Egyptian imaginaries of resistance: Cinematic remembrance of the Suez crisis

Current politics in Egypt has revived the idea of a strong connection between the army, the Egyptian people and its leaders. This imaginary was introduced by Egyptian cinema about the time of the 1952 revolution. In the early days of national independence, the Suez crisis of 1956 in particular holds the symbols and images needed to create the set of semantics supporting this imaginary. Based on theories on national and postcolonial imaginaries, I analyse two Egyptian films on the Suez crisis: Port Said from 1957 and Maliqat al-Bihar (Giants of the Sea) from 1960 including shorter references to other films from the period. By examining the postcolonial semantics of these films, I identify three elements that together retell the Egyptian nation. First, the Suez crisis is pictured as eliminating the colonial enemies due to the actions of strong leaders. Second, a pan-Arab alliance is installed. Third, enemies from within are disconnected from the true Egyptian assessed by loyalty to the nation. The result is a strong imaginary of the correlation between the army, people and in particular its leaders.

Public invocations of international law and legacies of the Iraq War

This essay reads three texts: Charlotte Peevers’s The Politics of Justifying Force: the Suez Crisis, the Iraq War and International Law, the 2016 Report of the UK Iraq Inquiry, and Ayça Çubukçu’s For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal On Iraq. It explores what each of the texts tells us about the role of international law as a public language and suggests how we might think of the texts as creating one legacy of the Iraq War.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 and 1957 in West German Television News

From the mid-1950s onwards, the number of television viewers in West Germany increased rapidly and television became the “window to the world” for many people. Through audio-visual reporting the people were informed so that they could feel save as they know what had happened in the world, especially in times of the Cold War. The Suez Crisis of 1956/1957 was one of the Cold War conflicts that television was able to report on continuously and thus demonstrate its advantages. The Suez Crisis has to be considered not only in the context of the larger, geopolitical conflict between East and West, but also in a decolonization context, and it affected the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in several ways. The daily newscast Tagesschau, and the weekly compilation Wochenspiegel was able to convey images from a distant region with high actuality. In the beginning, Tagesschau used material from the cinema newsreel and followed its style, but the news editors very soon developed their own strategies of modern reporting. This article outlines the style of West German television news in the 1950s as well as the routines and ways of reporting, which continue in news production today.

“The Battle for Abu Simbel”: Archaeology and Postcolonial Diplomacy in the UNESCO Campaign for Nubia

This essay examines the role and agency of British archaeologists in the discussions surrounding Egypt’s construction of the Aswan High Dam beginning in the late 1950s. The dam was conceived as a grand engineering project that would create new farmland and make Egypt self-sufficient in terms of its energy needs, but flooding caused by the dam threatened to destroy numerous archaeological sites along the Nile River on the border of Egypt and Sudan. With the blessing of the Egyptian and Sudanese governments, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched a complex rescue operation in 1960 with the goal of surveying the affected sites, in some cases removing entire structures to safe locations. Despite Britain’s initial reluctance—four years after the Suez crisis—to participate in a program that would benefit an avowedly hostile regime, British scientific expertise and private fundraising soon came to play an important role in UNESCO’s ‘Campaign for Nubia’. Using diplomatic papers and the records of various scientific bodies, I will argue that British participation in the UNESCO archaeological program was a crucial avenue for Anglo-Egyptian rapprochement during the 1960s and 1970s.

To Disclose or Deceive? Sharing Secret Information between Aligned States

Why do aligned states sometimes disclose secret information about their miitary plans to use force, whereas other times they choose to deceive their partners? The state initiating these plans may choose among four information-sharing strategies: collusion, compartmentalization, concealment, and lying. Three main considerations shape its decision: the state's assessment of whether it needs its partner's capabilities to succeed at the military mission, the state's perception of whether the partner will be willing to support the state in the requested role, and the state's anticipated deception costs for not fully informing its partner state. Several cases illustrate how these strategies are chosen: Israel, Britain, and France's decision to use force against Egypt during the Suez Crisis (collusion between France and Israel, and concealment vis-à-vis the United States); Israel's 2007 bombing of Syria's al Kibar reactor (compartmentalization); and Israel's deliberations whether to attack Iran's nuclear reactor (lying). These strategies have implications for intra-alliance restraint and contribute to understanding deception and secrecy between allies.