Local Ethics and Conflicts of Interest: Living Between Bottom-Up from Top-Down Peace in Provincial Egypt

Abstract

This article proposes and explores a fundamental difference between top-down and bottom-up understandings of peace and conflict. Set in the provincial Egyptian city of Beni Suef, the article first examines three major contemporary conflicts (revolutionary conflict, sectarian conflict, and economic conflict), which have most colored my interlocutors’ lives. Next, the article employs ethnographic data collected in Beni Suef between 2011 and 2018 in order to investigate how ordinary Egyptians have experienced the different conflicts in their day-to-day lives. I argue that, while the structural conflicts that most shape life in provincial Egypt are driven by overarching geopolitical, political, and economic interests, the majority of my interlocutors’ everyday lives centered on local ethics. The basic divergence between top-down interests and local ethics, I conclude, explains the inherent lack of scalability and inescapable disconnect between top-down and bottom-up approaches to peace and conflict.