Let me begin by delivering some well-earned praise. Atef Said’s book Revolution Squared: Tahrir, Political Possibilities, and Counterrevolution in Egypt is a triple success. First, he has compiled a monograph of great empirical authority: there is no doubt in my mind that Revolution Squared will go on to be regarded as one of the most authoritative sociological sources on the Egyptian Revolution, one of use to a wide audience that also includes political scientists, International Relations scholars, and anthropologists. Moreover, Said has brought all of this together in a deeply compelling, often intimate, and always crystal-clear authorial voice, offering up an exceedingly well-written book. Third, finally, and perhaps most crucially for political scientists, he has made some important contributions to the study of revolution, which I expect to have a very positive influence on political scientists’ approach to this phenomenon in the years to come. Let us now consider them.

Revolution Squared is set across six substantial chapters, running temporally from the revolution’s prehistory (Chapter 1), through its most contentious and dynamic period (Chapters 2, 3, and 4), across the span of its coalitional fragmentation, short-lived Islamist government, and military coup in 2012–2013 (Chapter 5), and ultimately to the paralyzing authoritarian rule that characterizes the country today (Chapter 6). These are bracketed by the kinds of introduction, conclusion, and appendices readers will not want to miss. In addition to his major theoretical contributions, Said also peppers this deeply empirical text with a number of shorter theoretical engagements that are original, useful, and thought-provoking.

The importance of these interventions may be contextualized by a torrent of recent debate about the future direction of revolution studies, and the prospects of a potential “Fifth Generation” of revolutionary theory. In its course, an array of key once taken-for-granted concepts have found themselves under close scrutiny. All of Said’s smaller-scale interventions are poised to help us resolve some of the big problems to which the “Fifth Generation Debate” drew critical attention, namely: the conceptualization of revolutionary processes (p. 17–19, see also: George Lawson Anatomies of Revolution, 2019), the relationship between revolution and democratization (p. 150–153, see also: Benjamin Abrams, “A Fifth Generation of Revolutionary Theory is Yet to Come,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 32(3), 2019), the meaning and validity of the “refolution” hypothesis (p. 22–25, see also: Asef Bayat, “The Arab Spring and Revolutionary Theory: An Intervention in a Debate,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 34(2), 2021), and how best to conceive of the relationship between revolution and counterrevolution (p. 193–194, see also: Jamie Allinson, The Age of Counter-Revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East, 2022). Said provides us with an array of promising and engaging solutions to a good portion of these problems, in a way that lays strong foundations for further progress.

The main mission of Revolution Squared was—as Said puts it—“to answer one key question: How are revolutions defined by their spatiotemporal contexts?” (p.3). In answering this question, Said offers a theoretical approach to revolutions that neatly synthesizes classic foundational work by authors such as Charles Tilly, William Sewell Jr, and Doug McAdam with a larger body of work on space and time in recent revolutionary processes, as well as his own findings in Revolution Squared. The outcome is a compelling theory of the Egyptian Revolution that shows how spatial and temporal dynamics—and the relations between them—can have massive effects on how revolutions play out.

Drawing on the discourses employed by Egyptian revolutionaries, Said introduces how revolutionaries conceptualized “political space,” a term that encompasses the bounded physical and virtual contexts in which (political) happenings could occur. He shows, from a spatial perspective, how the revolution’s history was one of the generation of public political space. This began before 2011, in digital niches and during fleeting street protests, and eventually in a broader social media environment. In January 2011, however, revolutionaries were able to claim political space in otherwise “official” and “formal” spaces such as in Cairo’s Tahrir Square (the most famous site of revolutionary activity). At its zenith, revolutionary political space spanned the physical and virtual worlds of Egyptians’ daily lives. It ranged from official spaces like Tahrir to the streets of local neighborhoods, and from the airwaves of mass media to the “walls” of social media communities. The story of counter-revolution, by contrast, was that of the tightening and ultimate closure of political space, turbocharged by dramatic crackdowns and new forms of digital repression.

Said draws particular attention to the means by which space is claimed, established, and defended during the revolutionary processes. Here, there is a particular kind of symbolic object which he argues looms especially large: the barricade (p. 83–86; p. 222). Outside of Tahrir, barricades formed a relatively pragmatic component of some of the “checkpoints” erected by popular committees who did not self-conceptualize as revolutionaries, despite taking law and order into their own hands (and away from the nation’s disgraced police forces). In Tahrir Square, however, barricades at once served as defensive structures and symbolic illustrations of revolutionary power and control. They cleaved “the division between revolutionary and nonrevolutionary space … both literally and figuratively.” (p. 84).

But what of the role of time in Said’s analysis? Here, Said draws on the philosophical and literary concept of Kairós, which has its origin in the Ancient Greek term for the right, critical, or opportune moment (καιρός). For Said, kairós refers to a kind of temporal marker that, in concert with demarcated spaces, served to convey a popular understanding of where and when “the revolution” was happening (p. 238). In the case of Egypt, this came to be a little under Eighteen Days, in downtown Cario’s Tahrir Square. It was this “squaring” of the revolution—as Said puts it—its discursive reduction “to the physical and symbolic boundary of Tahrir Square during the uprising, [emphasis added]” that guaranteed its grim fate (p. 5).

More broadly, Said’s spatiotemporal theory of the Egyptian revolution invites us to consider how revolutionary processes may depend upon and influence spaces’ attributes, openness, and closure, as well as how publicly understood temporalities (i.e., how people relate to time) may shape or influence human behavior. A logical next step—one Said keenly recognizes—is to consider how this framework might be applied to a wider variety of revolutions, and whether we can discern any spatiotemporal logics that are characteristic of specific kinds of revolutions, or indeed are generalizable to contentious politics broadly considered. If such spatiotemporal factors (as Said conceives them) can generally be said to support mass participation in revolutionary processes, there is good reason to positively consider the further generalizability of Said’s conclusion that they also help shape the scope of agents’ counterrevolutionary activity, pre-revolutionary resistance, and resilience under authoritarianism. I would be keen to find out from Said what he reckons the most “portable” parts of his spatiotemporal theory of Egypt’s revolution are, and which cases the rest of us might wish to try and test them out in.

The second core theoretical contribution in Revolution Squared concerns the relationship between contingent phenomena and agency in contentious politics. Here, Said offers a distinctive and unique conceptualization of “lived contingency”: how “the actions [revolutionaries] do or do not take in relation to the possibilities, unpredictabilities, and practices of power” they encounter during and proximate to a revolution (p. 11, p. 212). Said homes in on three aspects of this concept: agential contingency, spatial contingency, and instances of “unbounding.”

Agential contingency is perhaps the most familiar form of contingency elaborated by Said, and refers to the patterns of choice and consequence charted masterfully by Ivan Ermakoff in 2015 (“The Structure of Contingency,” American Journal of Sociology, 121(1), 2015). By contrast, spatial contingency refers to “how actors experience, appropriate and remake spaces” (p. 12). As Said notes, spaces can be imbued with certain attributes, be it by the symbolic objects situated in and alongside them, the performances enacted by their occupants, or the deep histories and meanings with which they were once or are newly associated (p. 12). Finally, Said turns to what he calls “uncalculated unbounding.” This refers to how revolutionary actors may “lose many commitments to the normal everyday concerns” that characterize their lives, and instead “become willing to take the highest risk of all, to die to make things better” (p. 15).

Said is nonetheless keen to draw some distinctions between the experience of contingency in revolutions and other instances of contention. He posits that social movements, for example, do not exhibit the same “intensity of lived contingency”, and so their protagonists do not undertake the kind of “uncalculated unbounding” seen among revolutionaries (p. 285). While unbounding still occurs, it is—Said argues—calculated in character, lacking the fuller release of everyday obligations. It seems to me that this is another area where Said’s contribution to the study of revolution may be usefully broadened to contentious politics more generally. This opens up a useful line of further conversation: what is it about revolutions that engenders uncalculated unbounding, and how might instances of calculated and uncalculated unbounding appear across other contentious processes?

More broadly, I was also left wondering whether there might have been any way the revolution could have succeeded in overthrowing Mubarak without being “squared”? Tahrir Square enjoyed a profound and important status that stretched long back into Egyptian political history and permeated public consciousness. It also helped facilitate revolutionary mobilization in some very important ways. Hence, I do wonder whether the boost it gave the revolution was so integral that perhaps there could have been no revolution in 2011 Egypt without Tahrir? I do not have an answer to this question, but perhaps I might tempt Said to proffer one in our exchange.

All in all, Revolution Squared offers a superb empirical account of Egypt’s revolution, filled with first-hand observations, insightful research, and novel nuances not seen in other books on the topic. It was for that reason that the text came to play a key role in our Urban Sociology syllabus at University College London this year, as one of the core readings. Drawing on his insightful account, Said has developed some novel theoretical ideas of clear importance and utility to scholars of revolution, and broken new ground in the study of space, time, and contingency in revolutionary processes. I greatly enjoyed reading this book and am honored to have had the opportunity to place our works in dialogue.