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2014, Middle East Research and Information Project
Sisi may have won Egypt's presidential election, but the socio-economic and political system he and the Armed Forces preside over cannot be fixed by the continuation of old policies which the Army's rule heralds.
2018
Unprecedented levels of state violence against the Muslim Brotherhood and its widespread acceptance by Egyptians following the July 2013 military coup have been under-examined by scholars of both critical security studies and Middle East politics, reflecting implicit assumptions that state violence is unexceptional beyond Europe. This article explores how the deployment of such levels of violence was enabled by a securitization process in which the Egyptian military successfully appropriated popular opposition to Muslim Brotherhood rule, constructing the group as an existential threat to Egypt and justifying special measures against it. The article builds on existing critiques of the Eurocentrism of securitization theory, alongside the writings of Antonio Gramsci, to further refine its application to non-democratic contexts. In addition to revealing the exceptionalism of state violence against the Muslim Brotherhood and highlighting the important role of nominally non-state actors i...
This paper positions itself in an area of study at a crossroad of different disciplines, like democratization processes, state building, Islamic parties in a democratic setting and their relationship with power, Muslim Brothers’ political engagement, rentier states (or semi- rentier as Egypt) and democracy, economic power of the army, external intervention in the Middle East region. This paper touches most of these aspects and how they played out in Egypt between 2011 and 2013. It focuses on the mistakes that happened in the Egyptian process and it does it with a strongly simplified structure.
Security Dialogue
Unprecedented levels of state violence against the Muslim Brotherhood, and the widespread acceptance of this violence by Egyptians following the July 2013 military coup, have been under-examined by scholars of both critical security studies and Middle East politics, reflecting implicit assumptions that state violence is unexceptional beyond Europe. This article explores how the deployment of such levels of violence was enabled by a securitization process in which the Egyptian military successfully appropriated popular opposition to Muslim Brotherhood rule, constructing the group as an existential threat to Egypt and justifying special measures against it. The article builds on existing critiques of the Eurocentrism of securitization theory, alongside the writings of Antonio Gramsci, to further refine its application to non-democratic contexts. In addition to revealing the exceptionalism of state violence against the Muslim Brotherhood and highlighting the important role of nominally...
International Studies Quarterly
Research on the military's removal from politics overemphasizes the attitudes and interests of officers. Civilians are portrayed as incapable of confronting refractory men with guns. This essay compares regime transitions in Egypt (2011–2013) and Tunisia (2011–2014) to show that unified civilian elites strengthen and polarized elites undermine civilian control of the armed forces. Research for the cases is based on interviews with Egyptian and Tunisian businesspersons, party members, and civil society activists; the International Consortium of Investigation Journalists's tax-offshoring database; loan disbursements from the IMF and World Bank; and secondary sources in Arabic, French, and English. The cases reveal novel insights about the military's removal from politics in fledgling democracies. Pleasing Egypt's officers did not shield President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood from a coup in July 2013 because Morsi and the Brotherhood threatened the wealth and...
This essay considers the role that Copts played in the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the way in which the political changes of the time affected Coptic interest repre sentation in the Egyptian state. Copts, the indigenous Christians of Egypt, were eager participants in the protests that brought down former president Hosni Mubarak. However, their enthusiasm for a new era was dampened by the inability of lay Coptic movements to challenge the status quo in a way favorable to Coptic interests. Dissent against the management of security under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (scaf) led Copts toward cautious optimism when Muhammad Morsi was elected president in 2012. However, the transition to democracy in Egypt as laid out by the Islamist government ultimately squandered the goodwill of Egyptian Christians and contributed to their disillusionment with the democratic idea. The result has been the further polarization of Egyptian society in ways which have deepened cleavages between Christians and the Islamist movement and rendered more ambiguous the role of the church and lay movements in representing Coptic interests.
Üsküdar Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2021
It has been a general assumption that leaders have played a vital role in the making of Egypt's foreign policy. This article tries to detail this assumption and illustrates that individual formulation and implementation of foreign policies following the Free Officers' coup d'etat of 1952 and the Egyptian revolution of 2011 cannot be sufficiently clarified in the absence of domestic level explanations. What is found in this study is that various domestic factors paved the way for Nasser to increase his effectiveness on Egypt's foreign policy, whereas they created a compelling environment for Morsi in which he had a lesser influence on its foreign policy during his short tenure.
Journal of North African Studies, 2018
Following the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, analyses of political change in Egypt have primarily focused on domestic processes and paid relatively less attention to the influence of changes in the country’s foreign policy. The circular character of the recent Egyptian political transformation process enables strategic shifts to be observed and the scope of foreign policy change – and continuity – to be assessed. This article addresses the evolution and the adaptive moves made by Egyptian foreign policy towards the Arab region between 2011 and 2016, paying special attention to the relations between post-Mubarak Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have traditionally maintained a mutual interest bilateral relationship in which Egypt’s economic dependence and shared security concerns – the stability of the Gulf and Middle East countries, the containment of Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah – have led them to act pragmatically and overcome disagreements. In keeping with a framework of foreign policy analysis that distinguishes between foreign policy determinants, decision-making and behaviour, the article will first examine how the domestic political transformations witnessed since 2011 have affected Egypt’s foreign policy. A more in-depth case study will then focus on the sub-regional level of analysis with the specific aim of explaining the strengthening of relations between Egypt and Saudi Arabia from 2014 to 2016.
Rome, IAI, July 2021, 19 p. (IAI Papers ; 21|29), ISBN 978-88-9368-205-3, 2021
Ten years since the downfall of Hosni Mubarak, the protest movement which animated Tahrir Square has failed to create an alternative path towards democracy despite the great wave of mobilisation that engaged the country. The eruption of the revolution on 25 January 2011 did not happen overnight, but was the result of ten years of contentious politics taken on by two different souls: the social soul, represented by mobilisation of the workers of state-owned companies; and the political one, composed of political activists and youth movements alongside women’s defence groups and human rights defenders. Even with the great surge of activism, manifested through strikes, sit-ins and street protests, in the aftermath of the revolution these two souls rarely met. This, along with the lack of an organic political organisation, gave space to the more organised forces – the Muslim Brotherhood – and to the counterrevolutionary bloc led by the army.
IAEME PUBLICATION, 2018
A term invented by American news journal Foreign Policy, the ‘Arab Spring’ is used to refer to the wave of political uprisings that had started in Tunisia in 2010 and has since swept across the Arab World posing a strong resistance towards the existing authoritarian and kleptocratic regimes. The levels of success of the upheavals differ from place to place. The Egyptian equivalent, also known as the Egyptian Revolution was triggered by the death of Khaled Saeed and further endorsed by social media campaigning led by Wael Ghoneim. As an immediate result of the protests in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak, who was in office since 1981, was deposed in 2011, thereby ending the 31-year-old State of Emergency leading to suspension of the Constitution, parliamentary dissolution and subsequent democratic elections. This paper seeks to explore and analyse the directions taken by Egypt during this so-called post-Arab Spring reconstruction period dotted with perpetual mass insurgency. Contrary to the anticipation of democracy and civil freedoms as a result of Mubarak’s resignation, Egypt has been caught up in further economic ebbs and repressive measures. Being the largest Arab state and Israel’s neighbour and Camp David partner, Egypt is pivotal for the region’s future. The overthrow of Mohammed Morsi and the subsequent electoral victory of Abdel Fatah el-Sisi after the constitutional referendum in 2014 proved to be a turning point for the Sinai insurgencies and ultimately in the question of regional stability and liberalization, something largely unheard of since the Suez Crisis. Through analysis of present state of affairs in Egypt, this paper seeks to establish a progress report of the Arab Spring in the region and infer as to what the future looks like for the hundreds and thousands that had valiantly occupied Tahrir Square to voice a collective opinion in favour of democracy.
Uluslararası İlişkiler Çalışmaları Dergisi, 2021
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Election Law Journal, 2017
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Guardians or Oppressors
Contemporary Politics, 2020
Revista de Investigações Constitucionais
Middle East Law and Governance 10, 341-374, 2018
Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2021
Egypt Beyond Tahrir Square, Bessma Momani and Eid Mohamed, eds., 2016
Penn State Law Review, 2016
Global Discourse, 2017
History and Anthropology, 2016
Connecticut International Law Review, 2015