You Have Not Yet Been Defeated roundtable
Date: Thursday 24 October 2024, 4-5.30pm
Location: University of Leeds, Baines Wing SR 2.10
This roundtable conversation with Sanaa Seif and Nicola Pratt will address Alaa Abd El-Fattah's book of essays You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, his essayistic and political activism more generally and Sanaa’s campaign for Alaa's release.
Alaa is a prominent British-Egyptian activist and one of the leading voices of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. During the 2011 revolution, Alaa criticised the army’s abuses against the protesters and was imprisoned for “inciting violence against the army”. Since then, he has spent most of his time in prison, arrested for alleged violations of national security. He went on hunger strike from April 2022 to November 2022, during COP 27 in protest against the conditions of his imprisonment.
Alaa’s prison sentence ended on the 29th September this year, but the regime refused to release him and so he remains illegally imprisoned and the struggle for his release continues.
His book You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a collection of his writings, from essays to tweets to reflections scrawled in pencil and smuggled out of prison, translated and edited by an anonymous collective of supporters. They cover the time of the 2011 Revolution and its aftermath. Anyone reading the book will be able to tell Alaa is an incredibly creative and versatile thinker. In his essays, he adopts a plurality of genres, metaphors and mediums to convey his urgent messages about the challenges of democracy-building, resistance and solidarity in a repressive, dictatorial regime.
Just a couple of weeks back, Alaa has been named this year’s PEN writer of courage. Arundhati Roy decided to share her prize with Abd el-Fattah “for the same reason that Egyptian authorities have chosen to keep him in prison for two more years instead of releasing him last month. Because his voice is as beautiful as it is dangerous. Because his understanding of what we are facing today is as sharp as a dagger’s edge.”
The roundtable will feature readings from El-Fattah’s essays, discussions of his key ideas and reflections on the promises/failures of the campaign for his release. Thematically, the roundtable will focus on El-Fattah’s metaphor of monstrosity, which outlines how activists can reanimate their political commitment in the wake of defeat and draw resilience and hope from past losses and wounds.
It is our hope the roundtable will promote Alaa’s book and raise awareness about the significance of Sanaa’s and Alaa's activism.
This roundtable is co-hosted with the Centre for Democratic Politics.
Sanaa Seif is Alaa’s sister, herself a prominent activist, writer and filmmaker involved in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. She was an editor and shooter on the film The Square, which details the events of the Egyptian revolution from 2011 to 2013 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary feature. Since her involvement in the Revolution, Seif has been very active in several protest movements and human rights campaigns, including the campaign for Alaa’s release. She was also arrested and imprisoned twice for her activism. Many see her as a symbol of resistance and the revolutionary spirit.
Nicola Pratt is a Professor of International Politics of the Middle East. She has written extensively on women's activism, democratization, human rights and conflict in a number of Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt. Between 2016 and 2020, she led a research project on 'Politics and Popular Culture in Egypt: Contested Narratives of the 25 January 2011 Uprising and its Aftermath, resulting in the curation of a digital archive of the 2011 Revolution.