Egypt’s Coups and Revolutions: From Mubarak to Sisi

In this edition of Wilson Center NOW we speak with Wilson Center Middle East Fellow and author Amy Austin Holmes about the release of her new book, Coups and Revolutions: Mass Mobilization, the Egyptian Military, and the United States from Mubarak to Sisi. The book analyzes the waves of revolution and counterrevolution in Egypt between 2011 and 2018 and brings together the literature on bottom-up revolutionary movements and top-down military coups. Holmes also introduces the concept of a coup from below in contrast to the revolution from above that took place under Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Guest
Amy Austin Holmes is a Wilson Center Fellow, Associate Professor of Sociology, American University in Cairo and 2019 Visiting Professor at the Middle East Initiative of Harvard University. She began teaching there in 2008, after finishing her PhD at Johns Hopkins University. She has been awarded fellowships from Harvard University, Brown University, and was a Fulbright scholar in Germany. Her research focuses on the intersection of contentious politics and security issues, broadly defined. Her book Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 was published by Cambridge University Press; she also directed an accompanying documentary film. Having spent a decade living in the Middle East through the period known as the Arab Spring, she has published numerous articles on Egypt, Turkey, Bahrain, and the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Syria. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, South Atlantic Quarterly, Journal of Arabian Studies, Social Movement Studies, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to name a few. She has given TV and radio interviews with NPR, BBC, Al Jazeera, and other outlets. She has testified in the House of Lords of the British parliament on the situation in Bahrain.

Moderator
John Milewski is the executive producer and managing editor of Wilson Center NOW and also serves as director of Wilson Center ON DEMAND digital programming.