Trauma as counter-revolutionary colonisation: Narratives from (post)revolutionary Egypt
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088217748970 |
| Author | Vivienne Matthies-Boon,Naomi Head |
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088217748970
Journal of International Political Theory
2018, Vol. 14(3) 258 –279
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088217748970
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Trauma as counter-
revolutionary colonisation:
Narratives from (post)
revolutionary Egypt
Vivienne Matthies-Boon
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Naomi Head
University of Glasgow, UK
Abstract
We argue that multiple levels of trauma were present in Egypt before, during and after the
2011 revolution. Individual, social and political trauma constitute a triangle of traumatisation
which was strategically employed by the Egyptian counter-revolutionary forces – primarily
the army and the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood – to maintain their political and
economic power over and above the social, economic and political interests of others.
Through the destruction of physical bodies, the fragmentation and polarisation of social
relations and the violent closure of the newly emerged political public sphere, these actors
actively repressed the potential for creative and revolutionary transformation. To better
understand this multi-layered notion of trauma, we turn to Habermas’ ‘colonisation of the
lifeworld’ thesis which offers a critical lens through which to examine the wider political
and economic structures and context in which trauma occurred as well as its effects on the
personal, social and political realms. In doing so, we develop a novel conception of trauma
that acknowledges individual, social and political dimensions. We apply this conceptual
framing to empirical narratives of trauma in Egypt’s pre- and post-revolutionary phases,
thus both developing a non-Western application of Habermas’ framework and revealing
ethnographic accounts of the revolution by activists in Cairo.
Keywords
Colonisation, counter-revolution, Egypt, Habermas, trauma
Corresponding author:
Vivienne Matthies-Boon, Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht
166, 1018 WV Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Email: e.a.v.boon@uva.nl
748970IPT0010.1177/1755088217748970Journal of International Political TheoryMatthies-Boon and Head
research-article2017
Article
Matthies-Boon and Head 259
Introduction
In January 2011, the Egyptian revolution overthrew the long-standing and repressive
regime of President Hosni Mubarak. The revolution started on the National Celebration
of the Police Day and was directed at the brutality of Mubarak’s crony capitalist police
state that directly infringed on people’s physical integrity and emotional wellbeing
(Ismail, 2011, 2012). The mobilising potential of the revolution was, however, cut short
and the revolutionary ideals of ‘bread, freedom and social justice’ were violently crushed
by counter-revolutionary actors seeking to maintain political and economic power. High
levels of violence penetrated into all aspects of Egyptian society and engendered exten-
sive individual and collective trauma.
Based on testimonial life-story research with 40 young Caireen activists, we argue
that trauma in Egypt entailed interconnected experiences of betrayal in the personal,
social and political realms (also see Matthies-Boon, 2017). Advancing an intersubjective
phenomenological and triadic account of trauma, we argue that individual, social and
political trauma emerged as normative expectations were betrayed and crushed by coun-
ter-revolutionary actors in violent pursuit of their own strategic economic and political
interests. Activists experienced a personal psychological breakdown of their assumptive
world – that is, their generalised beliefs about self-worth, meaningful others and the
benevolence of the world (Janoff-Bulman, 1992) – due to grave physical violence, or the
immanent and persistent threat thereof, both in the pre- and post-revolutionary periods.
Such shattering of the assumptive world also atomised social relations as activists expe-
rienced deep existential loneliness aggravated by social fragmentation, dehumanisation,
alienation and anomie. Individual trauma was thus intimately connected to social trauma.
We argue that these experiences of individual and social traumatisation were neither
accidental nor the inevitable outcome of the revolutionary uprising, but rather a purpose-
ful act, namely, the direct outcome of what we call political trauma, the violent betrayal
of a collective (revolutionary) striving for an inclusive public sphere.1
In order to grasp this intricate triangle of traumatisation, we turn to Jürgen Habermas’
‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ thesis, which offers a critical lens on the political and eco-
nomic dynamics through which such multiplying of trauma occurs. This perspective ren-
ders trauma a systematic attempt to break communicative, social and political relations.
Trauma in the Egyptian case should not solely be understood from either an individualist
psychological perspective or a social point of view, but rather as being constituted by politi-
cal power and its violent strategic pursuit of instrumental reason. The dominant institu-
tional actors (primarily the army and the Muslim Brotherhood leadership) sought to
maintain and strengthen their own economic, political and administrative power at the cost
of deliberative power and the transformation of others. They sought to break Egypt’s diver-
gent forms of social and political activism by continuously exerting violent exclusionary
measures on the public realm through physical violence, dehumanisation, polarisation,
repressive laws and other measures (see Human Rights Watch, 2012, 2014, 2017a, 2017b).
In what follows, we first outline a critique of trauma conceptualised solely as an indi-
vidual or social experience. We then develop a Habermasian-influenced conception of
trauma as constituting a multi-level process of traumatic betrayal. We apply this concep-
tual framing to empirical narratives of trauma in Egypt’s pre- and post-revolutionary
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