Reimagining Revolution | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation

As genocide continues in Gaza, war expands across the region, and states move to crush dissent across the West, one question cuts through it all: how do movements emerge, endure, and win?
Join us as we mark 15 years since the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and Arab Spring with a conversation on the young people who ignited it — and what their struggle can teach us now.
Drawing on Rusha Latif's Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution, based on her firsthand research during الثورة المصرية (the 2011 Egyptian revolution), we return to a moment when ordinary people seized the world’s attention and reshaped our sense of what was possible.
What allowed this "leaderless" movement to take shape under authoritarian rule? What sustained it — and what led to its unraveling? And what does that history offer those confronting empire, militarism, and state violence today?

This conversation asks not only what happened in 2011, but what it can teach us about building movements that endure, forging solidarities across borders, and cultivating the kind of political imagination this moment demands.

ABOUT TAHRIR’S YOUTH: LEADERS OF A LEADERLESS REVOLUTION
A gripping, in-depth account of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, through the eyes of its youthful vanguard
January 25, 2011, was a watershed moment for Egypt and a transformative experience for the young men and women who changed the course of their nation’s history. Tahrir’s Youth tells the story of the organized youth behind the mass uprising that brought about the spectacular collapse of the Mubarak regime. Who were these activists? What did they want? How did the movement they unleashed shape them as it unfolded, and why did it ultimately fall short of its goals?
Rusha Latif follows the trajectory of the movement from the perspective of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition (RYC), a key front forged in Tahrir Square during the early days of the revolt. Drawing on firsthand testimonies and her own direct experience, she offers insight into the motives, hopes, strategies, successes, failures, and disillusionments of the movement’s leaders. Her account details the challenges these activists faced as they attempted to steer the movement they had set in motion and highlights the factors leading to their struggle’s defeat, despite its initial promise.

Tahrir’s Youth questions the belief that Egypt’s revolution was spontaneous and leaderless. Timely and necessary, this study not only illuminates the uprising’s leadership dynamics but also demonstrates the need for imagining new modes of revolutionary organizing for the twenty-first century.

Rusha Latif is joining us on the Busboys stage alongside journalist Sana Saeed. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Latif will be signing following the program.

This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of TAHRIR’S YOUTH will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person.

We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books

Rusha Latif is an Egyptian-American researcher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on social movements and revolutions, particularly in the Middle East, with an emphasis on leadership, organization, and collective action across lines of class, gender, religion, and ideology. Her book, Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution (AUC Press, 2022), draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo during the 2011 uprising to examine activist agency in the absence of formal leadership. Her research has been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, and Jadaliyya.

Sana Saeed is a former correspondent and senior producer for AJ+. She is the host of Backspace, a media critique series that looks at how news stories are told, the historical roots of contemporary narratives and considers what a different approach to those stories could look like. Sana holds an MA in Islamic Studies, with a focus on historiography and 20th century Middle East political history from McGill. Her focus is on the intersection of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. news media. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, LA Times, NBCU, Salon, Quartz, and The Guardian.

BOOK DETAILS

Tahrir's Youth

Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution

By Rusha Latif

June 28, 2022 | Hardcover, 356 pages, $35.00

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