‘I used to be afraid, now I’m an Egyptian’

Abstract

One of the striking features of the January 2011 revolution was that hundreds of thousands of non-activist Egyptians broke through their fear barrier. On paper, the Egyptian regime was still as strong as ever and throughout the first week the regime displayed its full panoply of brutal tactics. How did people overcome their fear? Building on the nascent literature on emotions in social movement theory, we look at the various encouragement mechanisms that activists adopted to help people overcome their fear, from starting the protests in narrow alleys away from the police, to chanting, training and the savvy use of mass media. But many of these mechanisms had been deployed before. To explain the unprecedented scale of the protests, we have to look at changes in what Deborah Gould termed people’s ‘emotion culture’. In particular we look at the impact of ‘moral shocks’ and shaming in the lead up to the revolution; the resurgence of hope following Ben Ali’s fall in Tunisia vs. the deep sense of hopelessness of people’s everyday lives; the growing realisation that this was a historic moment calling for total commitment; and moral outrage at police violence.