Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Sarah Anne Rennick and I am the Deputy Director for Management at the Arab Reform Initiative, a Paris-based think tank. We have recently published a series of studies about social movements in Egypt in the wake of the 2011 revolution. These social movements represented efforts by poor and working class groups who were struggling to achieve rights and recognition and used the opportunity opened up by the revolution to organize politically. These efforts, however, were curtailed by the rise of the military to power in 2013 and the closing of the public sphere.

While the studies are all related to the Egyptian context, we feel strongly that many of the conclusions of the studies – including the internal challenges to sustained mobilization and effective organization, problems related to governance and representation, and the adaptation to increasingly closed and repressive contexts – can apply to social movement organizations and networks in other contexts.

As a social movement scholar myself, I am interested in sharing this research with colleagues as I feel these case studies represent a unique effort to apply the broad conceptual framework of social movement theory to diverse cases in the Arab world, and that they afford the opportunity for interesting comparative research.

While the bulk is in Arabic, there is an abridged version in English published under the collective title “Effervescent Egypt: Venues of Mobilization and the Interrupted Legacy of 2011″ available at http://www.arab-reform.net/en/node/1222

My best regards,

Sarah Anne Rennick