RGP Cycle Three Grantees and Projects

Mohamed Fahmy Menza: Citizenship: Between Discourse and Practice: Experiences of Sociopolitical Transformation in the New Egypt

Social movements that spearheaded and actively participated in the January 25th and June 30th waves of uprisings that led up to the demise, first of the Mubarak then the Muslim Brotherhood regimes, have catapulted the demands to reestablish ‘citizenship’ as one of the main foundations of a new social contract that aimed at redefining state-society relations in the new Egypt. Meanwhile, the concept of citizenship has been increasingly featured in the discourse and practice of a wide variety of development initiatives and interventions over the past decade or so. In fact, Egypt’s experiences with the modern nation-state project have gone through various phases of ebb and flow since the beginning of the 20th Century when it comes to the conceptualization of citizenship and its priority as a political commitment on the part of the state. The concept of citizenship as such has been affected by the socioeconomic and political trajectories of state-society relations during the Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak regimes. Dilemmas of geographical disparities and uneven access to resources and services in addition to issues of discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin, gender, and religious affiliation (Copts, Nubians, Bedouins…etc.) were among the main accompanying features of the neoliberal order that was first introduced and then consolidated by Sadat’s Open Door and Mubarak’s state-withdrawal policies, respectively.
How was the concept of ‘citizenship’ featured in the discourse and activities of social and political forces active in the Jan 25 movement in Egypt? And where the foreign donors’ programs and interventions relating to citizenship rights impacted by some of the local demands to foster citizenship rights? Has there been any overlap between the social movements and political parties that called for citizenship rights as a main national priority? And what is the role of the Egyptian civil society in this process? This research aims at tackling these research questions, among others, in an attempt to shed some light on the discourse and practice of ‘citizenship’ in the context of Egypt’s state-society relations post January 25.

Mohamed Fahmy Menza is an Affiliate Assistant Professor and Director of Dialogue at the Core Curriculum, American University in Cairo (AUC). He holds a PhD in Arab & Islamic Studies, with a specialization in political economy and sociology, from the University of Exeter and his research focuses on state/society relations, informal and patronage politics and the political economy of development. Dr Menza has received several awards in the area of multidisciplinary research, including the Exeter Research Scholarship, and has provided consultancies to an array of development organizations, such as the World Bank and CARE International. His most recent publication is the book Patronage Politics in Egypt: the NDP and the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo published by Routledge. Menza is also the head of the politburo of Misr Al-Horreya (Egypt Freedom) party, a social-liberal party that came into being after the January 25 Revolution, and was most recently mentioned in the 2013 edition of Who’s Who in the World.