According to conventional Western wisdom, liberal ideas are unpopular among Egyptians, despite what some enthusiastic young people said in Tahrir Square in early 2011. Yet while it is true that social mores have become more conservative in Egypt in recent decades, it is not true that core liberal ideas are in retreat. On the contrary, the essentials of political liberalism—citizens’ rights, government accountability, the rule of law, limits on state power—have become so popular that the liberal ideological field has become crowded.
About the Authors
Michele Dunne
Michele Dunne is senior fellow and director of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She was the founding director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, and has served as a specialist on Middle East affairs at the U.S. Department of State.
Tarek Radwan is associate director for research at the Rafik Hariri Center. He previously reported on the Middle East with Human Rights Watch and served as a human-rights officer for the United Nations–African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur.
Strategies based on transition pacts that reduce rulers' risks and cushion their retreat from total power may be the most promising route to democracy in the Arab world.
Egyptians threw off the thirty-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, but now find themselves under essentially the same military tutelage that they had hoped to escape.
