Review of “Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution”

Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution offers vivid, intimate portraits of the youths who led the massive uprising that brought down the Mubarak regime in Egypt in 2011. The activism of these youths profoundly transformed contemporary Egyptian society, resulting in a series of political changes, many of which did not necessarily reflect the original intentions of the youths themselves. A decade after the historical events, the efforts, thoughts, and sacrifices of these young activists are still far from being sufficiently recognized by the popular narratives of recent Egyptian history. Instead, these popular accounts depict a “leaderless” revolution and highlight the role of Western social media in political activism. In Tahrir’s Youth, the author, Rusha Latif, powerfully challenges this narrative by offering a convincing story of how youths from a wide range of class and religious backgrounds engaged with each other and with the Egyptian people to mobilize and organize political activism. Latif situates her portraits of the revolutionary becoming of these young people in the historical context of the modernizing Egypt, that is, the socioeconomic order that was formed over the six decades from Nassar’s reign to Mubarak’s presidency. Rather than “leaderless,” “faceless,” and dependent on Western technology, the revolutionary story that Latif told has not only protagonists but also protagonists with biographic pre-revolutionary traces and post-revolutionary evolution. The author is not oblivious of the unique role that the Internet played in contemporary political activism. Arguing against an overly deterministic technological optimism, Tahrir’s Youth strikes a delicate balance between the social effects of information technology and the impact of these young actors’ political agency. The Internet, social media, and their associated networks are treated as important enabling conditions that shaped the trajectories of the historical course of these events but not as determining factors that exclusively account for the rise and fall of this political activism. Using Latif’s own words, “[the course of the events was]…neither thoroughly planned, nor completely spontaneous. Rather, it unfolded as part of a dialectical process in which purposeful actors and a historically determined contextual reality shaped one another through a series of rapidly evolving political actions and events that continuously transformed political actors and reconfigured their actions and subjectivities.” (Latif 2022, p. 153).

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