Henry Bunkall | Hilary Term 2026
Defining Highly Repressive Environments
Davenport defines political repression as the state’s use of physical sanctions to deter ‘specific activities and/or beliefs perceived to be challenging to government personnel, practices or institutions.’[1] This helps distinguish highly repressive states from others. If we understand that political repression is an inherent feature of all states, it is inappropriate to lean on the dichotomy of liberal democracy and authoritarianism to understand political repression. With this in mind, I take as my definition that highly repressive environments are those wherein extreme legal, spatial and social control alongside real or perceived violence is employed to depoliticise and disenfranchise the population.
In these environments, protest movements operate with a high degree of fluidity, often defying expectations of what constitutes protest. Protestors and activists reinterpret the actions intended to repress them, generating creative responses that facilitate protest. Having been shaped by a highly repressive environment allows some acts of protest to flourish in an area where previously dissent seemed impossible because of, rather than in spite of repressive action. This acknowledged, there is still the question of whether these adaptations themselves bolster the repressive state in being able to influence, albeit, most commonly indirectly, the forms of protest that occur.
In the Middle East and North Africa, diverse methods of state repression have cultivated highly varied and creative protest movements. I explore protest through four lenses: fraternisation, spatial manipulation, quiet encroachment and knowledge exchange. It must be made clear that the Middle East and North Africa is not a hegemonic region, and the protests explored in this essay are each born out of a sophisticated combination of unique cultural, political and historical factors among others. What ties the examples I explore is the interaction between government claims to space and the interaction of protestors in response to this.
Fraternisation in Egypt
Fraternisation sees protestors strive for face-to-face contact and perspective sharing with security forces in order to form an indissoluble bond that allows protestors to overcome antagonism.[2] During Egypt’s January 25th revolution, protestors achieved this by advancing into the space of the state security forces to spontaneously ‘kiss, hug and embrace individual soldiers.’[3] The protestors hoped to win the loyalty of the regime’s security forces by reclaiming the social space between them and defusing violent state repression.[4]
An extreme disruption of expected situational norms,
Spatial Manipulation
Walter Armbrust argues that the centrality of Tahrir and its importance as a transportation hub allowed protestors to disrupt traffic beyond the square, enthusing a substantial portion of the public with its effect.[6]Tahrir was a material demonstration of the neoliberal reshaping of Cairo, as Tahrir and other inner-city spaces had been reduced to ‘nonplaces’ designed for cars to pass through rather than spaces of socialisation.[7]
Employing the space as a site of demonstration therefore held significant resonance as protestors managed to transform the site into one of radical encounter. Sit-ins and encampments on what was referred to by protestors as the ‘saniyya’, a seventy-meter empty grass space, reclaimed a public presence in an environment intended to exclude it.[8] Alongside other acts of mass mobilisation, movement was slowed, as the boundary between protestor and repressing force becomes increasingly challenging to enforce. The protestors exposed the contradictions in the state’s neoliberal vision by transforming a place of transport to one of political expression and creativity.
When formed, fraternisation ties allow protestors to succeed in two ways suited to a highly repressive environment. Firstly, they signal a clear pacific intention by using common greetings and interactions to establish a sense of solidarity
However, success in this circumstance is contextually dependent and fragile. The performances are most effective when dealing with inexperienced state forces who have not received specialist training in crowd control. This was the case for many of the units deployed in Egypt in 2011, with the Egyptian army last having been deployed on Egyptian streets in 1986.[10] More experienced units or those with specialist protest and riot training, such as the Egyptian Central Security Force, can utilise crowd-control techniques to block protestors achieving the proximity required for fraternisation performances to occur. These forces can use long-range weapons to achieve this with tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets.[11] These methods of repression were able to limit the success of fraternisation performances, with a few exceptions. In these situations, protestors can adapt with dynamism and innovation to seize the initiative when repressive forces make errors.[12] In Downtown Cairo, protestors embraced twenty CSF troops isolated from their main line chanting, ‘these are poor men following orders.’[13] This neutralised the violence from the CSF troops, and prevented violence from fellow protestors which would have inevitably escalated the response of the CSF to the use of deadly force. This occurred while other CSF units launched attacks with tear gas further down the road.[14] The success of mass mobilisation as a tool for protest was dependent on the military being unwilling to enact the scale of violence that would be necessary to reassert control over public space occupied by protestors.[15] In Egypt, when the scale of violence required to remove protestors from Tahrir Square became clear, military commanders pressured Mubarak to resign.[16]Even if Field Marshal Ḥusayn Ṭanṭāwī ordered the army to do so, Hicham Bou Nassif suggests that the middle ranking officer, NCO and ordinary ranking soldiers of the army did not receive the professional and financial privileges of Mubarak’s patronage system to follow through with such commands.[17] This being so, the degree of command held by the ruler of these states over the security apparatus, most notably the army, is contingent on the success of mass mobilisation and fraternisation.[18] A top-down patronage system in this situation was not enough to motivate the level of violence that would have been required to quell the protests.
Whilst the geography of urban Egypt was ideal for mass mobilisations, in Saudi Arabia protestors have had to manipulate a contrasting spatial environment that was designed to resist congestion or interruption. Urban spaces in Saudi Arabia have been engineered by the state as a structural obstacle to collective activism. Cities such as Riyadh, Dammam and Jeddah are arranged as grid-like spaces without clear centres alongside fast-moving highways.[19] This method of urban planning prevents blockades, removing the option to slow down and disrupt movement. Despite the state using contemporary urban planning as a device to counter mass mobilisation, protest methods adapt according to geographical setting, challenging the state’s mastery of space. Car drifters and joyriders exploit the edges of urban expansion, using suburban spaces to avoid police, reclaiming the space as a site of freedom.[20] In these zones, the state has not yet been able to expand and consolidate the system of cameras and security forces to extinguish the protest.
Joyriding is uniquely politicised by the extensive efforts of the Riyadh police to actively combat it and the continuation of joyriding in spite of it. This differentiates joyriding in Saudi Arabia, which appears to be a politicised act of protest in consistent opposition to the efforts of the state rather than in a nation like Egypt or Yemen where it could be attributed to a lack of government regulation. In the first three months of 2014, the police in Riyadh would arrest 750 young people for partaking in joyriding, whilst direct confrontations with the police see joyriders throw eggs.[21] In 2014 the arrests coincided with an estimated youth unemployment rate of 29% and in reflection of this it would be interesting to analyse contemporary arrest data relating to joyriding currently as youth unemployment has experienced a substantial decline to an all-time low of 11.5% in 2024.[22][23]
In an environment where speed has been engineered to prevent blockade and protest, the joyriding movement has for over fifty years been able to harness the fast-moving environment to steal cars, and to organise joyriding and drifting games at even higher speeds along the highways.
Everyday Resistance and Quiet Encroachment
The creative use of space is a recurring feature of protest in highly repressive environments. During the First Intifada (al-Intifāḍa al-ʾŪlā) of 1987–1993, Palestinian activists in the West Bank made checkpoints, walls and urban structures islands of protest, using stickers, graffiti and flags so extensively that Israeli forces were unable to suppress the protest movement.[24] The environment created by the occupying forces opened an alternative route to protest.
Small acts of defiance led to a widespread mobilisation that was inclusive to individuals who otherwise avoided acts of resistance in fear of reprisal.[25]
Acts of disproportionately violent Israeli repression were documented by the international press at an ‘unprecedented’ level, providing visible demonstrations of the contrast between the occupied and the occupier.[26]
Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s policy of beatings and other forms of physical force against Palestinian protestors amplified condemnation of IDF and Israeli Police brutality from notable human rights groups such as Amnesty International, and even the U.S. State Department. [27][28][29] A report sponsored by Swedish Save the Children notes that of the estimated 50,000 to 63,000 children requiring medical treatment in the first two years of the intifada, an estimated 6,500–8,500 were wounded by gunfire, whilst it was estimated that 23,600–29,900 children required medical treatment for beating injuries in the same period with nearly a third of a sample of 3,460 recorded in the first year being subjected to children aged ten years or younger.[30] The disproportionate violence of the Israeli government inadvertently signalled that even peaceful or seemingly minor acts of defiance held the power to threaten and disrupt their control of space. By attempting to quell the overwhelming Palestinian presence, the occupying force instead amplified the visibility of Palestinians and made their cause harder for the international community to ignore.
Creative forms of protest in highly repressive environments often challenge assumptions of the threshold required to constitute protest. Under Hafez al-Assad in Syria, satirical plays were areas for critique of the regime to reach a mass audience. The 1974 play Daʿyat Tishrīn gave expression to a shared sense of solidarity among the population, subverting official routes of communication established under the state-regulated arts scene which was dominated by the al-mukhābarāt, the feared intelligence service of Assad’s state.[31] In Daʿyat Tishrīn the protagonist Ghawwar, a well-behaved but ill-fated nationalist, is electrically shocked by a torturer. He exclaims that ‘the electricity has reached me before it reaches our village!’[32] This dialogue engages with the domestic and economic failures of the regime, with the knowledge that the regime would never seek to claim that electrical shortages are desirable.[33]
Violent repression by the regimes forces prevented explicit protest at the issues such as electrical shortages, so political debate played out within the state-controlled culture and arts scene in a more nuanced fashion. Satirical plays had the ability to navigate and negotiate with this environment by critically exploring failing elements of Syrian society without ever explicitly attributing these failures to the government. In doing so, they
The popularity of comedic plays like Daʿyat Tishrīn can be related to a disbelief in the infallibility of the cult of Assad by its audience, the Syrian public, perpetuated by the fracture between propaganda and the social and economic realities that Syrians experienced.[34] Creative exploitation of a gap between compliance and belief as influenced by encountered realities undermines codes of conduct engineered to ensure social control.[35]
Alternative forms of protest challenge our understanding due to the apparent absence of political intent. ‘The Quiet Encroachment of the Ordinary’ as termed by Asef Bayat, explains the grey zone of protest action, marked by ‘atomized and prolonged mobilizations with episodic collective action’ that see ‘ordinary people push back against the powerful to improve their condition or simply survive’.[36] A broader understanding of protest empowers working class communities who have historically been smeared, unduly, as passive or disinterested in activism. 40% of poor residents of the informal community of Hayy al-Sellom in south Beirut refused to pay their electric bills in the late 1990s.[37] Participants were driven more by their own poverty than a deliberate intent to build a protest movement, compelling the state to extend urban services to their neighbourhoods by illegally tapping into supplies before simply refusing to pay once the utilities are installed.[38] Such actions expose a discontent at the state’s management of the economy, notably in Lebanon where infrastructure such as electricity has been consistently poorly managed by the government since the end of the civil war in 1990.[39] Subverting the states control over infrastructure whilst continuing to draw from it can therefore itself be seen as an expression of protest.
The explosion of neoliberalism furthered the potential for this subversion, by using the informal economy to sidestep state-controlled infrastructure. In Egypt, schoolteachers have seized this opportunity in response to low salaries by engaging in private tuition of their own pupils, creating an illegal sector that generates roughly $3 billion per year.[40] This is evasive action that is not built on a conscious effort to resist in comparison to more actively confrontational resistance. As is the Hawala system, which allows the transfer of funds across distances through intermediary agents and personal trust.[41] By circumnavigating formal banking and bureaucratic structures, the user pays a lower rate to transfer funds, while undermining the economic order of the state.[42] What unites these examples is a desire to reclaim a feeling of autonomy in the face of regulation and state institutions, by operating outside of state boundaries.[43] These movements can develop heightened political consciousness if actors feel their new gains are threatened.[44] This method of protest exploits state vulnerabilities such as inadequate technology and infrastructure to prevent quiet encroachment.[45] The protestors’ aims shift from resistance to defence as when Cairo’s street vendors vanish down into alleys and cul-de-sacs when police advance, only to return when they have left.[46] Bayat terms this mode of opposition outside of formal institutions as ‘street politics.’[47] Neoliberal structures in highly repressive states have enabled and necessitated a reconfiguration of protest. Using the informal economy to avoid state regulation places actors in opposition to state control, reflecting broader dissatisfaction with the economic status quo and governance.
Migration and Knowledge Exchange
Mass migration, accelerated by globalization and capitalist economic structures has strengthened protest in repressive environments. In the Gulf, the movement of Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis and Jordanians facilitated the transmission of effective tactics of protest. Migrants and circular migrants enhanced efforts to overcome barriers to mass mobilization by allowing the workers’ movement to learn from their experiences. For example, in Bahrain during the September 1954 bus and taxi strikes, the spreading of nails and tin-traps to prevent strike breakers was viewed as having likely been ‘learned from Lebanon.’[48]
The messaging of the workers’ committee (al-lajna al-ʿummāliyya) in Saudi Arabia during the August 1953 ARAMCO labour strikes demonstrates the impact of migration on protest. The committee initially demanded improved wages and better food which failed to draw support, however when the campaign shifted to demanding political rights, participation surged.[49] The reframing of the strike in terms of political rights was in stark opposition to the previous demands which the workers felt constituted begging, a practice widely shunned upon by many Muslims based on the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad.[50] Arab nationalists had experience in successfully harnessing sentiments of honour and dignity from Palestine to Egypt in order to generate popular momentum and were therefore uniquely placed to steer the workers committee. The committees successful messaging was influenced by migrants who articulated the successes of Pan-Arabism and allowed their learnings to be implemented in the labour strikes.[51] A shared sense of destiny encompassed the movement, subverting the social codes of conduct harnessed by the Saudi state and its American allies to suck life from labour movements.
More recently, Saudi Arabia’s Islamist movement had adapted its actions to overcome barriers to collective action. These groups exploited the economic development that accompanied suburbanisation, as a growing middle class sought ways to spend their leisure time that increased from more regular work schedules and wages.[52] In Riyadh, summer camps emerged, with cultural, religious, and sporting activities that would facilitate public speaking and other skills associated with mass mobilisation to flourish.[53] During the Gulf War, these camps formed pre-existing networks from which to mobilise protest towards the US-led coalition’s presence in Saudi territory.[54] Although they resulted in failure, these protests showed the useful opportunity summer camps presented to dissenters.
Despite intense pressure from Saudi media to ban the camps after a wave of bombings in 2004, studies produced by the Interior Ministry and Ministry of Social Affairs showed a slump in youth delinquency in the months of June and July when the camps ran.[55] The Islamist movement leveraged the moral restrictions felt by the state in as much as it could not be perceived to allow youth delinquency and capitalised on the opportunities created by suburbanization to innovatively facilitate mass mobilisation. In the April 2005 municipal elections, the Islamist movement harnessed the training and networks created in summer camps to effectively organise and win sweeping victories, reflecting a growing discontent at the Saudi policy.
Conclusion: Rewriting Social and Cultural Codes
To summarise, in highly repressive environments, protest movements persist despite repression and are shaped directly by it. Protests are consistently characterised by a creativity and fluidity that challenges what is traditionally assumed to constitute protest. Mass mobilisation can be achieved with the use of fraternisation performances in suitable environments, whilst the subversion of state-controlled spaces has been successful in both a geographic
[1] Christian Davenport, State Repression and Political Order, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 10, no. 1 (2007), p. 2.
[2] Neil Ketchley, “‘The Army and the People Are One Hand!’ Fraternization and the 25th January Egyptian Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, no. 1 (2014): 157.
[3] Ibid., 160.
[4] Ibid., 157.
[5] Ibid., 166-171.
[6] Walter Armbrust, Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), chap. 2.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ketchley, Egypt in a Time of Revolution, 176.
[10] Ibid., 167.
[11] Ibid., 161.
[12] Ibid., 181.
[13] Ibid., 160-161.
[14] Ibid., 161.
[15] Charles Tripp, “The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East,” in The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution in the Arab World, ed. Fawaz A. Gerges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 133.
[16] “Why the Egyptian Army Didn’t Shoot,” Middle East Report, January 2013, https://merip.org/2013/01/why-the-egyptian-army-didnt-shoot/.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Tripp, “The Power and the People,” 132.
[19] Pascal Menoret, “The Suburbanization of Islamic Activism in Saudi Arabia,” City and Society 29, no. 1 (2017): 164.
[20] Ibid., 179.
[21] Pascal Menoret, “Riyadh rage: inside Saudi Arabia’s joyriding craze,” The Guardian, June 22, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/22/saudia-arabia-joyriding-cars-drifting-street-racing-riyadh-rage.
[22] Ibid.
[23] World Bank, “Unemployment, Youth Ages 15–24 (% of total labor force), Saudi Arabia,” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.1524.ZS?locations=SA
[24] Tripp, “The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East,” 118.
[25] Ibid., 118-119.
[26] Stories from the First Intifada: ‘They Broke My Bones,’” Al Jazeera, December 10, 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/12/10/stories-from-the-first-intifada-they-broke-my-bones.
[27] Nabeel Abraham and Lisa Hajjar, “International Human Rights Organizations and the Palestine Question,” Middle East Report 150 (January/February 1988).
[28] Glenn Frankel, “The Uprising in the Occupied Territories: An Israeli Dilemma,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1988, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-01-22-mn-25363-story.html.
[29] “Amnesty International Accuses Israel of Shooting Unarmed Civilians,” UPI Archives, January 3, 1990, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1990/01/03/Amnesty-International-accuses-Israel-of-shooting-unarmed-civilians/9454631342800/.
[30] “The Status of Palestinian Children During the Uprising in the Occupied Territories,” American–Arab Affairs, no. 33 (June 30, 1990): 147, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/vi-status-palestinian-children-during-uprising/docview/219474833/se-2.
[31] Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 110.
[32] Ibid. 110.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid., 138.
[36] Asef Bayat, “The Quiet Encroachment of the Ordinary,” in Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 55.
[37] Ibid., 57
[38] Ibid., 57.
[39] Dana Abi Ghanem, “Energy, the City and Everyday Life: Living with Power Outages in Post‑War Lebanon,” Energy Research & Social Science 36 (February 2018): 36‑43, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629617304012.
[40] Bayat, “Quiet Encroachment,” 57.
[41] Tripp, “Power and the People,” 167.
[42] Ibid., 167.
[43] Bayat, “Quiet Encroachment,” 58
[44] Ibid., 57.
[45] Ibid., 61.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Ibid.
[48] John Chalcraft, “Migration and Popular Protest in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf in the 1950s and 1960s,” International Labor and Working-Class History 79 (2011): 32.
[49] Ibid., 39.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Ibid., 39-40.
[52] Menoret, “Suburbanization of Islamic Activism,” 180.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Ibid., 181.
[55] Ibid., 181-182.
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