Egypt in a Time of Revolution: A Conversation with Neil Ketchley (S. 5, Ep. 39)

Neil Ketchley speaks about his new book Egypt in a Time of Revolution: Contentious Politics and the Arab Spring. Ketchley is a Lecturer in Middle East Politics, King's College London. "The book really tries to make a contribution by drawing on a range of new and unique data sources and methods— from analyzing video footage of crowd dynamics at Tahrir, police radio transcripts from the formative early days of the mobilization, to event data from Arabic-language newspapers. In terms of the kind of a conceptual contribution, the argument is really geared around an assumption and belief: that the dynamics of street level mobilization— and contentious politics more generally— are really formative in their own right. The book argues that the ways in which Egyptians banded together and ousted Mubarak were not some kind of manifestations of cheering grievances, but also powerfully constituted the postman-Mubarak process." "And if you want to understand the kind of key questions and episodes, you really have to take street politics very seriously."