Download or read book Voting Patterns in Post Mubarak Egypt written by Jeffrey Martini and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2013-03-22 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a means of helping U.S. policymakers and Middle East watchers better understand voting patterns in Egypt since the 2011 revolution, RAND researchers identified regional voting trends, where Islamist parties run strongest, and where non-Islamists are most competitive. Egypt appears headed toward a much more competitive political environment in which Islamists will be increasingly challenged to maintain their electoral edge.

Download or read book Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak s Egypt written by Lisa Blaydes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-22 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its authoritarian political structure, Egypt's government has held competitive, multi-party parliamentary elections for more than 30 years. This book argues that, rather than undermining the durability of the Mubarak regime, competitive parliamentary elections ease important forms of distributional conflict, particularly conflict over access to spoils. In a comprehensive examination of the distributive consequences of authoritarian elections in Egypt, Lisa Blaydes examines the triadic relationship between Egypt's ruling regime, the rent-seeking elite that supports the regime, and the ordinary citizens who participate in these elections. She describes why parliamentary candidates finance campaigns to win seats in a legislature that lacks policymaking power, as well as why citizens engage in the costly act of voting in such a context.

Download or read book Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak s Egypt written by Lisa Blaydes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its authoritarian political structure, Egypt's government has held competitive, multi-party parliamentary elections for more than 30 years. This book argues that, rather than undermining the durability of the Mubarak regime, competitive parliamentary elections ease important forms of distributional conflict, particularly conflict over access to spoils. In a comprehensive examination of the distributive consequences of authoritarian elections in Egypt, Lisa Blaydes examines the triadic relationship between Egypt's ruling regime, the rent-seeking elite that supports the regime, and the ordinary citizens who participate in these elections. She describes why parliamentary candidates finance campaigns to win seats in a legislature that lacks policymaking power, as well as why citizens engage in the costly act of voting in such a context.

Download or read book Freedom of Expression in Islam written by Muhammad Khalid Masud and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Muslim countries, apostasy and blasphemy laws are defended on the grounds that they are based on Islamic Shari'a and intended to protect religion. But blasphemy and apostasy laws can be used both to suppress thought and debate and to harass religious minorities, both inside and outside Islam. This book – comprising contributions from Muslim scholars, experts and activists - critically and constructively engages with the theological, historical and legal reasoning behind the most restrictive state laws around the world to open up new ways of thinking. The book focuses on the struggle within Muslim societies in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia where blasphemy and apostasy laws serve powerful groups to silence dissent and stifle critical thought. The first part of the book covers the development of the law in shifting historical circumstances and surveys the interpretations of Qur'anic verses that seem to affirm freedom of religion. The second part examines the present politics and practices of prosecuting alleged blasphemers and/or apostates in Muslim countries. The third part looks to the future and where reforms of the law could be possible. Debates on Islam and freedom of expression are often cast in polarizing terms of rights versus religion, East versus West. This volume avoids such approaches by bringing together a diverse group of Muslim scholars and activists with the knowledge, commitment and courage to contest repressive interpretations of religion and provide a resource for reclaiming the human rights to freedom of expression and belief.

Download or read book Youth Activism in Egypt written by Ahmed Tohamy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Ahmed Tohamy analyses the often-neglected trajectory that led up to the protests in Egypt that culminated in the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. Tohamy's assertion is that by examining the decade preceding this momentous event, we see that the youth movement far from being inert was extremely active. Tohamy uses the Social Movements Theory to argue how Egyptian youth became a new agent of change in the Middle East. By positioning the youth activists as dynamically engaging with their social and political contexts within a framework of opportunities and constraints, his analysis strikes at the heart of the debates concerning the nature and substance of revolution and its effects on state and society."

Download or read book Pacted Democracy in the Middle East written by Hicham Alaoui and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a new theory for how democracy can materialize in the Middle East, and the broader Muslim world. It shows that one pathway to democratization lays not in resolving important, but often irreconcilable, debates about the role of religion in politics. Rather, it requires that Islamists and their secular opponents focus on the concerns of pragmatic survival—that is, compromise through pacting, rather than battling through difficult philosophical issues about faith. This is the only book-length treatment of this topic, and one that aims to redefine the boundaries of an urgent problem that continues to haunt struggles for democracy in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Download or read book Legacies of Repression in Egypt and Tunisia written by Alanna C. Torres-Van Antwerp and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-10 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When an authoritarian regime collapses, what determines whether an opposition group will form a political party, be successful in mobilizing voters, and survive or dissolve as a group in subsequent years? Based on unique field research, this examines how legacies of authoritarian rule shaped the outcome of Egypt's 2011 founding elections.

Download or read book The Buried written by Peter Hessler and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist "Extraordinary...Sensitive and perceptive, Mr. Hessler is a superb literary archaeologist, one who handles what he sees with a bit of wonder that he gets to watch the history of this grand city unfold, one day at a time.” —Wall Street Journal From the acclaimed author of River Town and Oracle Bones, an intimate excavation of life in one of the world's oldest civilizations at a time of convulsive change Drawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos. In the midst of the revolution, Hessler often traveled to digs at Amarna and Abydos, where locals live beside the tombs of kings and courtiers, a landscape that they call simply al-Madfuna: "the Buried." He and his wife set out to master Arabic, striking up a friendship with their instructor, a cynical political sophisticate. They also befriended Peter's translator, a gay man struggling to find happiness in Egypt's homophobic culture. A different kind of friendship was formed with the neighborhood garbage collector, an illiterate but highly perceptive man named Sayyid, whose access to the trash of Cairo would be its own kind of archaeological excavation. Hessler also met a family of Chinese small-business owners in the lingerie trade; their view of the country proved a bracing counterpoint to the West's conventional wisdom. Through the lives of these and other ordinary people in a time of tragedy and heartache, and through connections between contemporary Egypt and its ancient past, Hessler creates an astonishing portrait of a country and its people. What emerges is a book of uncompromising intelligence and humanity--the story of a land in which a weak state has collapsed but its underlying society remains in many ways painfully the same. A worthy successor to works like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, The Buried bids fair to be recognized as one of the great books of our time.

Download or read book Authoritarian and Populist Influences in the New Media written by Sai Felicia Krishna-Hensel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The media is often viewed as a primary gauge which reflects the changing political landscape as societies transition from authoritarian regimes to democracies. Chronicling the process through media analysis provides deeper insights into the relationship between technology, the state, and social forces that are reflected in the public’s communications. This volume explores the challenges and political conditions that have shaped the media in several representative studies of the media in the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. The contributors analyse the legacy of the past on the development of the media in post-authoritarian regimes and explore the relationships between media, communication industries (public relations), and politics. The use of new communications technologies to manipulate the media and the public introduce a novel use of social media by populists as well as authoritarian regimes and their proxies. This book presents a comparative and global investigation of the role of the media in the realignment from established policies to an emerging milieu of new channels of communication that challenge traditional media practices.

Download or read book Schooling the Nation written by Hania Sobhy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses first-hand accounts from Egyptian schools to show how governance, legitimation and belonging were shaped before and after the 2011 uprising.

Download or read book Bread and Freedom written by Mona El-Ghobashy and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multivocal account of why Egypt's defeated revolution remains a watershed in the country's political history. Bread and Freedom offers a new account of Egypt's 2011 revolutionary mobilization, based on a documentary record hidden in plain sight—party manifestos, military communiqués, open letters, constitutional contentions, protest slogans, parliamentary debates, and court decisions. A rich trove of political arguments, the sources reveal a range of actors vying over the fundamental question in politics: who holds ultimate political authority. The revolution's tangled events engaged competing claims to sovereignty made by insurgent forces and entrenched interests alike, a vital contest that was terminated by the 2013 military coup and its aftermath. Now a decade after the 2011 Arab uprisings, Mona El-Ghobashy rethinks how we study revolutions, looking past causes and consequences to train our sights on the collisions of revolutionary politics. She moves beyond the simple judgments that once celebrated Egypt's revolution as an awe-inspiring irruption of people power or now label it a tragic failure. Revisiting the revolutionary interregnum of 2011–2013, Bread and Freedom takes seriously the political conflicts that developed after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, an eventful thirty months when it was impossible to rule Egypt without the Egyptians.

Download or read book Islamic Law and Human Rights written by Moataz El Fegiery and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the development of the Muslim Brotherhood’s thinking on Islamic law and human rights, and argues that the Muslim Brotherhood has exacerbated, rather than solved, tensions between the two in Egypt. The organisation and its scholars have drawn on hard-line juristic opinions and reinvented certain concepts from Islamic traditions in ways that limit the scope of various human rights, and advocate for Islamic alternatives to international human rights. The Muslim Brotherhood’s practices in opposition and in power have been consistent with its literature. As an opposition party, it embraced human rights language in its struggle against an authoritarian regime, but advocated for broad restrictions on certain rights. However, its recent and short-lived experience in power provides evidence of its inclination to reinforce restrictions on religious freedom, freedom of expression and association, and the rights of religious minorities, and to reverse previous reforms related to women’s rights. The book concludes that the peaceful management of political and religious diversity in society cannot be realised under the Muslim Brotherhood’s model of a Shari‘a state. The study advocates for the drastic reformation of traditional Islamic law and state impartiality towards religion, as an alternative to the development of a Shari‘a state or exclusionary secularism. This transformation is, however, contingent upon significant long-term political and socio-cultural change, and it is clear that successfully expanding human rights protection in Egypt requires not the exclusion of Islamists, but their transformation. Islamists still have a large constituency and they are not the only actors who are ambivalent about human rights. Meanwhile, Islamic law also appears to continue to influence Egypt’s law. The book explores the prospects for certain constitutional and institutional measures to facilitate an evolutionary interpretation of Islamic law, provide a baseline of human rights and gradually integrate international human rights into Egyptian law.

Download or read book Adaptable Autocrats written by Joshua Stacher and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The decades-long resilience of Middle Eastern regimes meant that few anticipated the 2011 Arab Spring. But from the seemingly rapid leadership turnovers in Tunisia and Egypt to the protracted stalemates in Yemen and Syria, there remains a common outcome: ongoing control of the ruling regimes. While some analysts and media outlets rush to look for democratic breakthroughs, autocratic continuity—not wide-ranging political change—remains the hallmark of the region's upheaval. Contrasting Egypt and Syria, Joshua Stacher examines how executive power is structured in each country to show how these preexisting power configurations shaped the uprisings and, in turn, the outcomes. Presidential power in Egypt was centralized. Even as Mubarak was forced to relinquish the presidency, military generals from the regime were charged with leading the transition. The course of the Syrian uprising reveals a key difference: the decentralized character of Syrian politics. Only time will tell if Asad will survive in office, but for now, the regime continues to unify around him. While debates about election timetables, new laws, and the constitution have come about in Egypt, bloody street confrontations continue to define Syrian politics—the differences in authoritarian rule could not be more stark. Political structures, elite alliances, state institutions, and governing practices are seldom swept away entirely—even following successful revolutions—so it is vital to examine the various contexts for regime survival. Elections, protests, and political struggles will continue to define the region in the upcoming years. Examining the lead-up to the Egyptian and Syrian uprisings helps us unlock the complexity behind the protests and transitions. Without this understanding, we lack a roadmap to make sense of the Middle East's most important political moment in decades.

Download or read book Media Revolution and Politics in Egypt written by Abdalla F. Hassan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For too long Egypt's system of government was beholden to the interests of the elite in power, aided by the massive apparatus of the security state. Breaking point came on 25 January 2011. But several years after popular revolt enthralled a global audience, the struggle for democracy and basic freedoms are far from being won. Media, Revolution, and Politics in Egypt: The Story of an Uprising examines the political and media dynamic in pre-and post-revolution Egypt and what it could mean for the country's democratic transition. We follow events through the period leading up to the 2011 revolution, eighteen days of uprising, military rule, an elected president's year in office, and his ouster by the military. Activism has expanded freedoms of expression only to see those spaces contract with the resurrection of the police state. And with sharpening political divisions, the facts have become amorphous as ideological trends cling to their own narratives of truth.

Download or read book Egypt beyond Tahrir Square written by Bessma Momani and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First-person accounts by scholars and journalists of the Arab Spring and the revolution that ended Mubarak’s presidency. On January 25, 2011, the world’s eyes were on Egypt’s Tahrir Square as millions of people poured into the city center to call for the resignation of president Hosni Mubarak. Since then, few scholars or journalists have been given the opportunity to reflect on the nationwide moment of transformation and the hope that was embodied by the Egyptian Revolution. In this important and necessary volume, leading Egyptian academics and writers share their eyewitness experiences. They examine how events unfolded in relation to key social groups and institutions such as the military, police, labor, intellectuals, Coptic Christians, and the media; share the mood of the nation; assess what happened when three recent regimes of Egyptian rule came to an end; and account for the dramatic rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood. The contributors’ deep engagement with politics and society in their country is evident and sets this volume apart from most of what has been published in English about the Arab Spring. The diversity of views brought together here is a testament to the contradictions and complexities of historical and political changes that affect Egypt and beyond.

Download or read book The Arab World Upended written by David Ottaway and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the autocratic regimes in the seemingly unassailable police states of Tunisia and Egypt suddenly collapsed in 2011, the Islamic parties that took over quickly succumbed in turn to further massive uprisings, this time by disaffected secularists and, in the case of Egypt, with the support of the army. What explains this? And why do the current regimes in both countries remain so fragile? Addressing these questions, drawing on years of first-hand, in-depth research, David Ottaway explores the causes of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the reasons for their radically differing outcomes, and the likely trajectory of the two countries¿ political development. David B. Ottaway, after receiving a Ph.D. in public law and government from Columbia University, worked as a foreign correspondent and then an investigative reporter in Washington D.C. for 35 years. At present, he is a Middle East Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Download or read book Elections and Democratization in the Middle East written by M. Hamad and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-02-20 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Top scholars of the Middle East set out the history and future of elections in eight Middle East countries. Examining issues associated with elections, the transition of governance, and the ways in which technology shapes popular participation in politics and elections, they discuss the future of governance and democratic transition in the region.