The regime of Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi exhibits a deeper form of authoritarianism than the Mubarak regime. It has engaged in more extensive and brutal repression and has adopted legal changes that further restrict civil and political rights. This paper develops a causal argument for why these changes occurred by utilizing Sheena Greitens’ theoretical framework, which emphasizes the importance of analyzing the dominant threat to the founding autocrat when he first assumes power. The paper examines the formation of the Nasser regime and finds that the dominant threat faced by Nasser emanated from other parts of the elite, particularly from the military and security apparatus. As a consequence, Nasser created a highly fragmented set of coercive and political institutions with overlapping missions. Politics was grounded in a balancing among the military, the Ministry of Interior (MOI), and the ruling party (initially the ASU). This fragmented structure ensured that no single institution could overthrow Nasser. However, this fragmented structure created incentives for high levels of violence due to the resulting limits on quality of intelligence that the apparatus could gather, restrictions on the free flow of information among security organizations, and competition among these organizations to demonstrate their repressive capabilities. The paper shows that this structure remained largely intact throughout the Sadat and Mubarak eras. The paper argues that the uprising of 2011 led to a change in the dominant threat posed to Egypt’s ruler, from an elite threat -- which had prevailed since the regime’s founding in 1952 -- to a mass threat, which was manifest in the scale of the public demonstrations in 2011 and compounded by the rise of an insurgency in Sinai and the flow of weapons and fighters across the Libyan border that supported popular opposition. The shift to a mass threat contributed to an end to politics grounded in a balancing among the military, the Ministry of Interior (MOI), and the ruling party. Instead, the military emerged as the dominant institution. However, the deeply-rooted fragmented structure of the Ministry of Interior persisted. Egypt is left with a military-dominated regime and a Ministry of Interior that faces strong structural incentives to engage in ever-higher levels of violence. The paper utilizes a variety of sources including accounts by key actors as conveyed in speeches, interviews, and memoirs; laws governing coercive and political institutions; relevant newspaper and other accounts; and relevant secondary literature in Arabic and English.

Does fearmongering rhetoric increase support for authoritarian politics and policies, and if so, why and how? In this paper, I theorize the way in which authoritarian behavior and individual characteristics interact to create public support, drawing on long-standing psychological theories about the behavioral effects of deeply held ideas regarding authority and power (Adorno et al. 1950; Hetherington and Weiler 2009), fear (Gray 1987; Ruiter, Abraham and Kok 2011), and patriarchal norms (Sidanius et al 1994; 2000, 1995). In short, authoritarians utilize fearmongering rhetoric to tap into citizens’ fears about a variety of threats, and these performances activate the authoritarian aspects of individual personalities. While this process is not activated in all citizens, authoritarian rhetoric may have a substantial effect on the certain portions of the population. The motivation and evidence for my analysis comes from contemporary Egypt, where military president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has overseen authoritarian retrenchment since the 2013 coup which displaced democratically elected president (and former Brotherhood member) Mohamed Morsi. I test hypotheses about propaganda and personality through a nationally representative survey of Egyptian citizens conducted in November 2018. The survey included an embedded experiment, which randomly assigned respondents to one of give treatments including vignettes approximating Sisi’s rhetoric about the existential threat of infrastructure, terrorism, identity, and economic problems currently facing Egypt (in addition to a control for comparison, which did not include a vignette). Preliminary analyses demonstrate that exposure to fearmongering rhetoric increases citizens’ ranking of the specific threat discussed (whether economic, national security, identity, or infrastructure) as a major problem for Egypt, and makes them significantly more likely to think this problem will affect them personally. In addition, economic fearmongering causes citizens to report significantly more support for non-democratic government and a strong leader (rather than representative government) in times of crisis. Preliminary results also suggest that reactions to the fearmongering rhetorical primes interact significantly with pre-existing personality attributes. These 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, and how and why ordinary citizens might facilitate authoritarian retrenchment.

The term ‘social contract’ is increasingly used in social science literature to describe sets of state-society relations – in particular with reference to MENA countries. Much of the literature highlights that MENA countries used to have quite similar social contracts between the 1950s and the 2010s, which were based on the provision of social benefits to citizens – such as overly generous food and energy subsidies – as a recompensation for the lack of political participation. This article defines social contracts as sets of formal and informal agreements between societal groups and the government on rights and obligations towards each other. It maintains that social contracts are – partly informal – institutions that are meant to make state-society interactions more predictable and thereby politics more stable. And it highlights that the social contracts of MENA countries degenerated steadily after 1985 due to increasing populations and budgetary problems and that the Arab uprisings 2010-11 were an expression of discontent with a situation where governments provided neither political participation nor sufficient social benefits. The main focus of the article, however, is on the question if new social contracts have emerged after 2011. In this, the article refers to the strategies that the governments of differnet MENA countries have taken to implement food and energy subsidy cuts without delegitimising their own authority – respectively provoking major social unrest. The article shows that Morocco. Egypt and Iran used distinct approaches – each of them affecting the social contract in the respective country in different ways: Morocco’s government removed some subsidies, but mainly those that benefit predominantly middle classes. It explained the need for reforms, engaged in dialogue with society and set up some compensatory measures for the poor. Thereby it tried to preserve as much as possible of the existing social contract. The Egyptian government, in contrast, dismantled subsidy schemes more radically, without consultation and comprehensive information campaigns. Also, its compensatory measures remain negligible, which shows that the government relies no longer on the provision of social benefits as a means of legitimisation but rather on repression and the claim of being the only actor that is able to guarantee the individual and collective security of citizens. Finally, Iran replaced subsidies by a very generous quasi-universal cash transfer scheme, which is more efficient and egalitarian – suggesting that the government intends to create a more inclusive social contract and thereby broaden its social support basis.

This paper analyzes the targeting of civilian and environmental infrastructures in the Yemen conflict since 2015, focusing on the interlinked effects on civilian health and welfare from the targeting of water, energy, and agriculture, and the changing role of humanitarian actors in this protracted conflict. This paper is part of a broader project exploring changing practices of warfare and humanitarian action in the post-2011 wars in the Middle East and North Africa. The Yemen case is particularly important as it represents an extreme instance of conflict-induced spread of disease and man-made famine. It poses significant challenges to both the on-the-ground operations and basic assumptions of humanitarian organizations, as well as the norms and practices of international humanitarian law. Since the Saudi-led coalition, backed by the US, the UK, and France, intervened militarily in the Yemeni civil war, civilian infrastructure ranging from markets to oil refineries to agricultural lands have been targeted both directly and indirectly. Several scholarly reports suggest that aerial bombardment has destroyed civilian infrastructure not as ‘collateral’ damage from targeting military targets but as a deliberate strategy to undermine livelihoods and income, thereby inducing widespread disease, malnutrition and looming famine in areas under the control of the Houthi government and its allies. The 2016-2018 cholera outbreak, in particular, was the largest and most rapid spread of cholera ever recorded by the World Health Organization (WHO), with over a million cases reported. This paper uses data from multiple sources to analyze the role of targeting civilian infrastructure by parties to the conflict; humanitarian response efforts; and the contradictions between great power behavior and norms of humanitarianism. These sources include an original database compiled by the authors that tracks targeting by actor, infrastructure targeted, and location; the Yemen Data Project, compiled by Yemeni activists and journalists tracking coalition airstrikes; and exploratory work with geospatial scientists using satellite imagery analysis to asses conflict-destruction of infrastructure. We also draw upon WHO data, reports from Yemeni ministries, and interviews with humanitarian organizations that remain in Yemen.