The Egyptian revolt was reframed by media as horizontalist not state-seeking

Evidence

Jack Shenker, a Guardian correspondent who lived in the country and knew many revolutionaries well, put it this way: “Egyptians built something different from Mubarak Country: a different set of borders, a different set of social relations, a different narrative about who they were and what they could do. Everyone, including me, wrote about the inventive food supplies and toilet systems, the hijacked power cables and tented schools, the in-house hairdresser and exuberant street weddings.” For anglophone readers, all of this appeared as the kind of decentralized and anti-hierarchical movement that could herald open progress, rather than the kinds of dedicated (or Leninist) revolution that insisted on a given path. No, this was aimed at transforming power, rather than seizing the state. Shenker continues, writing that Egyptian revolutionaries had not “viewed power as something just ‘out there’ to be captured; they’ve understood it as something diffuse, scattered across complex domestic, regional and global nodes… . It means a reimagination of how power functions, and the opening up of a space in which that reimagination can take place. It means a rejection of rigid hierarchies and ideological blueprints, of charismatic leaders and the obedience they crave… . Inspired by the horizontalidad movements of Latin America over the last two decades, this sort of rhizomatic organization,” he said, “was the natural outcome of the oppositional activity that had taken place during the Mubarak era.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 233

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shenker’s account defines the horizontalist/rhizomatic reading of 2011 Egypt against the Leninist state-seizure model.
• XREF: connects to: Western media framed the Egyptian uprising through the 1989 Berlin Wall template — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 229; Western media coverage structurally selected which Egyptian revolutionaries got heard — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 230; Media framed Palestinian resistance as civilizational clash rather than political land struggle — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 650

Broader Connections

• Media framed Palestinian resistance as civilizational clash rather than political land struggle #expands (0.78) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 650