Egypt is Not for Sale: Coalition Building and the Subversion of the Authoritarian Discourses in Egypt’s Island Protests

In early 2016, the transfer of the Red Sea archipelago of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia became the trigger for massive popular resistance in Egypt. Dislocating the regime’s canting nationalist discourse, the announcement of the island transfer gave rise to powerful counter-hegemonic projects and mobilised opposition in what became the largest non-Islamist protests since the military coup in mid-2013. It was a diverse coalition of leftist and Nasserist parties, revolutionary youth initiatives and some of the nationalist movements that had brought the incumbent military regime into power, which took to the street in April 2016 under a radical frame that integrated features of both, the patriotic lingo propagated by the regime and the revolutionary rhetoric of the 2011 uprisings. This innovative protest coalition came to be known as the “Egypt is not for Sale” campaign. Adopting a discourse theoretical perspective on contentious politics, this contribution investigates how the controversy over the demarcation of the Egyptian border became a source of oppositional subject formation and the crafting of a new “coalitions of contenders” (McAdam et al., 2001) against the encroachment of authoritarian rule. Enabling dissidents, whose goals had been largely discredited by the regime as disruptive and counter-revolutionary to successfully extend their mobilizing frames in creative ways, the transfer of Tiran and Sanafir served as a catalyst to denounce, among others, police violence, social inequality, corruption, mismanagement and the restriction of civil rights. I argue, therefore, that this contentious episode is a prodigious example of how radical movements can resist and even instrumentalise repressive securocratic and protectionist discourses as resources for alliance-building by resignifying their meaning and turning them against their architects: By portraying the island transfer as a sellout of the national heritage and entitlement of all future generations, the protesters in Egypt carefully placed their campaign in the trajectory of an ongoing fight of Egypt’s people against deprivation, thus establishing a chain of equivalence between young liberal activist and patriotic youth movements that had so far toed the regime’s line. Drawing on an event catalog that maps the “islands protest” of 2016 and on a critical textual analysis of the protest campaign’s political communication, this paper examines how the “Egypt is not for Sale”-Campaign subverted hegemonic discourses producing new relations that favoured coalition building and cross-movement mobilisation, changed the perception of political opportunities, and effectively created the conditions for social transformation. Ultimately, it suggests that it is through such diligent meaning work that movements can most effectively challenge oppressive modes of governance under conditions of authoritarian closure.