(iPoster) Engineered Publics: Ultras, Law, and the Stadium as a Juridical Arena in Egypt

• In Event: Poster Sessions: African Politics Conference Group & Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Politics

Abstract

This paper analyzes Egypt’s post-2011 sports sphere as a site where law, security governance, and socio-technical governance infrastructures rework football crowds into “engineered publics” and compress the horizons of collective political change. It conceptualizes the stadium as a juridical access regime: a bounded institutional space in which entry, assembly, and expression are governed through interlocking legal and administrative instruments. Substantively, the paper traces how fan-ID schemes, ID-linked ticketing databases, venue rules (including restrictions on megaphones, choreography, and banners), and routinized surveillance reclassify collective claims as compliance problems—treating chants, displays, and crowd coordination less as political speech than as administrative infractions.
The central argument is that these venue-specific techniques do not remain confined to sport. By converting exceptional controls into ordinary management and fragmenting Ultras’ capacity for coordinated presence, the stadium becomes a practical laboratory for broader authoritarian projects that regulate visibility and association through rules, data, and procedural enforcement rather than episodic coercion alone. Empirically, the paper draws on legal–regulatory coding, venue rules, and match-level event data to specify how the governance of the stands produces a legible, selectively permitted public, and how similar access logics travel to other civic arenas.
Framed within “Democracy Under Threat,” the paper treats the erosion of democratic life not only as institutional backsliding but also as a re-engineering of publics: a shift in how participation is organized, who can appear, and what forms of collective action remain intelligible as politics.

Mohamed Elgohari,
Adjunct Professor, George Mason University
[email protected]

Author

• Unregistered Participant