Nadine Abdalla is a Cairo-based political scientist. She obtained her PhD in Political Science from Sciences-Po Grenoble (France) with the highest French grade “Très Honorable avec Felicitations du Jury” and her MA in International Relations from Sciences-Po Paris. Her PhD dissertation focused on social mobilizations in Egypt and the challenge they have presented to the political regime prior to the 25th of January 2011 uprising. She has participated in a number of international conferences and has worked with several Egyptian and European think tanks and research centers such as the Arab Forum for Alternative Studies (AFA) and Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies (ACPSS), both in Cairo, the German Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin and the Center for Studies and Research about the Arab World and the Mediterranean (CERMAM) in Geneva.

Her research interests include social movements, labor and youth movements, social and political change in Egypt. Her policy papers and academic articles on youth/labor movements in particular and on the Egyptian transformation in general were published by many European think tanks and research centers such as The European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed) in Barcelona, the Arab Reform Initiative (ARI) in Paris, The Middle East Institute (MEI) in Washington, the SWP in Berlin, as well as Egyptian research centers such as the AFA and the ACPSS in Cairo. Abdalla also writes a weekly column for the Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm and has several articles published in other newspapers.

The Labor Movement in the Political Transformation/Transition Process: An Analysis of its Impact in Egypt in Comparison to Brazil

As a EUME Fellow, she will deepen her work on social and labor mobilization and their impact on the political transformation that Egypt is undergoing. She will rely on the framework of analysis established by Samuel Valenzuela (1989) which confirms that both aspects (the reaction of labor to the overall political change, and the latter’s effects on it) are intimately connected to the degree that the first cannot be fully understood without analyzing the latter.

Hence, she will emphasize four sources of variation or four explanatory variables to the way the Egyptian labor responds to, and is affected by this political change: (1) The strength or weakness of the labor movement, and the economic context of the transition. (2) The effects of the authoritarian regime’s treatment of labor prior to the period of change. (3) The unity or fragmentation, the centralization or decentralization of the labor movement. (4) The relationship between the labor movement and the elites guiding the process of political transformation.

In this project, she will use the Brazilian case as a "Shadow Case". Therefore, for her analysis of each of the variables mentioned above, she will refer to the Brazilian case in order to have a better understanding of the dynamics governing the Egyptian case. The Brazilian experience will thus serve as an input that offers empirically grounded inspirations, working hypotheses and potential scenarios for future trajectories of transformation processes.