Understanding the Praetorian Rule of Fatah al-Sisi in Egypt

Gamal Abdel Nasser established the praetorian regime in 1952. Nasser ruled Egypt with the ‘party-state’ system to maintain the ‘social contract’ between the state and the Egyptians. The government thrived on the patrimonial relationship and de-politicization of the population. The ‘Egyptian upheaval’ in 2011 sought the protection of individuals’ rights, equality, and freedom against the military-led praetorian regime. A short-democratic experiment led to the arrival of Islamist majority rule in Egypt under the leadership of President Mohammed Morsi. The liberal-secular oppositions and the military removed President Morsi because Islamists failed to achieve the protesters’ aspirations. Egyptians supported the military’s rule that led to the election of General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi as President of Egypt. Fatah al-Sisi shifted the dynamics of government from ‘party-state’ to ‘ruler-arbiter’ praetorian rule that centralized the authority and power under his leadership through military domination to counter the Islamists and revolutionary aspirations. The research explains the causality behind the Egyptian military's intervention in politics, structuring of the praetorian regime in Egypt; the return of military praetorianism after the removal of President Hosni Mubarak; the rise of the Sisi as ‘ruler-arbiter’ and its implications on the democratization process. The paper’s method is explanatory to study the ‘structural’ (military) and ‘agential’ (Sisi’s rule) factors to determine the causes of establishing the praetorian ‘ruler-arbiter’ type Sisi’s regime. The approach to examine the ruler-arbiter phenomenon is the ‘actor-centric’ instead of the ‘mechanistic’ to understand the praetorian rule in Egypt. The research finds that the rise of the ‘ruler-arbiter’ regime under the leadership of the Sisi, caused by the military-established praetorian authority and President Sisi's choices and decisions, led to the failure of the democratization in Egypt.

How China's Response to the Suez Canal Crisis Helped Shape Sino-Egyptian Relations

Gamal Abdel Nasser used his strong response to the 1956 Suez Canal crisis to elevate his political position within Egypt. However, Nasser and Egypt did not respond to European and Israeli aggression alone. World-wide political pressure caused the Suez Canal Crisis to serve as a turning point where French and British global dominance were surpassed by that of the United States and the Soviet Union. However, China also played a substantial role in aiding Egypt. In a recognition of Egypt’s analogical circumstances of ideological struggle versus imperial powers and out of a desire to establish stronger relations in the area, China used their state response to build stronger connections with both Nasser and Egypt. As a result of the Chinese response to the Suez Canal Crisis, the foundations were laid for more positive Chinese-Egyptian relations for the next several decades.

Inji Efflatoun: White Light

The Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun (1924-1989) is widely recognized as a major avant-garde figure in Egyptian modernist history as well as a feminist activist who petitioned for women’s suffrage, amendments to family law, and for worker’s rights. Perhaps most famously, she was among the first cohort of women to be arrested as a political prisoner; she served a four-year sentence under President Gamal Abdel Nasser for her work with the Egyptian Communist Party (1959-1963). Most scholarship on Efflatoun has followed the artist’s autobiographical narrative in treating the artist’s dual activities – political action and artistic practice – as essentially opposed. This essay proposes an adjustment to this frame, arguing instead for recognizing the artist’s theoretically-informed response to gendered somatophobia (fear of the body) as a central aspect of both commitments. The essay examines the darkness of Efflatoun’s early surrealist paintings as a pairing with the «white light» of her 1970s paintings, thereby revealing the artist’s ongoing inquiry into possibilities for kinship based on copresence rather than appearance.

The Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Potential for Violent Escalation

This chapter revisits the early history of the Muslim Brotherhood to understand why an organization that started out as a nonviolent religious movement came to be associated with violence. Many blame this on the harsh repression under President Gamal Abdel Nasser. However, the analysis shows that the drift toward violence started much earlier. Reconstructing the sequence of events between 1936 and 1948, the chapter reveals that what initially politicized the Brotherhood was the presence of British troops in Egypt and Palestine. The formation of an armed wing led to competition over authority within the group, which incentivized violent escalation. The chapter then focuses on the period between 1954 and 1970 and shows that repression had a dual effect. On the one hand, it inspired new jihadi interpretations, which were particularly appealing to younger members. On the other hand, the prisons were also the backdrop against which the Brotherhood became convinced that violence was futile.

Johnson, Congress, and the Special Relationship

Using research from the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, FRUS, and the Congressional Record, the first chapter explores U.S.-Israel relations during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. In 1967, provocative moves made by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and an Israeli first strike plunged the region into war. Legislators took to the House and Senate floors to proclaim the essence of the special relationship—an unwavering American commitment to ensure Israel’s survival. In the aftermath of the war, the Johnson administration decided to abandon existing U.S. policy regarding territorial integrity in the Middle East and support Israeli occupation of Arab lands in order to pressure Arab states to finally recognize Israel and make peace with it. The Johnson administration, like the administrations before it, could not solve the riddle of Arab-Israeli conflict and regarded the war as an opportunity to pursue a different path. The decisions to not push Israel out of the territories and to increase weapons sales to Israel were both justified by the American commitment to Israel’s survival.

The Arab League has No Bark and No Bite

Along with a moment of peace in the middle of the 20th century came large changes in the world order; namely the rise of newly independent nations and the formation of supranational organisations. The Middle East was the first region to establish an intergovernmental security network after 1945 when the Arab League was created. While the institution has had several opportunities to prove itself capable of uniting and pacifying a region often described to be “without regionalism,” it has rather served as a tool in the toolbox of Arab nationalist leaders like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser to solidify their political legitimacy and maintain a strict policy of non-interference. The League’s failure to provide a place for mediation and resolution of regional conflicts further undermines its effectiveness. The Arab Spring that swept across the region beginning in 2009 brought optimistic projections for the League’s capacity to deal with the conflict, particularly following the League’s suspension of Syria following brutal repression of demonstrations in 2010. Is the failure of the League a product poor design at its offset or could it provide a hopeful forecast for increased regional cooperation and peacebuilding in the Middle East? Without bark and without bite, the latter will be difficult to achieve.

The Decolonising Camera: Street Photography and the Bandung Myth

ABSTRACT This article examines the visual archive of the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia. Better known as the Bandung Conference or simply Bandung, this diplomatic meeting hosted 29 delegations from countries in Africa and Asia to address questions of sovereignty and development facing the emergent postcolonial world. A number of well-known leaders attended, including Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Zhou Enlai of China, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Sukarno of the host country, Indonesia. Given its importance, the meeting was documented extensively by photojournalists. The argument of this article is that the visual archive that resulted has contributed to the enduring symbolism and mythology of Bandung as a moment of Third World solidarity. More specifically, the street photography style of many images - with leaders walking down the streets of Bandung surrounded by adoring crowds - depicted an informality and intimacy that conveyed an accessible, anti-hierarchical view of the leaders who were present. These qualities of conviviality and optimism can also be seen in images of conference dinners, airport arrivals, delegate speeches, and working groups. Drawing upon the critical work of scholars of southern Africa and Southeast Asia, this article summarily positions the concept of the 'decolonising camera' to describe both the act of documenting political decolonisation as well as the ways in which visual archives produced during decolonisation can contribute to new iconographies of the political, which are both factual and mythic at once.