Shouting in a Cage

This is the book on co-optation that we never knew we needed. Fenner's book does something that only the very best books in the social sciences do: it takes a concept that readers think they already understand and forces them to rethink what it means, why it occurs, and how it works. This book offers a new way to understand why political parties become co-opted and how they survive it. -- Adria K. Lawrence, author of Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-Colonial Protest in the French Empire
The officially recognized opposition parties of the Arab world's authoritarian regimes are often viewed as mere handmaidens to dictatorship. In this remarkable study, based on years of rich archival and ethnographic research in Egypt and Morocco, Sofia Fenner offers an alternative and wholly convincing perspective, describing how the rigors of life under dictatorship force once-independent political parties to invest in survival at the expense of trying to garner mass support. Though this renders them unable to claim a share of power, it endows them with a capacity for resilience and even ferocity that speaks to their independent origins and their future potential. This is the work of a gifted scholar that is necessary reading for all scholars of authoritarian regimes, democratization, and political parties. -- Tarek Masoud, Harvard University
Historically rich and intellectually compelling, Shouting in a Cage challenges conventional thinking about opposition co-optation and reconceptualizes it as practice and process while elegantly centering narrative as a central political force. -- Sarah E. Parkinson, author of Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon
Co-optation is one of political science's strangest concepts-always invoked yet seldom examined. Sofia Fenner meticulously gives form to this amorphous idea with a creative pairing of neutralized parties in Egypt and Morocco. This is an illuminating analysis of the terrible options facing political parties under authoritarianism. -- Mona El-Ghobashy, author of Bread and Freedom: Egypt's Revolutionary Situation