RESTORING THE FAMILY TO CIVIL SOCIETY: LESSONS FROM EGYPT

Abstract

of civil society that focus on voluntary associations, interest groups, and a communicative public realm lead to rather bleak prognoses of political autonomy and democratization in the Middle East and in Egypt, which serves as the empirical backdrop for this inquiry.1 Analysts and activists point to the inability of citizens to choose their leaders, to make government accountable, to articulate and debate ideas in the public sphere, and to associate freely with one another, protected by civil rights. While these accounts are not wrong about endemic authoritarian, entrenched military-security states, and monarchical and exclusionary rule in the region, their narrow understandings of civil society neither do justice to the thriving oppositional trends and submerged counterpublics in the region nor do they capture the primary contours of stillcontested struggles for power, rule, and authority.2 Here, I will argue that recent innovation in the conceptualization of the civil society, which recognizes the family and informal networks as part of civil society, prodded by feminist and Gramscian perspectives, offers a more inclusionary and accurate understanding of political life in Egypt. Why make an argument about including the family and informal networks in civil society and in the analysis of politics in Egypt? Simply, it is because ethnographic fieldwork reveals the importance of the family and networks in Cairo as they organize and distribute scarce resources, facilitate coordinated actions, and promote public discourse. Adopting a tone of revelatory discovery seems bizarre, since the extent of familial, kin-based solidarity and authority is so obvious to all who have even a