While the 2011 Egyptian revolution has already become the subject of much debate, the roots of the socio-economic context which made the revolution possible have seldom been explored. Roberto Roccu addresses this gap and in doing this provides the first detailed study of the deeper causes of the Egyptian revolution. Relying on an innovative understanding of Antonio Gramsci's thought, He argues that economic reforms implemented since the late 1980s provided the conditions for both the emergence of a capitalist oligarchy within the regime and an unprecedented rise in socio-economic inequality in society at large. These two processes substantially eroded any remnants of hegemony, leaving the Mubarak regime ill-equipped to face the global economic crisis. By alienating sections of the ruling bloc while impoverishing vast strata of the population, neoliberal reforms provided a necessary, although by no means sufficient, condition for the Egyptian revolution to occur.

Drawing on Khalid Ikram's extensive knowledge of economic policymaking at the highest levels, The Political Economy of Reforms in Egypt lays out the enduring features of the Egyptian economy and its performance since 1952 before presenting an account of policy-making, growth and structural change under the country's successive presidents to the present day.

This Handbook discusses theoretical approaches to migration studies in general, as well as confronting various issues in international migration from a distinctive and unique international political economy perspective. With a focus on the relation bet

Egypt is a country of its people. What has been the effect on its inhabitants of the 2011 revolution and subsequent developments? In 2013, a conference held under the auspices of Cairo Papers in Social Science examined this issue from the points of view of anthropologists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, and urban planners. The papers collected here reveal the strategies that various actors employed in this situation. Contributors: Ellis Goldberg, David Sims, Yasmine Ahmed, Deena Abdelmonem, Dina Makram-Ebeid, Clement Henry, Sandrine Gamblin, Hans Christian Korsholm Nielsen, Zeinab Abul-Magd

This book critically analyses the hegemony of Egypt's business and military elites and the private media they own or control. Arguing that this hegemony requires the exercise of power to maintain consent under changing conditions such as the 2011 uprising and the 2013 military coup, the book answers the central question of why and how Egypt's ruling elites control the media. Situated within the interdisciplinary domain of 'critical political economy' (CPE), the book focuses on popular privately-owned newspapers and TV channels and their ownership using a qualitative approach involving fifteen interviews conducted over seven years with key actors and experts in the Egyptian media landscape for unprecedented insight. As the first book on the political economy of Egyptian media, The Political Economy of Egyptian Media serves as a case study and a country profile and will be of appeal to scholars and experts of Middle Eastern studies, political sciences, media and the political economy of communication, among others.

This book presents a comparative analysis of Russia and Iran under sanctions. Whilst the growing literature on sanctions has focused primarily on their effectiveness, much less attention has been paid to the ways in which sanctions have transformed target societies and states. Despite, or indeed because of, the relentless enactment of sanctions, Russia and Iran have become increasingly Hobbesian in their governance – more self-reliant, less democratic, and more aggressive towards the West. The author explores these developments through a novel Welfare State Regime framework (WSR) that combines welfare state functionality with institutional, economic, and cultural structural dimensions.

In the years since the 2011 revolutions, Egypt and the Arab countries in general have moved from a profound moment of hope and democratic potential to deepened authoritarianism and outright war. Among the many political actors who have seen their political prospects rise and fall are youth activists, the revolutionary vanguard who spearheaded the transition process. This book offers a detailed analysis of Egypt’s revolutionary youth as a collective and non-institutionalized political actor since 2005, bringing forth in particular the organizational, ideational, and strategic dimensions of the social movement. It offers insights into the origins of the movement and its evolution over time, the activists’ claims and objectives, and the rationale behind their actions/interactions in the greater political arena. Proposing a theoretical framework that lies at the nexus of practice theory and social movement theory, the book demonstrates how the foundational practices of "youth" and "revolutionary" acted as the movement’s internal culture, shaping the activists’ claims and goals, their organizational structures, and their choice of strategies and repertoires of contention. In the context of a defunct Arab Spring and the region’s descent into deepened authoritarianism and ultra-violent conflict, the book sheds light on the Egyptian uprising and the reasons for its increasingly grim outcome by providing a detailed analysis of one of its key players and both the exogenous and endogenous reasons why the revolutionary youth activists failed to achieve their goals. As the first book to assess the revolutionary youth as a social movement distinct from other forms of activism and other youth groups/parties in Egypt, it will be a valuable resource for anyone with an interest in Middle East Studies, the Arab Spring, or social movements more generally.

Challenging the assumptions of ‘mainstream’ International Political Economy (IPE), this Handbook demonstrates the considerable value of critical theory to the discipline through a series of cutting-edge studies. The field of IPE has always had an inbuilt vocation within Historical Materialism, with an explicit ambition to make sense, from a critical standpoint, of the capitalist mode of production as a world system of sometimes paradoxically and sometimes smoothly overlapping states and markets. Having spearheaded the growth of a vigorous critical scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, however, Marxism and neo-Gramscian approaches became increasingly marginalized over the course of the 1980s. The authors respond to the exposure of limits to mainstream contemporary scholarship in the wake of the onset of the Global Financial Crisis, and provide a comprehensive overview of the field of Critical International Political Economy. Problematizing socioeconomic and political structures, and considering these as potentially transitory and subject to change, the contributors aim not simply to understand a world of conflict, but furthermore to uncover the ways in which purportedly objective analyses reflect the interests of those in positions of privilege and power.

Although it is still early for an established academic account of the motivations behind the dramatic events in the Arab world in 2010/11, Leila Simona Talani believes that it is about time to try and place this issue into the broader picture of the latest changes in the global political economy.