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I'm pleased to announce that I'll be spending my next year as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, working with Courtney Jung on the Toronto Initiative for Economic and Social Rights, a research project focusing on how economic and social rights are conceptualized and implemented in the developing world. I'm looking forward to working with their whole dataset, as well as getting to do conceptual work behind the project, but, for the moment, I'm focusing on my specific research project for this fall: how economic and social rights are mattering (or not) in post-revolutionary Egypt. What follows this is some preliminary thinking about the questions I'm going to be examining while I'm in Egypt this September, and for the rest of the year, about how the right to well-being gets instantiated in various political contexts.
While Egypt has no shortage of major political crises to attend to--the drafting of the constitution, the ongoing game of chicken between the military, the judiciary, and the civilian government, a new cabinet, and the deep fears of religious minorities--the issue that is rising to the front of everybody's attention is the ongoing electricity shortage. Since July, every governorate in Egypt has seen rolling blackouts; they've been rare and short in Cairo, but long and brutal in Upper (Southern) Egypt and the periphery.
In Egypt right now, it's upwards of 35C/95F every single day; it's also Ramadan, meaning that many Muslims are abstaining from food or water for fifteen hours a day. Under these conditions, losing access to refrigeration, air conditioning, electric fans, water pumps (both in rural areas and in urban slums without regular water access), and other electronic devices is punishing for the population. This has lead to a run of protests up and down Egypt; here, for example, is a map I made of every protest location mentioned in the English-language reporting on the issue; note the geographic dispersal. (Don't be fooled by the narrowness of the ribbon of protests; nearly all of Egypt's population lives in that narrow ribbon. It's called the Nile.)
Why are the shortages happening? Reports on the ground are confusing. Most of the reporting I've read cites technical factors: crumbling electricity infrastructure, political challenges to new power plants, and an increase, over the past few years, in electricity consumption nationwide. But all technical factors exist in the context of political and social reality; they have a material status, but that material status comes to have meaning in in the particular social location where they exist. So, why is this happening at all? Who deserves the eminently political blame for this crisis?
On the one hand, the strong impulse of most official responses is to try to dissolve the blame by spreading it out. There are the millions of new air conditioning units installed nationwide in the past few years; there are protests against the building of new power plants, there is the decline of the infrastructure under Mubarak. The solution suggested by this analysis of the crisis is to improve the infrastructure as quickly as possible (they keep saying "within days," but color me skeptical), and to ask everyone to make the best individual decisions they can. Prime Minister Qandil just provided the best example of this when he suggested that Egyptians should wear cotton clothing and all stay in the same room rather than spreading out throughout their houses, to save power. (The response was, shall we say, hilarious.)
On the other hand, though, is a desire to blame the government for not providing. And here is the connection to my work for TIESR: the protests, including the "We Won't Pay" campaign organized by the Socialist Popular Alliance Party, frame access to electricity as a right that people are being denied. Most understandings of economic and social rights don't include a right to electricity, and probably for good reason; they focus on the core rights that allow a person to live a healthy, well-developed life. (Sen's notion of capabilities, for instance, still produces a Human Development Index as thin as life expectancy, literacy, and wealth, for instance.) But people's experience of having rights is different from the theoretical articulation of a right. The Egyptian citizens who are refusing to pay their electric bills until the power comes back are doing so because they believe that they are owed well-being by their government, and that this well-being include the right to electricity in the hot summer months.
This is all tangled up alongside the fact that many of the places seeing the most intense electricity protests are also seeing water shortages. The right to water is one that is recognized by the international community, even if it is rarely enforced. But in Egypt, right now, access to clean water is tied to access to electricity; both are primary deprivations that those who are protesting understand as being failures of the government to fulfill its part of the social contract.
By the time I arrive in Egypt in September, the battles over electricity may have faded; holiday-related electricity usage will likely have fallen, since Ramadan will be over, and the weather will have cooled down marginally, at least in lower Egypt. Alternately, the plans that the government keeps talking about might actually alleviate the problem. (Although--well, let's just say if your solution is "we need some solar panels!" and you think you can fix the problem in a matter of days, I doubt that you'll meet your own timetable.) However, this is clearly a crucial issue for understanding now just how the Egyptian government is going to provide the standard economic and social rights to its citizens, but how those citizens will demand the right to well-being, in whatever form it takes, from their government.
(For more information: here is a good article on the giant, nation-wide powercut on August 9th, here is an excellent article on the technical problems and their relationship to politics, and here is my very-much-in-progress spreadsheet of articles about the crisis in English.)
While Egypt has no shortage of major political crises to attend to--the drafting of the constitution, the ongoing game of chicken between the military, the judiciary, and the civilian government, a new cabinet, and the deep fears of religious minorities--the issue that is rising to the front of everybody's attention is the ongoing electricity shortage. Since July, every governorate in Egypt has seen rolling blackouts; they've been rare and short in Cairo, but long and brutal in Upper (Southern) Egypt and the periphery.
In Egypt right now, it's upwards of 35C/95F every single day; it's also Ramadan, meaning that many Muslims are abstaining from food or water for fifteen hours a day. Under these conditions, losing access to refrigeration, air conditioning, electric fans, water pumps (both in rural areas and in urban slums without regular water access), and other electronic devices is punishing for the population. This has lead to a run of protests up and down Egypt; here, for example, is a map I made of every protest location mentioned in the English-language reporting on the issue; note the geographic dispersal. (Don't be fooled by the narrowness of the ribbon of protests; nearly all of Egypt's population lives in that narrow ribbon. It's called the Nile.)
Why are the shortages happening? Reports on the ground are confusing. Most of the reporting I've read cites technical factors: crumbling electricity infrastructure, political challenges to new power plants, and an increase, over the past few years, in electricity consumption nationwide. But all technical factors exist in the context of political and social reality; they have a material status, but that material status comes to have meaning in in the particular social location where they exist. So, why is this happening at all? Who deserves the eminently political blame for this crisis?
On the one hand, the strong impulse of most official responses is to try to dissolve the blame by spreading it out. There are the millions of new air conditioning units installed nationwide in the past few years; there are protests against the building of new power plants, there is the decline of the infrastructure under Mubarak. The solution suggested by this analysis of the crisis is to improve the infrastructure as quickly as possible (they keep saying "within days," but color me skeptical), and to ask everyone to make the best individual decisions they can. Prime Minister Qandil just provided the best example of this when he suggested that Egyptians should wear cotton clothing and all stay in the same room rather than spreading out throughout their houses, to save power. (The response was, shall we say, hilarious.)
On the other hand, though, is a desire to blame the government for not providing. And here is the connection to my work for TIESR: the protests, including the "We Won't Pay" campaign organized by the Socialist Popular Alliance Party, frame access to electricity as a right that people are being denied. Most understandings of economic and social rights don't include a right to electricity, and probably for good reason; they focus on the core rights that allow a person to live a healthy, well-developed life. (Sen's notion of capabilities, for instance, still produces a Human Development Index as thin as life expectancy, literacy, and wealth, for instance.) But people's experience of having rights is different from the theoretical articulation of a right. The Egyptian citizens who are refusing to pay their electric bills until the power comes back are doing so because they believe that they are owed well-being by their government, and that this well-being include the right to electricity in the hot summer months.
This is all tangled up alongside the fact that many of the places seeing the most intense electricity protests are also seeing water shortages. The right to water is one that is recognized by the international community, even if it is rarely enforced. But in Egypt, right now, access to clean water is tied to access to electricity; both are primary deprivations that those who are protesting understand as being failures of the government to fulfill its part of the social contract.
By the time I arrive in Egypt in September, the battles over electricity may have faded; holiday-related electricity usage will likely have fallen, since Ramadan will be over, and the weather will have cooled down marginally, at least in lower Egypt. Alternately, the plans that the government keeps talking about might actually alleviate the problem. (Although--well, let's just say if your solution is "we need some solar panels!" and you think you can fix the problem in a matter of days, I doubt that you'll meet your own timetable.) However, this is clearly a crucial issue for understanding now just how the Egyptian government is going to provide the standard economic and social rights to its citizens, but how those citizens will demand the right to well-being, in whatever form it takes, from their government.
(For more information: here is a good article on the giant, nation-wide powercut on August 9th, here is an excellent article on the technical problems and their relationship to politics, and here is my very-much-in-progress spreadsheet of articles about the crisis in English.)
