A Struggle over Space: Human Rights NGOs in Egypt and their Battle against the State.

Abstract

This thesis seeks to explore the changes in state-society relations in Egypt since the ’18 days of revolution’ in 2011, specifically why and how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the human rights arena have been restricted in their operational space since the ousting of President Mubarak.

Trying to come to an integrated approach that could help analyze the events in Egypt, the framework of Van der Borgh and Terwindt (forthcoming) was used as a lens for researching operational space of NGOs. Three factors were consequently researched: the national, political context; the pressures NGOs receive from state and societal actors and the strategies NGOs themselves adopt to combat these restrictions.

This case study indicates several patterns in the behaviour of both the state and the human rights NGOs in Egypt, which helps explain why recently the human rights arena was severely restricted in a struggle over foreign funding.