March/April 2016 Friday Protests

* Alexandria University protest 24/04/16 Photo credit*

Introduction

The months of March and April have seen many protests in response to various events. The protests that seemed to attract alot of media attention were the ones that occured on the 15th of April. These protests came in response to Egypt transfering two Islands to Saudia Arabia. Were the protests on this day really significant? Or was it simply a matter of media exaggeragion? How do the protests on Friday the 15th of April compared to thse previous few weeks? This report documents the protests of March and April in order to provide a deeper insight regarding these questions.

Protest Counts

There were many fluctuations in the 8 Fridays of March and April. On average there were around 75 protests every Friday. These protests were spread across 16 governorates. The peak day for protests came on April the 15th with 92 protests occuring on this day. The previous week saw the lowest amount of protests (62 protests). The standard deviation for the 8 weeks was just over 11, which means that there flunctuations of approximately 10 protests around the mean value (75).

Distribution By Governates

You might expect that most of the protests would have occured in Cairo. They did not. Most of the protests occured in Sharqia, totalling at 104 protests. Cairo came in 4th place with respect to the number of protests. Giza (which is considered 'greater Cairo') came in second place.

A cummulative plot of the 8 weeks of protests shows a relatively steady change across the weeks. An interesting note is that on the 15th of April, the number Cairo protests seems to increase more compared to the other governorates. This suggests that the increase in the number of protests on the 15th of April is contributed mainly by an extra amount of protests in Cairo.

Distribution by Event Types

Slogans

There are many opinions within the Anticoup camp. Perhaps the following chart summarizes these various opinions.

Photo Credit: OpEgypt

In order to categorize the protests according to the chart above we used the following indicators:

1. Protests that raised Rabaa signs or Rabaa posters
2. Protests that raised posters or images of Mohamed Morsi
3. Other protests

Note that the three categories above are not mutually exclusive, i.e. we can have protests that belong to both category (1) and (2). In that chart bellow, we categorized each protest that occured on April the 15th according to the labels above. Note that this type of categorization is quite shallow and the results following from it may not represent a true indication of realilty. Be careful while drawing conclusions from the chart bellow.

Conclusion

This report gives us an insight about details. While many media outlets focus on specific protests, normally ones that occur near the city, this report offers a more broad view of all the anticoup protests that occured over the past 2 months and their nature. The conclusions from this analysis is left to the reader.

Data Sources