There was a time when Kellogg Institute Visiting Fellow Nermin Allam didn’t think she wanted to study Egypt, since it was already home. But thoughts of looking elsewhere changed the day political protest took hold in Tahrir Square in 2011.
“We were receiving the calls,,” said Allam, who says the memories of that time – returning to class, watching the uprising from afar, the sense of what might have been as Egyptian history unfolded and the hopes for what might yet be – are still bittersweet.
Allam, an associate professor of political science at Rutgers University, turned to studying gender politics and social movements in the Middle East and North Africa. “For a long time, I've been strategically focused on Egypt,” said Allam, author of Women and the Egyptian Revolution: Engagement and Activism during the 2011 Arab Uprisings (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She’s quick to note that when women first engaged in protest, they framed their participation as citizens of Egypt and not with women’s issues as a primary goal.
The women joined in a unified effort to remove longtime president Hosni Mubarak. Evolving beyond this priority, though, were new concerns about women’s autonomy, bodily rights, the right to act and speak out about the sexual harassment and violence that occurred in the wake of the uprisings and in its aftermath. Beginning in 2014, Egypt has enacted new measures against sexual violence.
For Allam, it’s important to understand the changes in the lives of protesters after the rallies and sit-ins.
“Something changes forever,” she explains. Typically, women who participate in movements, regardless of the movement’s success or failure, are less likely to remain traditional in their approaches to family, marriage, and children. “They’re more likely to stay politically active and hold egalitarian views,” Allam says. “However, only a small body of literature has examined how gender mediates these consequences.”
With Kellogg support, Allam is assessing how these changes are expressed over time. “The Afterlife of Women’s Participation in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising” is the focus of her new book project that revisits the lives of individual women who participated in the protests. Concurrently, she’s pursuing similar study as a nonresident fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Middle East Program.
“Among the changes I focus on are their personal lives and their professional lives,” Allam said. “Are there changes in their jobs, in their relationships? Did they leave? Why?” People describe exiting corporate life for opportunities with women’s organizations, or moving from smaller towns and communities to live in the city when their families disapproved of their choices. They’ve left lovers behind as views on gender norms evolved.
“There have been changes that protesters could, at least in part, trace to their participation,” said Allam. “Their political views, their gender attitudes, their ideas. I look at these changes.” These shifts in gender norms and opportunities also are at the center of Allam’s February 2025 paper on young Saudi Arabian women who, after policies changed to permit studying abroad without a male guardian, encountered new ways of seeing gender.
The Kellogg environment “pushes you to clarify your argument and analysis,” she says, and to explore research techniques you might not traditionally use, or to consider the questions asked by a diverse cohort from Uganda, Bangladesh, and beyond.
Lupe Ramírez, Kellogg’s Senior Program Manager of Visiting Fellowships and Graduate Student Affairs, adds that Allam’s work broadens Kellogg’s institutional reach into research on the Middle East and North Africa. “It’s important in terms of understanding democracy within the landscape of the region,” she said.
The lessons learned from Egypt and its as-yet unfulfilled transformation to democracy serve as background to how Allam understands an inflection point in other countries and governments and the recent cascading policy changes in the United States.
“For someone who was born and raised under different shades of autocracy, the sense is that you achieve democracy and then it’s over and you’re good,” Allam said. “But you realize that democracy is something you need to keep protecting and keep revisiting.
“It's a process that you need to keep protecting and if you don't, things can crumble really, really fast.”