January 25 at Six

Six years have passed since Egyptians have taken to the streets and public squares demanding “bread, freedom, and social justice.” Traces of January 25 Revolution may appear faint in present day Egypt. Certainly, the actors and players who once led the effort to mobilize opposition against thirty years of the rule of Hosni Mubarak have suffered a great deal of marginalization under the military sponsored regime that the coup of 3 July 2013 has put into place. And yet even with the seeming containment of the partisans of the January 25 Revolution, advocates of the status quo, notably the regime of Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, have been anything but triumphant. Even after four years of repression and political engineering, the regime has failed to revive the stable authoritarian order that once existed in the country. More importantly, the social struggles that paved the way for the January 25 Revolution continue to challenge the new ruling establishment and, at points, have exposed its weakness and kept it on the defensive.

To mark six years since the onset of the January 25 Revolution, Jadaliyya offers its readers a series of articles that bring to focus salient questions and narratives pertaining to the diverse struggles that January 25 has come to symbolize.