This paper traces the development of the primary official statistical institutions in Egypt between 1952 and the present. While an emerging literature on the political dimensions of statistical knowledge emphasizes the changing place of expertise, diffusion of statistical norms, and rise of Foucauldian governmentality, I argue instead that attention to the organizational context of statistical policy in Egypt reveals the pivotal role that statebuilding struggles related to inter-state conflict and regime consolidation have played in shaping the Egyptian statistical sector. Legacies of these historical struggles inform the scope and extent of the authority of the central statistical agency CAPMAS and are, I argue, still shaping the debate over statistical reform today. I chart successive shifts in Egypt’s political-economic orientation and accompanying reorganizations of the official statistical agencies and policies. In the 1950s and 1960s, each phase in the fitful rise of macroeconomic planning and the ascendancy of the public sector brought new waves of institutional and policy innovation in statistics, culminating in the 1964 founding of the national statistical agency CAPMAS, which enjoys an exclusive mandate over statistics in the country. However the trajectory of the statistical agency diverged from that of the rest of the planning apparatus; while the latter’s power quickly waned the dynamics of statistical reform brought the former closer to the ruling power center in the military. Whereas the Nasserist period featured successive reforms of a single central agency, economic re-orientation and neoliberalism under Sadat and Mubarak were marked by institutional proliferation in official statistics, i.e., the data needs of market-oriented economic policies were addressed by creating new parallel statistical agencies as much as by reforming CAPMAS’s sweeping authority. While these new agencies drew upon the same discourses of statistical expertise as CAPMAS, they ultimately came to contest the latter’s monopoly, which has been -- and remains -- the key question concerning statistical reform in Egypt. A concluding look at the post-2011 statistical sector argues that this period has seen a strengthening of CAPMAS vis-à-vis its main bureaucratic rivals. On a theoretical level, this account suggests that a focus on struggles over statebuilding, and their bureaucratic legacies, can capture the historical development and contemporary dynamics of reform in official statistics more readily than approaches emphasizing competing forms of expertise or diffusion of technocratic norms. Sources include interviews with Egyptian officials and experts, official publications, policy documents, and media archives, in Arabic and other languages.

Opposition parties in authoritarian regimes are often criticized for coming to resemble the undemocratic regimes they oppose. In the context of the Middle East, this critique usually highlights parties' lack of clear programs and reliance on prominent personalities and family connections to attract support. Scholars of Middle East politics, drawing on Weberian critiques of patrimonialism, have attributed opposition party weakness and failure in part to these personalist forms of organization (Fahmy 2002, Stacher 2004, Lust 2009). Yet while reliance on familial organization can produce specific organizational pathologies, its effects are not exclusively detrimental. This paper draws on the experience of two Middle Eastern opposition parties, Egypt's Wafd and Morocco's Istiqlal, to argue that familial organization is not only a liability, but also a key source of resilience for opposition parties struggling to survive in hostile authoritarian environments. Through a “parallel demonstration of theory” (Skocpol and Somers 1980) based on archival research, ethnographic observation, and interviews with party members, I argue that familial modes of organization support opposition parties in three major ways. First, patrimonial ties enable forms of political promise-making that do not depend on electoral victory. While these parties will not win executive power and thus cannot credibly commit to implement specific policies, they can rely on family connections to evoke their past accomplishments and promise a certain mode of being, if not doing, to potential supporters. Second, actual and metaphorical family ties work to impede fragmentation, which is widely recognized as a major threat to opposition party survival (Schedler 2002). Finally, familial organization facilitates the recruitment of new generations of party members, who are interpellated into formal politics without losing their youthful sensibilities. As youth turn away from institutional politics across the region (Bayat 2010), patrimonial opposition parties remain able to recruit young members. These young members, in turn, have been responsible for substantively important shifts in party policy, including the Wafd's participation in Egypt's 2011 uprising and Istiqlal's withdrawal from the Moroccan cabinet in 2012. Accounting for party survival and behavior requires that we attend not only to the weaknesses of patrimonial organization, but to its strengths as well.

How did emigration feature into the workings of the Egyptian state’s foreign policy under Gamal Abdel Nasser? More than forty years after Nasser’s death, the logistics behind Egypt’s pre-1967 migration policy have not been the subject of extensive research. Most studies on Egyptian population movements tend to skim the Nasserite period, on which little official data exist, and which is overshadowed by the later migration en masse to the oil-rich states. Only hints of the strategic value that Egypt attached to professionals’ temporary migration through its secondment program (niẓām al-i‘āra li-l-khārij) exist in research ranging from broad overviews on Egypt’s Nasserite era, to works published on the history of Arab states’ development, and from studies on Middle Eastern migration movements to international organisations’ policy reports. Yet, little of substance is known about seconded Egyptians’ actions abroad save from vague references to either ‘Egypt’s pioneering emigrants [who] first offered their skills to the nascent development of neighbouring Arab countries’ (Latowsky, 1984) or, more critically, to their role in ‘the revolutionary, Arab nationalist tide which inundated the Gulf and Arabian peninsula region in the 1950s’ (Naqib, 1990). In fact, by failing to examine this form of migration in depth and to properly contextualise it within Nasser’s political agenda, such studies underestimate the extent to which the policy of secondment constituted a key component of Egypt’s foreign policy. This paper argues that the Egyptian state allowed, and encouraged, seconded professionals’ political activism in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the Gulf throughout the 1952-1967 period as the sole notable exception to an overall restrictive state emigration policy. It relies on two sources of data: first, it employs content analysis of the coverage of migration-related issues in the three main Egyptian newspapers (al-Ahram, al-Akhbar, al-Jumhuriya) in order to accurately trace the evolution of Egypt’s emigration policy under Nasser. Second, it analyses newly-declassified material from the British Foreign Office archives and unpublished reports from the Egyptian Ministry of Education in order to provide a detailed reconstruction of migrants’ political activism and regional migration’s importance for Egyptian foreign policy. By presenting a cache of archival material in analytical context, it offers concrete evidence of how migration buttressed Nasser’s regional ambitions at the chagrin of the British and the reticence of other Arab leaders, neither of whom were able to successfully counteract this unique foreign policy instrument.

In the wake of the Egyptian Nationality Law of 1926, the Alexandria Police Department increased its expulsion of non-Egyptian ‘undesirables’ involved in the commercial sex industry. In 1930, the growing frequency of expulsions led to the establishment of a separate foreign criminal branch of the Alexandria Police Department, and the category of ‘undesirables’ was expanded to include those who had a history of drug use. According to French consular records from Alexandria, the majority of these ‘undesirables’ were migrant workers, yet at least some protested their expulsion on the basis that they had been born and raised in Alexandria and knew nothing about the alleged homeland to which they were being expelled. These expulsions speak not only to the transnational character of Alexandria’s working class at this time, but also to the transnational conceptions of criminality which were fundamental to the regulation of subaltern mobility and the establishment of a global nation-state system. As the spread of middle-class modernity produced new understandings of the criminal rooted in gender and sexual deviance, illegal vice became the face of a new interwar criminality that grasped the attention of both Egyptian middle-class nationalists and the League of Nations. Although historians often trace the Egyptianization of Alexandria to the nationalization policies of Gamal Abdel Nasser, consular records documenting the expulsion of ‘undesirables’ in the interwar period suggests that the Egyptianization of Alexandria began decades before the Nasser period through nationalist control of subaltern bodies rather than elite property. Policing gender and sexual performances in Alexandria became integral to the nationalist project of constructing and policing territorial borders. At the same time, the transnational conceptions of criminality that gave rise to these policies challenges the juxtaposition of the national and the global, highlighting the way in which the nationalization of working-class bodies through the imposition of anti-vice measures was central to both the Egyptian nationalist project as well as the making of an international political order.

As Minister of Public Instruction between January 1950 and January 1952, the well-known Egyptian intellectual and educator Taha Hussein (1889-1973) tried to create Egyptian cultural institutes in French-controlled North Africa. Despite his insistence on the purely cultural motives of his project, Taha Hussein came to a head-on collision with the French authorities that opposed any official Egyptian presence in North Africa. After lengthy negotiations and broken French promises, Taha Hussein, in an unprecedented move against the traditional Franco-Egyptian friendship, retaliated by stopping the important French archaeological excavations in Egypt and imposing restrictions on cultural exchanges with France. On the surface, pitching his project as “only cultural” seems to agree with Taha Hussein’s published ideas about the “universality of culture” and the many debates that continue to surround these ideas. Egyptian Marxist writers in the fifties and sixties lamented how his literature was not “committed” to society and its needs (Al-ʻĀlim and Anīs 1955). Postcolonial thinkers have criticized Taha Hussein for his uncritical appreciation of European culture and more importantly for separating culture from the complex web of unequal power relations that shaped his time (Tageldin 2011). Moreover, many North African intellectuals, especially in Algeria, resented that he was not vocal enough against France during Algeria’s war of independence (Karrū 2001). Through a close examination of the details of his dispute with the French over North Africa, however, I will argue that a very political Taha Hussein emerges. Using primary sources from the Egyptian National Archives (Dar al-Wathaiq), the Archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (AMAE) as well as Taha Hussein’s private papers, I will show in this short presentation that for Taha Hussein the promotion of the “cultural” over the “political” was a supremely political strategy. Such a strategy ensured that the French government studied and responded to his project in a very serious way. Furthermore, by putting forward such a project, Taha Hussein forced both the Egyptian and French governments to articulate their cultural policies in the region. The details of this dispute will allow me to tell the story of Egypt’s rising regional cultural influence before the 1952 revolution. By shifting the focus from what Taha Hussein wrote to what he and his bureaucrats did, an important continuity with Nasser’s pan-Arabism emerges. By making this argument I aim to question the presumed rupture between “liberal” and “socialist” Egypt.