Pomeps Conversations

Catherine Herrold talks about her latest book, Delta Democracy: Pathways to Incremental Civic Revolution in Egypt and Beyond, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book uncovers the strategies that Egyptian NGOs have used to advance the aims of the country’s 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. “What the book argues is that, in fact, many development NGOs and local grant making foundations did promote democracy. But they did so in ways that went unrecognized by the Western democracy promotion establishment and, far more importantly, by successive ruling regimes in Egypt. And they did so, number one, by masking their democracy promotion work...And number two, instead of focusing on the procedural form of democracy, they sought to build substantive democracy through participation, free expression, and rights claiming at grassroots levels,” explains Herrold. She goes on to say, “these development NGO and foundations really focused on the grassroots and they created spaces for collective action for discussion, f