Waning Revolutionary Possibilities: Squared II: Counterrevolutionary Coercion and Elections without Democratization

Atef Shahat Said starts the chapter with a vignette about observing a protest against President Mohamed Morsi on October 12, 2012, a hundred days after his election, and then discusses the problem of democratization in Egypt. He proposes that we ought to analyze democratization in Egypt as a contentious historical process and suggests that Egypt's troubled transition to democracy involved an election without democratization. This was a second instance of squaring the revolution (reducing it to a project of elections without democratization, combined with repressive counterrevolutionary methods). He then provides a short and close historization of the period 2011–15 while focusing on how revolutionary mobilization was entangled with electoral and constitutional politics in this period. Said also demonstrates how this period witnessed the waning of revolutionary possibilities and how these processes paved the way to the miliary coup on July 3, 2013.