MIDDLE EAST CENTRE FRIDAY SEMINAR SERIES: The state of Egypt, the State of Palestine

Dina Bishara is the Jarvis Doctorow Research Fellow in the Politics and International Relations of the Middle East at the University of Oxford. She received her Ph.D. from the George Washington University in 2013. She has published on labor activism in Egypt and the role of the military in Egyptian politics in The Arab Spring in Egypt: Revolution and Beyond (American University in Cairo Press, 2012), and Middle East Law and Governance. Her book manuscript, titled Contesting Authoritarianism: Challenges to State Corporatism in Egypt, explores how authoritarian institutions become objects of contestation rather than simply instruments for co-optation. It does so by investigating the conditions under which previously co-opted groups contest authoritarian institutions through an analysis of the ways in which public sector workers and state employees challenged a long-standing system of state control over interest representation. Her future work will explore the interplay between street and institutional politics in the transition from authoritarian rule.