presence”; now, it promotes direct confrontation with the regime. (Carr) Its presence both on
Facebook and on the street kept the spirit of the strikes alive. According to journalist Mona El
Tahawy, “[i]n the absence of any viable opposition to the Mubarak regime, April 6 became that
place where young people could go. More importantly, it was able to take them off the virtual
space and into the real world.” (PBS) April 6 produced only small protests during 2008 and 2009
(Carr), but doing so kept the fire under the regime burning, enabling the events of 2010, to which
we will return later in this essay, to turn up the flame.
In December 2008, as Israel rained down fire on Gaza, April 6 organised a protest against it.
Protests against Israel are often tolerated in Arab autocracies, but this one hit closer to home.
Many of the thousands of demonstrators chanted slogans against Mubarak for his role in the
blockade of Gaza. (Shapiro) In doing so, demonstrators were breaking the taboo on calling out
Mubarak by name, just as Kefaya had broken the taboo on frank talk about Egypt’s real
problems. Since newspapers would have been censored if they had engaged in honest and
penetrating journalism, the taboo could only have been broken on the street. Activism on the
street was necessary to show the regime the people were not afraid. Activism online meant that
the message could get to hundreds of thousands of young Egyptian opinion makers without being
filtered through censored newsprint.
Social media
News and opinions are transmitted through social networks. Social media became the space to
disseminate across networks instantaneously, thus uniting these networks. In the absence of
reliable print media, social media are created by one’s peers and hence may be considered more
trustworthy (or at least an alternative potential truth).
The April 6, 2008 demonstrations put pressure on the regime because they were live and on the
street. However, they would not have gathered such numbers of people, nor would the events of
that day have been so well publicised, had Egyptians not made such use of social media.
Courtney Radsch explains that the mass action of April 6, 2008 “exemplifies the convergence of
new media platforms and political activism but also the necessity of linking online movements to
offline organizing.” (Radsch, 10) The media that most influenced the new political wave in
Egypt were blogs, Youtube and Facebook. (We will consider Facebook in the next section.)
Thomas Barnett predicted in 2006, “[t]his revolution will be blogged from below”. (Isherwood,
2) Blogging in Egypt was limited to a small core before 2005, with Egyptians publishing an
estimated 40 blogs; by 2006, the number was over a thousand. (Radsch, 3-4) A reasonable fear in
the early days of blogging was that it would have little more significance than the controlled
press, providing a vent for popular discontent but substituting words for action. (Khamis, 2) That
was not the case with Egyptians, however. It may be that street politics continued because it had
begun years before without the aid of online media. Whatever the reason, blogging meant online
organisation for offline action.
“The catalyst that propelled the Egyptian blogosphere into an active realm of contention, making
activists into bloggers and bloggers into activists, were demonstrations in spring 2005 against the
proposed constitutional referendum and in support of judicial independence.” (Radsch, 5) During
these protests, state security forces and hired thugs assaulted women and arrested several
bloggers. (Ibid., 5) The blogosphere buzzed with the news, highlighting police violence against
innocent people. Rania al Malky, editor of Daily News Egypt, said at the time that activists “now
have the tools to tell the real story of how their peaceful protests are ‘controlled’.” (Ibid., 8)
Telling the stories was about to get harder, but it would not slow down.
In 2006, the Egyptian state began its “War on Bloggers”. Bloggers were arrested for what they
posted online. Like the police brutality that characterised the war on protests, the war on
bloggers did not cow enough people to halt the practice, but further inflamed it. The discussion
shifted from the discourse on democracy and human rights to the concrete issue of the beating
and torture of Egyptians. Stories on police brutality became routine in the Egyptian blogosphere.
(Lim, 239) Some Egyptian bloggers were becoming famous as they published whatever photos
and videos they could find (and they were abundant) of police crackdowns, torture and other
violence, along with demonstrations against it.
Youtube is complementary to blogging and Facebook, because it enables people to embed videos
in whatever they post. In 2007, a 13-year-old boy named Mamduh Abdel Aziz died in hospital
after being beaten while in police custody in the town of Mansoura. Before he died, someone
posted a video of him with extensive burn wounds on his genitals. (Murphy) In 2006, police
officers tortured a microbus driver and filmed the incident in order to intimidate the driver’s
family. The blogosphere picked up the video in November of that year, and widely-read blogger
Wael Abbas published it. Once enough people knew about the story, newspapers El Fagr and El
Masry El Youm wrote about the episode and the wider public learned what happened. Two police
officers were eventually sentenced for the crime. (Isherwood, 1) Before “We Are All Khaled
Said” came along, Wael Abbas’s blog was a repository for information on police abuses. He had
posted other videos, such as of a man begging for mercy in a police station and a woman hanging
upside down and moaning. (Ross) Egyptians became aware of all of these incidents because of
social media.
The Emergency Law disallowed large assemblies, and as such making offline public
announcements of the demonstrations was not possible. As the protests took place from 2005
onward, online activists knew where to look. Word of upcoming protests spread virally, blog to
blog, informing all the concerned organisers. (Isherwood, 7) They covered the actions of Kefaya,
April 6 and others, when the traditional newspapers were doing their best to ignore them.
(Isherwood, 5)
Grievances alone do not, by themselves, explain revolts. If a young person was going to work to
take down a powerful regime, he or she needed to know that many others shared his or her
grievances and goals. (Lim, 234) Under the ever-present threat of violence and the barrage of
misinformation of a police state, it is difficult to know if one’s problems and state of mind are
shared. Daron Acemoglu argues that those who oppose dictators will do so only if they know
others hold the same views, and would be willing to join a movement for change. Satellite
television and social networking made it clear to the ever-growing number of Egyptians who
followed these media that they were not alone. (Khamis, 4) They may have known already, due
to the number of protests and strikes that had occurred, that Egyptians were angry. But the
catalyst for revolution would need to be “the missing link between public anger and resentment
of the ruling regime on the one hand, and actual public mobilization to bring about real change
on the other hand. Political activism in the real world, aided by cyberactivism in the virtual
world, succeeded to find this missing link.” (Ibid., 10)
Challenges to the ruling elites and the status quo are sometimes cast as challenges to technology.
Tom Isherwood points out, however, that the tables have turned. Egyptian bloggers have helped
change power dynamics and end the government monopoly on information. Technology is now
in the hands of those who wish to challenge the state. (Isherwood, 9) Let us proceed with an
account of the clearest example of how publicising police brutality online led to the revolution in
the streets.
Khaled Said
On June 6, 2010, police seized 28-year-old Khaled Said at an internet café in Alexandria and
beat him to death in the street. The police claimed he had been involved in drugs, and died when
he swallowed some to hide evidence. Other accounts, however, told a different story: that Khaled
had posted a video of police sharing the spoils of a drug bust. It was this account that everyone
believed. Khaled’s gruesome death animated public opinion against the police. (El Ghobashy)
The people were angry.
An anonymous Facebook user—later revealed as Google executive Wael Ghoneim—started a
group called “We Are All Khaled Said”. Hundreds of thousands joined the group. (Preston) The
group displayed photos of Khaled smiling juxtaposed with cellphone photos of his bloody face
and disfigured corpse from the morgue. The brutality of Khaled’s death was laid stark, along
with the message in the name of the page: “We” are in the same boat as Khaled, and any of us
could be next. Brutality against the poor was common and well known. The killing of a
businessman brought the power of the untouchable police home to the middle classes. This
realisation, like all the other fearsome images and videos, did not cow the people but electrified
them. “By propagating the message that ‘We’ are all Khaled Said, the group was successful in
identifying who the ‘we’ was who could make change.” (Lim, 242)
Prior to Khaled’s murder, there had been several blogs and Youtube videos exposing police
torture, but they did not have a unified community around them. This latest shocking incident
changed that. (Preston) The bloggers had learned the value of pathos in persuading people, which
is why they showed everyone the grisly, uncensored photos of the dead man. We Are All Khaled
Said became a clearinghouse for information, graphic images and videos, and even published the
names of abusive police. Observers credit this group with animating and popularising the
discussion of police brutality. (Giglio) Wael Ghoneim told group members “This is your country;
a government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money, and you have
your rights”. (Khamis, 9)
Khaled Said’s death led to continual protest at police brutality. (Ali) Between June and
September 2010, there were five “silent stands” for Khaled Said, silent vigils aimed squarely at
the police. (Lim, 233) In June 2010, security forces blocked a protest called for by April 6 in
Tahrir Square. (El Marsfawy) Such protests could have helped relieve pressure on the regime,
giving the soothing illusion that the pressure was on, whereas brutal crackdowns galvanise
opposition. Mohamed El Baradei led a march in Alexandria a few days later, also against police
brutality. Demonstrators chanted slogans against Mubarak and Interior Minister Habib El Adly.
They called Khaled a “martyr of the Emergency Law”. “The protests are a message from the
Egyptian people that they don’t accept torture,” said Baradei to reporters. (Abou El Magd)
Street politics and social media worked together. Demonstrations were organised online by
people who were angry at what they had seen online that had taken place offline. Social media
amplified the effect of the protests by publicising the brutal images of police abuse at those
protests and elsewhere. The combination of online and on-street activity made revolution
possible. All that was required was a trigger.
January
The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi set the whole region alight. Barely three weeks later,
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had been routed. On the day Ben Ali ran, January 16, police corralled a
demonstration outside the Tunisian embassy, where protesters sang the Tunisian national
anthem. (El Ghobashy) January 25, National Police Day in Egypt, was just over a week away.
One could say Hosni Mubarak himself chose the date, as two years earlier he had set January 25
as the day to appreciate the police, a bitter irony for most Egyptians. But the date of revolt, as
distinct from a day of protest, was chosen by the timing of the Tunisian conflict.
Nevertheless, there was precedent for civic action on January 25. April 6 had organised protests
on January 25, 2010 as well, in a “Day of Mourning” to protest torture and police brutality, and it
did so through Facebook. (Lim, 242) As Merlyna Lim points out, the 2010 protests, like earlier
action, were not a focused effort to topple the regime. It was not until the next year, when
Egyptians had the Tunisian example to emulate, that they realised real change was possible. “The
Tunisian revolt refocused the Egyptian oppositional movement on the goal of overthrowing
Mubarak and fueled hopes that such a goal was possible.” (Ibid., 242)
Thus the date for revolution was set. It was not one person but an agreement among activists,
operating online, that decided what would happen on that day. A consensus for action came out
of the online conversation. April 6 set the precedent. Moreover, one of April 6’s founders,
Asmaa Mahfouz, posted a video, which rapidly went viral, of her reasons for joining the protests,
on January 18. "Don’t think you can be safe anymore,” she said. “None of us are. Come down
with us and demand your rights, my rights, your family’s rights. I am going down on January
25th and will say no to corruption, no to this regime." (Goodman) But April 6 was not alone. The
National Association for Change used a variety of social media, including Facebook, Twitter and
Youtube, to get the word out about January 25. “Look at what is happening in Tunisia,” their
messages read. “This is how people change their country.” (Khamis, 10). The already-popular
We Are All Khaled Said encouraged people to hit the streets. Others posted Youtube videos with
notorious scenes of police brutality, urging Egyptians to join the protest. (El Ghobashy) Khaled
Said’s mother enjoined Egyptians in an interview to take back their streets. (Ibid.) Though he
had stopped short of full backing of the day of protest, in the week leading up to it, Mohamed El
Baradei tweeted “Fully support call 4 peaceful demonstrations vs. repression.” (Giglio)
Not all activism took place online. After all, tens of millions of Egyptians were not to be found
online but on the street. Waleed Rashed, another founder of April 6, used another kind of social
medium to spread the word about January 25 in the weeks leading up to it.
Every time I was in a cab, I would call Ahmed on my cell phone and talk loudly
about planning a big protest in Tahrir Square for January 25th, because I knew
that they couldn’t stop themselves talking about what they’d overheard.
Eventually, on January 23rd, a cabbie asked if I’d heard about this big
demonstration that was happening in two days. (Lim, 243)
Word spread through coffee shops, mosques and football fields as well. All had begun with a
small group of “social media elites” (Ibid., 243) who used networks to spread the January 25
meme.
Conclusion
Thousands of Egyptians had gained experience in the politics of the street before January 25. The
thousands of isolated strikes, sit ins and protests in the decade before 2011 testified to the
bravery and resilience of Egyptian resistance to the regime and its enforcers. Why they returned
time and again to the street is not simple. In some cases, it may have been that their protests
succeeded, as with the textile workers in 2006. Activists might have felt that, the more people
knew of their actions, the more support there would be for reform. They may have felt that
confronting the police with peaceful demonstrations was their only recourse. Or shouting in
protest may be a natural cry of frustration against authoritarian rule. But if each protest can be
considered connected, due to their similar demands and results, each led to the one that engulfed
Egypt, disposed of its dictator and humbled its police.
The point is not that Kefaya, or April 6, or We Are All Khaled Said somehow broke the back of
the regime. The variety of groups and actors involved in the call to revolt on January 25 is what
enabled the revolution. One group could be arrested or coopted. The organisation by numerous
people of different backgrounds, in keeping with the tradition of the past decade of protest, gave
the demonstrations legitimacy. It showed everyone that they were in the same boat, as they
shared frustrations about corruption, police brutality, food prices, and who was to blame.
Those acting online and off worked together for years to produce a culture of activism that broke
taboos, and with them the fear the regime inspired. The shocking images, the calls to action, the
belief that no one was safe from the police anymore, all spread around Egypt due to social
media. The sign that something could be done about it came from the demonstrations of the past
decade. The combination of tactics led activists to defeat the police and decapitate the regime.
Bibliography
Abou El Magd, Nadia. “Egypt’s El Baradei leads thousands in protest against police.” The
National. June 26, 2010.
Ali, Randa. “Decade of discontent: the road to Egypt’s revolution.” Ahram Online. January 20,
2012. Retrieved from http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/32046/Egypt/Politics-/
Decade-of-discontent-The-road-to-Egypts-revolution.aspx.
Anderson, Lisa: “Demystifying the Arab Spring.” Foreign Affairs. May/June 2011. Retrieved
from http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67693/lisa-anderson/demystifying-the-arab-spring.
Carr, Sarah. “April 6: genealogy of a youth movement.” Jadaliyya. April 5, 2012. Retrieved
from http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4950/april-6_genealogy-of-a-youth-movement.
Delkatesh, Mohamed. “Humiliation: a catalyst for the Arab Revolt.” New Perspectives
Quarterly. Vol. 28, Number 2 (Spring 2011). Pages 57-9.
El Amine, Rami, and Mostafa Henaway. “A people’s history of the Egyptian Revolution.” Left
Turn. July 7, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.leftturn.org/peoples-history-egyptian-revolution.
El Ghobashy, Mona. “The Praxis of the Egyptian Revolution.” Middle East Report. Vol. 41,
Number 258 (Spring 2011).
El Marsfawy, Mostafa, Mohsan Semika and Mohamed Hany. “Security thwarts protest over
Saeed’s death.” Egypt Independent. June 21, 2010. Retrieved from
http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/security-thwarts-protest-over-saeeds-death.
Giglio, Mike: “‘We Are All Khaled Said’: will the revolution come to Egypt?” The Daily Beast.
January 22, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/22/we-are-all-
khaled-said-will-the-revolution-come-to-egypt.html.
Goodman, Amy. “Asmaa Mahfouz and the Youtube video that helped spark the Egyptian
uprising.” Democracy Now! February 8, 2011.
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/8/asmaa_mahfouz_the_youtube_video_that.
Guardian, the. “US embassy cables: police brutality in Egypt.” January 28, 2011. Retrieved from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/187359.
Ishani, Maryam. “The hopeful network.” Foreign Policy. February 7, 2011. Retrieved from
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/07/the_hopeful_network?page=0,0.
Joya, Angela. “Egyptian Protests: Falling Wages, High Prices and the Failure of an Export-
Oriented Economy.” Globalresearch.ca. June 2, 2008. Retrieved from
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9147.
Khamis, Sahar, and Katherine Vaughn. “Cyberactivism in the Egyptian Revolution: how civic
engagement and citizen journalism tilted the balance.” Arab Media and Society. Number 14
(Summer 2011).
Lim, Merlyna. “Clicks, cabs, and coffee houses: social media and oppositional movements in
Egypt, 2004–2011.” Journal of Communication. Vol. 62, Number 2 (April 2012). Pages 231-48.
Murphy, Dan. “As Egypt cracks down, charges of wide abuse.” Christian Science Monitor.
October 10, 2007.
PBS. “April 6 Youth Movement.” PBS.org. Retrieved from
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/revolution-in-cairo/inside-april6-movement/.
Preston, Jennifer. “Movement began with outrage and a Facebook page that gave it an outlet.”
The New York Times. February 5, 2011.
Radsch, Courtney. “Core to commonplace: the evolution of Egypt’s blogosphere.” Arab Media
and Society. Number 6 (Fall 2008).
Reese, Aaron. “Framing April 6: Discursive dominance in the Egyptian print media.” Arab
Media and Society. Number 8 (Spring 2009).
Ross, Brian, and Matthew Cole. “Egypt: the face that launched a revolution.” ABC News.
February 4, 2011. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/egypt-face-launched-
revolution/story?id=12841488&page=1.
Shapiro, Samantha M. “Revolution, Facebook-style.” The New York Times. January 22, 2009.
Shorbagy, Manar. “The Egyptian Movement for Change — Kefaya: redefining politics in
Egypt.” Public Culture. Vol. 19, Number 1 (Winter 2007).