A little more than a year and a half after the unforeseen waves of mass uprisings in the Arab world, and the term ‘Arab Spring’ is starting to quickly lose its glamour in the media. Current indicators in the countries that witnessed the protests are not conducive to optimism, with authoritarianism generally persisting, and the post Arab Spring political arenas largely dominated by Islamist parties seeking to implement their ultra-conservative politico-religious agendas. In Egypt, for example, Islamists who have managed to capture both a parliamentary majority and the presidency are now seeking to write a Shariah-based constitution, refusing to acknowledge ideological and religious diversity and disregarding any input from other political entities and voices in the civil society calling for an open, inclusive dialogue on a the constitution that will define rights, political participation, governance and accountability in post-Mubarak Egypt.

I deliberately chose to use the term ‘post-Mubarak’ not ‘post-revolution’ Egypt in the last paragraph to stress the point that has become almost axiomatic of the current state of political activism in Egypt: the Egyptian revolution is still very much in flux. Activists keep emphasizing that “Al Thawra Mostamera” (meaning: the revolution continues). For many Egyptians, the main result of the January 25^th 2011 uprising is replacing one form of a dictator with another. Oppression and exclusion continue to define the relationship between citizens and the state, albeit under different ideological veneers.

Revolutions, uprisings and other acts of mass popular political iconoclasm are episodic, explosive events. That is, the revolutionary ‘momentum’, as strong as it can be (in Egypt’s case toppling a dictator in 18 days) can only be effectively sustained for a relatively short time. This is due to various reasons, including – and perhaps most importantly – the ability of a coercive regime to deploy armed violence against the protestors (take, for example, the situation in Syria at the time of this writing, and the Libyan uprising a few months ago). The ideological homogeneity that exists within the temporal (e.g the 18 days it took to oust Mubarak) or spatial (e.g. Tahrir Square) boundaries of a mass popular uprising is not sustainable beyond the euphoric moment that defines the success of an act of mass political dissidence (a dictator stepping down, a coercive regime ousted, etc). In the case of the Egyptian revolution, the revolutionary drive which has come into focus in Tahrir Square in January 2011– one which has been described as ‘leaderless’ – was devoid of ideological, sectarian and other divisive factors, focusing all protest energy on specific, clear demands. That does not mean that these factors will not force their way to the surface and forefront of the sociopolitical arena beyond milestones that define incidents of forceful mass dissent. The dynamics that affect social interactions and relations within the aforementioned boundaries of a short revolutionary period are very different from those that take place in a post-revolution sociopolitical environment. Faced with a common, much more able foe (the strongly entrenched regime) social identities coalesce and ideological divides are diminished temporarily during an act of popular uprising. The exact opposite happened in the months that followed the Egyptian revolution. A society in which open political participation and self-expression was largely stifled for more than 30 years has suddenly gained a level of freedom that made people hyper-aware of their perceived self-identities. Consequently, ideological affiliations became much more pronounced, and binary identification with certain political ideologies or factions became a way for most people to find and assert these identities.

Attempting to understand the prospects for genuine, desirable democratic transformation in Egypt after the 2011 revolution (as well in other recently manifested contexts of popular dissidence) necessitates an analysis that is not confined to the conventional frameworks of institutional politics and citizen-state relationships. It could be argued that any far-sighted analyses that aims to assess the extent to which grassroots drives for change can endure against continued opression must have, at their core, a thorough consideration of how societies are making use of the networked world to bring voices previously stifled or unheard to the foreground of politics. Sociopolitical change is a historical inevitability, and the reasons behind why people protest and revolt are globally universal (coercion, inequality, oppression and tyranny). Nonetheless, the modalities and processes of how such change takes place are undergoing profound changes, largely due to the exponentially advancing technologies shaping people communicate, share information and create knowledge requisite to bring about the transformations they collectively seek. Within the context of a society in the process of home-grown democratic reform following a popular uprising, the question I pose is: How effective are technologically-empowered forms of citizen mobilization in contributing to democracy building and continued grassroots activism against what could be seen as a continuation of authoritarianism.

In a recent social event on the campus of the University of Sussex (where I am currently working on a PhD), a student from the Physics department – on learning that I am Egyptian – asked me about the current state of affairs in Egypt. Instead of reeling off the usual condensed spiel spanning key events since January 25th 2011 to the current presidential election run-off, and not wanting to start talking about ‘durable authoritarianism’ and ‘resilient regimes’, I decided to analogically and succinctly describe the current situation in Egypt in a way that a physics student could instantly understand. I explained the Egyptian political environment in terms of the First Law of Thermodynamics.

I call it the Law of Conservation of (Egyptian) Authoritarianism. It states that…

(Egyptian) authoritarian regimes are neither elected nor ousted, they merely change from one form to another.

The physics student nodded knowingly, and that’s when I knew that paying a little attention in my Physics 201 class ten years ago was not in vain.