By Hesham Shafick
Hesham Shafick is a PhD scholar and teaching fellow at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary, University of London. Shafick co-convenes a cross-institutional research group on International Political Sociology – check doingips.com.
Two years after Egypt’s uprisings in 2011, a popularly-backed military coup massacred 1000+ protestors in Rabaa square. Many of the activist groups that mobilised for the earlier uprisings did not condemn this act. Existing social movement literature accounts for the political settings which made this silence structurally, ideologically and strategically viable. Building on these works, this article sheds light on the framing process through which the activists justified and hence reproduced this silence. Merging feminist ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ with(in) a ‘collective action framing’ framework, the article underlines the importance of ‘bottom-up’ approaches for understanding the reproduction of hegemonic silences beyond structural, ideological, and strategic determinism.
The article can be found at https://www.interfacejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Interface-11-2-Shafick-1.pdf