PhD candidate, Heba M Khalil, recently published "Revolution in Parallel Times: An Egyptian Village’s Lived Revolution."

Abstract: "This paper explores revolutionary and rural politics through the case study of Al-Tahseen, a small village in the Egyptian Delta that witnessed an administrative secessionist movement in 2012 and a lineage of protests since 2008. The paper interrogates the relationship between politics at the rural level and the 25 January revolution in 2011, the 18-day mass protest that led to the ouster of long-time President Hosni Mubarak. Indeed, parallels can be drawn between the protest movement in Al-Tahseen and the 25 January revolution. While the villagers were not part of the latter, they watched it closely on television and modelled their sequence and choice of collective action accordingly. Al-Tahseen experienced its own local revolution, which the villagers consciously differentiated from the 25 January uprising. Through this case study, I explore how protest tactics shift with changing political regimes, and highlight the complicated ways in which rural lived experiences relate to the more popularly known 2011 revolution, which is often seen and described as an urban revolution."

For the full publication click here.

About the Author: "Heba M. Khalil is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation traces the social history of Egyptian lawyers, exploring questions around precarity and politics. Heba previously worked for human rights and legal aid organisations in Cairo. She holds an LL.M. in Human Rights Law from the University of York and is currently completing a law degree at Cairo University. Her research focuses on political economy, rural politics and legal activism in Egypt. She recently published ‘Lawyers and Politics: Lawyering and Counter-Lawyering in Contemporary Egypt’ in the Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Egypt, and ‘Negotiating Statist Neoliberalism: The Political Economy of Post-Revolution Egypt’ with Brian Dill for the Review of African Political Economy."