An Arabia without Sultans? Reflections from Bahrain

The fences snake for miles, often with no discernable entrances. Sometimes they are ornate brick constructions, with large blazing lamps every metre or so. Often they’re just anonymous metal sheeting or chain-links anchored by metal posts. Every year the fences advance, claiming more land. Sometimes you can see over or through the fence: a street with a tarmacked road. Last year the fence was on the other side of the street, the road accessible to locals. Now the fence has moved with no reasons given and no public notice made. Now nobody can use the tarmacked road

Purging to transform the post-colonial state: evidence from the 1952 Egyptian Revolution

The post-WWII era saw junior military officers launch revolutionary coups in a number of post-colonial states. How did these events transform colonial-era state elites? We theorize that the inexperienced leaders of revolutionary coups had to choose between purging threats and delivering ambitious projects of state-led transformation, leading to a threat-competence calculation that patterned elite turnover. To illustrate our argument, we trace the careers of 674 high-ranking officials in Egypt following the Free Officers’ seizure of power in July 1952. A multilevel survival analysis shows that officials connected to Egypt’s deposed monarch and very senior officials were most vulnerable to being purged. Experienced bureaucrats and those with university education were more likely to be retained. This threat-competence calculation also informed which ministries experienced more purging. Qualitative triangulation with biographies, memoirs, newspaper reports, and speeches corroborates the mechanism. The findings show why radical state-led change often requires a degree of elite-level continuity

Burnings, beatings, and bombings:Disaggregating anti-Christian violence in Egypt, 2013-2018

What are the determinants of ethnic violence? Existing research has forwarded a range of often competing explanations, from political opportunism to economic competition to state incapacity. We argue that this diversity of accounts is attributable, in part, to scholars' tendency to lump together distinct forms of ethnic violence that have different underlying determinants. We propose that scholars instead disaggregate ethnic violence and put forward a typology based on the target of the attack (properties vs. individuals) and whether assailants use arms. We demonstrate the utility of this typology by applying it to an original dataset of ethnic attacks against Christians in Egypt from 2013 to 2018. In addition to a set of shared factors, we find that unarmed attacks against property (burnings) are the product of political mobilization, unarmed attacks against individuals (beatings) are related to socioeconomic tensions, and armed attacks (bombings) follow the strategic logic of terrorist violence.</p

Contentious politics and the 25th January Egyptian revolution

The three articles that make up this thesis consider the diverse forms of contentious politics and mass mobilization that emerged during the 25th January Egyptian Revolution in 2011 and its aftermath. The first article, discussing the eighteen days of anti-Mubarak protest, pays special attention to the position of the Egyptian army in and around Midan al-Tahrir, and recounts how protestors sought to co-opt and neutralize the threat posed by regime forces. It finds that fraternizing protestors developed a repertoire of contention that made situational, emotional claims on the loyalty of regime troops. The second article explores the role of elections and protests during the failed democratic transition away from authoritarian rule that began on 11 February with Mubarak’s resignation and ended on 3 July 2013 with a military coup. Highlighting the Muslim Brothers’ demobilization and privileging of procedural democracy following Mubarak’s ousting, it offers an alternative account of where and when Egypt’s democratic project went wrong. The final article considers opposition to the 3 July coup and in particular the effects of state repression on the daily street protests launched by the Muslim Brothers and their allies in the post-coup period. Far from being defeated, anti-coup contention, it is suggested, has instead been contained in ways that have made protest less visible and less disruptive over time. Taken as a whole, the thesis suggests new ways to understand and explain the 25th January Revolution, its trajectories and legacies

Anti-austerity riots in late developing states: evidence from the 1977 Egyptian Bread Intifada

In late developing states, labor markets are often segmented as a result of import substitution and political coalitions centered on the formally employed. Building on insider-outsider and moral economy frameworks from political economy, we theorize that in such contexts labor market insiders develop strong expectations about welfare provision and public transfers that make them more likely to riot against proposed austerity measures. We test our argument with the case of Egypt during the 1977 Bread Intifada, when the announcement of subsidy cuts sparked rioting across the country. To conduct our analysis, we match an original event catalog compiled from Arabic-language sources with disaggregated employment data. Spatial models, rich micro-level data, and the sudden and short-lived nature of the rioting, help us to disentangle the importance of an area’s labor force from its location and wider socioeconomic context. As we show, despite the diffuse impact of the subsidy cuts, rioting was especially concentrated in areas with labor market insiders – and this is after accounting for a range of plausible alternative explanations. The results suggest that moral economies arising from labor market segmentation can powerfully structure violent opposition to austerity

Explaining recruitment to extremism:A Bayesian hierarchical case-control approach

Who joins extremist movements? Answering this question is beset by methodological challenges as survey techniques are infeasible and selective samples pro- vide no counterfactual. Recruits can be assigned to contextual units, but this is vulnerable to problems of ecological inference. In this article, we elaborate a technique that combines survey and ecological approaches. The Bayesian hierarchical case-control design that we propose allows us to identify individual-level and contextual factors patterning the incidence of recruitment to extremism, while accounting for spatial autocorrelation, rare events, and contamination. We empirically validate our approach by matching a sample of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters from nine MENA countries with representative population surveys enumerated shortly before recruits joined the movement. High status individuals in their early twenties with university education were more likely to join ISIS. There is more mixed evidence for relative deprivation. The accompanying extremeR package provides functionality for applied researchers to implement our approach

The Muslim Brothers take to the streets

On August 14, 2013, supporters of deposed President Muhammad Mursi were massacred at two protest camps in Cairo and Giza. In the subsequent four months, the Muslim Brothers have regrouped to launch a wave of popular protest the likes of which has not been seen in Egypt since the January 25 revolution. Under the banner of the National Alliance to Support Legitimacy, the Brothers have mounted over 1,800 actions in 26 of Egypt’s 27 governorates to call for Mursi’s restoration to office and justice for his dead supporters. These protests have continued in spite of an ongoing crackdown that has claimed the lives of hundreds more and seen thousands of Brothers and pro-Mursi supporters detained

Fraud in the 2018 Egyptian presidential election?

This research note scrutinizes official vote counts from the 2018 Egyptian presidential election. Drawing on data for 13,807 polling stations published by the Egyptian Electoral Authority, it uses the Election Forensics Toolkit to estimate a series of digit and distribution tests. The results point to statistical anomalies in voter turnout for polling stations located in Egypt’s major population centres. The findings align with journalistic accounts of very low turnout in those areas and demonstrate how tools from electoral forensics can be applied to the study of elections in the Middle East and North Africa