It has been six years since Egypt's post-revolutionary democratic experiment was brought to an abrupt and preemptive end by a counterrevolutionary coup that brought to power the military leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The counterrevolution resurrected authoritarianism in its most brutal and pernicious form, with the Sisi regime consolidating its rule through a combination of jingoistic nationalism, harsh repression of dissent, and crony capitalism.
This panel provides a fresh appraisal of the factors and dynamics that contributed to Egypt's 2013 counterrevolution. Though some aspects of this episode have been studied through diligent reporting and careful scholarly research, there are still a number of important questions that remain unanswered. What role did international actors play in facilitating the coup? How can we make sense of the failures of Mohamed Morsi's government? What role did popular support play in creating the conditions for counterrevolution? And what have the effects of the counterrevolution been on Egyptians' attitudes towards democracy and revolution? These are some of the questions that this panel will take on.
The first paper examines how international actors contributed to undermining democratic rule and legitimizing the new counterrevolutionary regime. It compares the actions of the United States, the European Union, the African Union, and the Gulf Cooperation Council before and after the 2013 coup, and calls into question the degree to which international "linkage and leverage" (Levitsky and Way 2010) actually promotes democratization. The second paper conducts a focused examination of Egypt's transition period from February 2011 to July 2013 based on over 100 interviews with activists, politicians, and diplomats. It argues that Egypt's generals were not enthusiastic counterrevolutionaries, but rather were "pulled" into staging a counterrevolution by disaffected revolutionaries and ambivalent foreign powers. The third paper considers the evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood, placing the yearlong period of direct Brotherhood governance into a broader historical context. The paper argues that the tensions and contradictions in the Brotherhood's performance can best be understood by examination of its three faces: a movement, a party, and an ideology. The final paper studies the effects of the counterrevolution, arguing that it has contributed to a profound sense of depression and disillusionment among those who once fought for revolutionary change. Through a series of survey experiments it finds that triggering memories of the 2013 coup makes Egyptians less likely to support democracy, to trust their government, and to consider joining a protest.
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Killian Clarke
July 3, 2013 marked the end of Egypt’s post-revolutionary democratic transition. Following three days of massive nationwide protests calling for the resignation of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, the Minister of Defense, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, ousted the government in a military coup restoring the system of military rule that Egyptians had cast off during the 2011 revolution.
What are the factors that conspired to bring this counterrevolution about? Contrary to some of the early accounts of this period, I propose that the counterrevolution in Egypt was not preordained either by the strength and ambition of its military or by the weakness of its civil society. I propose instead that the counterrevolution was a contingent outcome brought about by the intersection of three dynamics: 1) the hesitation and caution of Egypt’s military generals, 2) the fracturing of the revolutionary coalition into two competing camps, and 3) the ambivalence of foreign allies towards the democratic project. Egypt’s generals were scarred by their experience ruling the country directly in 2011, and had little appetite to return to power once they handed it off to civilians in 2012. Instead, the military was “pulled” into action by the secular wing of the revolutionary coalition, who turned against the Morsi government after the November 2012 constitutional declaration. Despite a number of rapprochement initiatives, several of which nearly succeeded, these secular parties and movements decided ultimately that they were better off calling on the military to remove Morsi than trying to resist him through the formal political process. Their support removed a major risk factor that had been holding Egypt’s generals back: the risk of popular backlash and a “re-running” of the 2011 revolution. Finally, though major foreign powers officially expressed support for Morsi’s government, these states, particularly the United States, were actually deeply ambivalent about the prospects of democracy in Egypt. Several members of the Obama administration quietly communicated that a coup was unlikely to be punished with a decisive diplomatic response, removing a second major risk factor that had been giving Egypt’s generals caution.
The analysis is based on over one hundred interviews with Egyptian activists and politicians, as well as foreign diplomats, conducted between June 2016 and February 2019. The findings have important implications for our understanding of counterrevolution and democratic consolidation, pointing to the centrality of coercive, coalitional, and diplomatic factors in shaping these outcomes.
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Dalia Fahmy
In the decade before the Arab Spring, political and structural conditions led to internal and external evolution of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood found itself a social movement, a political party, and an ideology. These three faces caused several tensions in the 2005 parliamentary elections, the conduct of the Brotherhood parliamentary bloc between 2005-2010, their involvement in the revolution, the subsequent election of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi, and their subsequent fall from power. In this paper, I will trace the three faces of the Brotherhood during these important moments of transition, the tensions that arise, and finally end with a discussion of how the Brotherhood can reconstitute itself in the face of increased repression and exclusion and what the means for the socio-political role of political Islam.
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Dr. Amy Austin Holmes
Building upon the literature on domestic sources of autocracy, scholars have begun to analyze the international dimensions of authoritarianism. This paper intends to make a contribution to that growing literature by comparing the response of the European Union (EU), African Union (AU), United States (US), and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to the 2013 coup and subsequent counterrevolution in Egypt. Inversing and expanding the framework developed by Levitsky and Way, who argue that the extent to which international actors can promote democratization depends on the extent of linkage and leverage that the West has vis-à-vis autocratic regimes, I compare the degree of linkage and leverage of the EU, AU, US, and GCC vis-à-vis Egypt from 2013 until 2018. Rather than asking to what extent these four actors promote democratization, I assess their reaction to the coup and counterrevolution that undermined the democratic interlude after the fall of Mubarak in 2011. The United States arguably had more leverage over Egypt than the other international actors, as Egypt is the second biggest recipient of US military aid in the world. However, after Morsi was ousted, American officials were willing to circumvent their own laws on foreign aid provision, which would have required a suspension of military aid after a coup d’etat, in order to continue supporting the post-coup government, instead opting to only place a temporary hold on certain arms shipments. EU countries continued arms shipments as well. By contrast, the African Union upheld its laws that require member states to be expelled after a coup d’etat. Finally, I analyze financial flows from the GCC, in particular Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to the Central Bank in Egypt which began just days after Morsi was ousted on July 3. By comparing the responses of multiple international actors to the coup and counterrevolution in Egypt, I endeavor to offer a multi-dimensional analysis of the external forces that led to the undermining of Egypt’s first democratically-elected government. Furthermore, my findings challenge the assumption that it is primarily Western countries that have the ability to promote democratization through linkage and leverage.
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Michael Hoffman
On February 11, 2011, Hosni Mubarak resigned after nearly 30 years in office and 18 days of mounting protest. Sadly, Egypt’s democratic experiment proved to be short lived and by the third anniversary of the revolution, authoritarian retrenchment was well underway. While this turn of events has proven tumultuous for the country’s economic and national security, those who have experienced the political fallout of this chaos most acutely are those who were most engaged in changing Egypt’s political system – namely, the revolutionaries of 2011. We are interested in how the disappointment of those who were initially galvanized by the 2011 revolution affects their subsequent political behavior, in line with literature on how depression and related mental-health issues might demobilize political actors. Similarly, we are interested in how the emboldening of regime supporters with the counter-revolution of July 2013 might similarly spur these individuals to political action. We test these hypotheses through a nationally representative survey of Egyptian citizens conducted in November 2018. The survey included an embedded experiment, which asked one third of respondents to remember the 2011 uprising and to report their level of disappointment with subsequent events. Another third of respondents were asked to remember the 2013 coup and to report their level of disappointment with subsequent events, while a third were asked no questions as a control comparison. Preliminary results suggest that those asked to remember the 2013 coup report significantly less support for democratic values, trust in government institutions, and the likelihood of protest behavior, such as attending a meeting, signing a petition, or participating in a protest. Preliminary analysis also suggests that those who were more disappointed by both the events of 2011 and 2013 are most affected by our primes. Our findings contribute to a small but growing literature on the important question of how mass political behavior contributes to or detracts from the consolidation of democratic transitions.
