McCune Room, HSSB 6020
In this talk based on her latest book Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution, Rusha Latif will challenge the commonly held belief that the 2011 Egyptian revolution was spontaneous and leaderless, through a provocative new account of the revolutionaries—one that foregrounds their solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation as a key catalyst behind their revolt. Speaking to these interconnections, the presentation will follow the trajectory of the Egyptian revolutionary movement through its successes and defeats from the perspective of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition (RYC), the first and arguably most significant front born of the nationwide revolt. Timely and necessary, this talk will not only illuminate the Egyptian uprising’s leadership and organizing dynamics but also impart urgent lessons from the protagonists behind this historic movement—lessons for everyone hoping to achieve liberation and revolutionary change in the 21st century.
Rusha Latif is an Egyptian-American researcher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on social movements and revolutions, particularly in the Middle East, with an emphasis on leadership, organization, and collective action across lines of class, gender, religion, and ideology. Her book, Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution (AUC Press, 2022), draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo during the 2011 uprising to examine activist agency in the absence of formal leadership. Her research has been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, and Jadaliyya.