Justice Under the Law?

Two debates over justice that threaten to destabilize the neoliberal state have broken out in recent days. In the United States, legislators have objected to the threatened federal government use of drones to kill U.S. citizens while on U.S. territory. In Egypt, a court verdict contested by various participants in the Arab Spring revolution was issued in the midst of a police strike.  For both debates a central question remains: whether legislative and court systems will be able to limit the reach of the President, a time-honored defense against abuse of power by sovereign authorities and strategy promoting justice in the exercise of government power.

Populism or Democracy?

After the December, 2012 constitutional referendum in Egypt we find that electoral success may not translate into popular support. So how do democracies come to diverge from populism?

Democratic governments claim that the will of the populace is represented in government decision-making and policy. Yet historically democracy has had two broad variants. One variation, widespread until the early 19th century, was where ordinary people by force of numbers govern, so that democracy (sometimes known as popular democracy) is shaped by a relation between all the people and a form of government. A second now more commonly accepted form is where carefully selected representatives govern.  The claim of electoral democracies to full democracy is based on the second form, which unfortunately is now widely associated with democracy to the exclusion of the earlier and still popular sense.

Tahrir Square One -Year Anniversary – Jan. 25, 2012

Early in 2011 Egyptian democratic activists challenged their government’s status quo, and their hard work paid off when Mubarak fell from power on January 25, 2011. Democracy has not looked so powerful in many decades. After this first anniversary, the question becomes ’what are the conditions of democratic governance at the one-year mark?‘


If we measure democracy in terms of elections, many commentators have noted that the rapid move to elections guaranteed the already well-organized Muslim Brotherhood an advantage at the early, formative stage of the transition to an electoral system. And the election results announced this past Sunday show why. The young activists whose organizing overthrew Mubarak gained only 7 seats in the People’s Assembly, while a new tech mogul billionaire’s party won over 7% and long-established Islamist and liberal parties won the rest of the seats.

Decolonizing Democracy

The Egyptian Democratic Academy in Cairo is one of the local organizations that made the Jasmine Revolution possible, educating Egyptians about alternatives to dictatorships and military rule under Mubarak. A recent story in The Nation describes one of the teachers at the Academy, a 25-year-old woman, Esraa Nouh, whose father was imprisoned under Mubarak for many years. Nouh believes in liberalism and John Stuart Mill, and teaches the history of liberalism beginning with the Greek origins (more on them in a moment) and John Locke, drawing a thread connecting that history to recent Egyptian political trends.

The irony is that J.S. Mill’s views on politics and economics were dominant in Britain and other countries at the height of the colonization of Egypt. In fact, John Locke was as strongly supportive of slavery as the Egyptian pharaohs were, which makes him even less of a pretender to democracy than Mubarak was. Locke’s profits from his investments in English slave trade ships led him to support private property as a central right in democratic representational governance.