In 2011, Egyptians celebrated the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak following the 18-day uprising against his repressive regime. The Egyptian uprising—then a seemingly historical juncture in Egypt’s contentious politics—ended, however, with the consolidation of authoritarianism and the prosecution of protestors. Scholars thus continue to debate why and how people join collective action against repressive regimes despite the uncertain and even disappointing outcomes. In Contesting the Repressive State: Why Ordinary Egyptians Protested During the Arab Spring, Kira D. Jumet narrates the story of the Egyptian uprising by unpacking protestors’ decisions to participate in its different episodes. Through analyzing the intertwining of the affective and the structural micro-foundations of the uprising, Jumet eloquently examines how and why citizens chose “to protest or not protest” (p. 18) against repressive regimes in Egypt.

Building on rich empirical materials and the analytical traditions of contentious politics literature, Jumet situates individuals’ decisions to join protests at the intersection of shifting political opportunities, framing processes, and emotional mechanisms (p. 4). The book is divided into two parts and eight chapters; each chapter covers several key episodes of the uprising. The first part underscores the role of grievances, emotions, social media, and regime violence in mobilizing citizens to join collective action during the January 25 uprising. The second part surveys the dynamics of contention in the period after the uprising. The analysis examines the repertoires of contention and the shifting political opportunities under the military transitional rule, the presidency of Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi, and the June 30 coup.

The book is published at a time when the field of Middle East and North African studies is reflecting on its earlier research on the Arab uprisings and its theoretical approaches to the study of contentious politics. The book’s theoretical framework is a synthesis of the collective actions research program and the synthetic political opportunity theory approaches. This synthetic model moves beyond the structuralist and culturalist approaches that have dominated the study of social movements broadly and the field of Middle Eastern studies more specifically. The book provides a new vocabulary with which to understand the micro-foundations of protests and to capture the emotional mechanisms of protestors in collective action.

For example, in analyzing the role of social media in the uprising, Jumet puts forward the concepts of “online preference” and “revolutionary bandwagoning” to explain how Facebook facilitated the building of civil society and mobilized opposition (p. 53). Her model weaves Timur Kuran’s (1991) concept of transitioning from private to public preference together with Roger Petersen’s (2001) model of individual roles during rebellion. The proposed model presents online activism as an intermediate step to preference falsification and on-the-ground political action (p. 54). Revolutionary bandwagoning, Jumet argues, took place online during the January 25 uprising, because participants were “able to break the barrier of fear quite early by estimating how many people will attend a protest based on the number of people who accept the Facebook invitation” (p. 217). Social media, she thus attests, lowered the threshold for engaging in collective action and it mobilized protestors.

The analysis further unpacks protestors’ decisions to join the uprising by highlighting the emotional micro-foundations of the Egyptian uprising and its dynamics in mobilizing collective action before, during, and after the uprising. Many citizens chose to protest, Jumet argues, “because of the moral shock of seeing protesters brutalized, feeling a sense of injustice that their fellow Egyptians would be killed for demanding their rights. That moral shock arose from the emotion of empathy with protesters already in the streets” (p. 117). Conversely, individuals did not protest “when crucial elements of moral shock, such as empathy or unambiguous attribution of injustice to the regime, are absent” (p. 118). In line with the literature on emotions and affect, I would, however, argue that it is not just the absence of certain emotions—such as moral shock and empathy—that leads to inaction; it is more a question of which emotions take over and how they are mobilized. For example, after the ousting of Morsi, the military-backed regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi stirred and mobilized the emotions of the masses to consolidate its rule and energize the feeling of ordinary citizens against the Muslim Brotherhood. The same emotions of national pride that ignited the 2011 uprising were used to justify the persecutions of the Muslim Brotherhood and to portray them as “not deserving morally restrained treatment,” to use Sidney Tarrow’s words in The Language of Contention: Revolutions in Words, 1688—2012 (2013, p. 171). A focus on emotions thus draws our attention to the dynamics not only of collective action but also of oppression and how activists negotiate, negate, and challenge repressive structures.

After the uprising and under the military transitional rule, the author explains how activists sustained their activism and maintained the new political openings as a result of the “post-revolutionary emboldening effect” (p. 123). This phenomenon refers to “an emotional mechanism that motivates protest based on the belief that the power of the people can be greater than the people in power” (p. 145). Through studying emotions and their dynamics in collective action, the book offers a plausible explanation for why and how activism continues even when it seems to yield limited results and despite disappointments following episodes of contention.

The author’s analysis of the June 30 coup presented in chapter 7 advances the book’s theoretical and conceptual contributions. Jumet appropriates Samuel Huntington’s concept of “veto coup” (Political Order in Changing Societies, 1968) to explain how the June 30 coup exemplified a “popular participatory veto coup” (p. 172). By veto coup, Huntington described the process by which “the military vetoes mass participation by the lower class” (p. 173). In Egypt, Jumet argues that the June 30 coup was a veto coup “triggered by the military’s opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood,” rather than a rejection of the political participation of the lower class (pp. 172–73). It was “popular” and “participatory,” because it was carried out through “opposition co-optation” by the military and involved “popular participation of the public” (p. 172). Over the past half-decade, scholars have debated and contemplated whether to describe the June 30 events as a coup, a revolution, or a popular uprising. Jumet’s conceptualization is thus significant, because it underscores the role of the military in ousting former president Mohamed Morsi without erasing the public participatory character of the protests against him.

Contesting the Repressive State adds to our stock of knowledge on the Arab uprisings and refines our theoretical approach to protest mobilization. It delivers new theoretical insights and original empirical materials to the study of social movements and collective action, as well as the literature on emotions and contentious politics.