Student movements: Malaya as outlier in Southeast Asia

Extract

For the past three decades, student movements in most countries in the world have been beaten back, but there are signs that some may be returning. In response to the Arab Spring, students participated fully in Tahrir Square and beyond. The student elections in Egypt that followed, however, seem to have been divided according to the various links that each student group had with the political groups contending for state power, like the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists on the one side, against secular and revolutionary groups on the other. It is not certain if the student elections really reflected the overall mood of the country or whether they were simply shaped by political protagonists outside the campuses.