Miscellaneous
A public lecture delivered by Christopher Barrie (University of Oxford) at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, King's College London. Prevailing understandings of labour protest and strikes take as their focus stable democratic settings where autonomous trade union structures are an established component of the organizational resources available to workers. We extend the analysis of labour mobilization to a radically different context: Egypt in the year of the 25th January Revolution, when workers mobilized en masse in the absence of union leadership. For this, we use a catalogue of 4,912 protest events reported in Arabic-language newspapers. State-level signals of opportunity and aggregate shifts in economic conditions are poor predictors of labour activism in this context. Instead, local and national mobilization advancing both labour and non-labour demands is shown to inspire subsequent labour protest. These findings speak to the value of understanding labour protest and strikes not as delimited domains of action but as parts of a wider universe of contentious politics. CHRISTOPHER BARRIE is a DPhil Candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.