Description
This paper studies HarassMap (a Cairo-based anti-street harassment NGO) in order to understand the role such groups play in authoritarian neoliberalism. It responds to work in IR that critiques such groups for securitizing street harassment, shaping racialized and classed targets for state intervention, and privileging middle class consumers and neoliberal rationalities (Amar 2011; Grove 2015). Such work does not appropriately contextualize these anti-street harassment groups’ tactics and how they have been reshaped over time in response to various constraints. This paper draws on several years of interviews to examine how HarassMap’s approach has changed in the period surrounding the 25 January revolution. During this unique time, HarassMap was involved in campaigns that avoided securitizing street harassment, targeting mainstream ideas and gendered conduct on the street to provoke societal change. This paper goes on to study how, over the years that followed, HarassMap modified its approach based on the strategies available to them as non-state actors, functioning in negotiation with state and global forces in the context of an increasingly authoritarian regime. I argue that, despite representing a less securitized response to street harassment, HarassMap’s non-state governance tactics have been complicit in authoritarian neoliberalism, creating their own forms of exclusion by shaping and privileging good neoliberal subjects and businesses. Tracing this NGO’s changing tactics reveals how we cannot understand authoritarian neoliberalism without examining how it is being negotiated and reproduced on the ground.
