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Egypt’s 2011 Revolution. A Demographic Structural Analysis
Highlighting the events of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, various mass-media have tried to explain what caused the riots. Most explanations followed the same pattern, blaming economic stagnation, poverty, inequality, corruption and unemployment. A typical explanation is that “Egyptians have the same complaints that drove Tunisians onto the streets: surging food prices, poverty, unemployment and authoritarian rule that smothers public protests quickly and often brutally” (e.g., Al-Arabiya, 2011; Al-Lawati, 2011; Stangler & Litan, 2011). Such unanimity incites us to investigate to what extent those accusations reflected Egyptian reality. So we decided to take each of the abovementioned “revolutionary causes” and look into the actual dynamics of the relevant socioeconomic indicators in the years preceding the Egyptian Revolution.