Surviving repression : Trajectories of activists in post-2013 Egypt

Recently, social movement studies took a relational turn which investigates processes of mobilisation in view of the interaction between the three levels of analysis: the structural (macro), the meso (organizational), and the individual (micro) dynamics. Research contributing to the puzzling repression-mobilisation nexus has focused extensively on the macro and meso levels of the analysis. In this respect, literature investigated whether repression enhances mobilisation or rather triggers demobilisation, how repression affects organizations, groups and movements, and how the latters adapt to the new structural changes/ their new context. The school of biographical consequences of activism introduced the micro dynamics of the effect of repression on mobilisation, focusing on the effects of significant experiences, particularly those of imprisonment, physical violence and torture on individual lives. However, these efforts remain focused on long term impact, or individual perceptions of macro changes. More crucially, when it comes to individual activists, the prevalent questions in existing literature focus on how repression affects individual activism and engagement and whether it triggers radicalization, in an implicit attempt to solve the repression-mobilisation dilemma. What we aim to do in this paper is to shed light on the very experience of individual encounters with state repression. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2016, including observation, in-depth interviews and regular visits to the media outlets of the respective movements, the paper analyses the different effects of state driven repression on young activists adhering to a variety of political movements ranging from Islamist to liberal and leftist movements. We make a simple claim: individual encounters with state repression occur differently. While repression is objective, its effect is individual and subjective. In other words, repressive events come to be considered as individual turning points based on primarily individual factors particularly emotional response, personal connection and subsequent choices. Far from merely demonstrating difference, we take a step further in attempt to explain why individual trajectories take different turns, demonstrating how in each case a combination of organizational and configurational factors, along with individual properties (socialization, background, previous experiences) shape the experience of repression.