In July 2018, Iraqi counterterrorism troops deployed to face demonstrators in southern Iraq. By contrast, less than a year prior, Iraqi civil defense and Kurdish Peshmerga forces deployed to support affected civilian populations with aid distribution and search and rescue following a 7.2 magnitude earthquake near the northeastern town of Halabja. Each of these situations reflects common roles that military organizations play in civilian life outside of war. However, scholars are much more likely to focus on military organizations’ peacetime deployment of coercive capabilities—e.g., via election violence or protest suppression—than on these organizations’ use of logistical and technical competencies in life-threatening emergencies. Yet, due to their immense logistical capability, specialized skill sets, and responsive command structures, military actors are often called in to manage complex crises, particularly in Middle Eastern states where they may be the only government agencies with access to sufficient resources. How do governments conceptualize, anticipate, and prepare for emergencies? What are the political ramifications of military-civilian contact in non-conflict crisis settings? Little research has focused explicitly on the military aspect of emergency response and its political aftermath, particularly in the Middle East. However, the reality of climate change implies that both the frequency and scale of natural disasters such as storms, floods, and desertification will increase, necessitating recurrent military involvement in emergency preparation and response. Population growth in unstable settings such as earthquake-, landslide-, and fire-prone regions; mass domestic and cross-border migration; and the intersection of industrialization and lax regulation in many Global South countries suggest that states will increasingly rely upon military organizations’ specialized expertise and equipment to lead disaster response. This paper proposes a multi-level, cross-national, relational approach to understanding the connections between military organizations’ involvement in crisis response and political power. It proposes a comparison of military-based disaster response in Iraq/Iraqi Kurdistan, Qatar, and Algeria. Specifically, it examines how the varied roles that military organizations play in emergency response—e.g., coordinator, teacher, technician, delivery service—interact with other, non-military organizational roles—e.g., funder, supplier, clinician—to produce informal loci of institutional power. At the micro-level, it examines how civilians’ interactions with soldiers shape their views and behaviors towards the other. This project thus advances understanding of civil-military relations in the Middle East while elucidating the deep political implications of climate change for the region.

Diversionary war theory maintains that state incumbents go to war to keep their officers busy fighting an external enemy rather than plotting for a domestic power grab. Yet, war is not an option for states with small armies facing powerful neighbors. This paper argues that an army’s deployment in foreign peacekeeping missions has positive effects for coup-proofing similar to those assumed in the diversionary war theory. I introduce the theory of diversionary peace and explore Tunisia’s participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions as an empirical plausibility probe. In authoritarian regimes, such as Ben Ali’s Tunisia, foreign peacekeeping reduces the risk of military coups and therefore helps leaders stay in power. I discuss four mechanisms that link foreign peacekeeping to coup-proofing at home: peacekeeping participation establishes feasibility obstacles for coup coordination, the allocation of economic resources to officers, the institutionalization of the military apparatus, and a professionalized ethos in the officer corps. Drawing on Tunisia as a single case study, the paper’s empirical findings come from interviews with retired military officers in Tunisia as well as original data from a nationally representative survey on popular perceptions of the military conducted in August 2017. Data on Tunisia’s peacekeeping missions come from the United Nations and the Tunisian Ministry of National Defense.

Why did Egypt’s democratic transition fall to a military coup in 2013? While most accounts highlight popular disillusionment with the Muslim Brotherhood’s rule, this paper instead reveals the military’s interests in staging a coup. It argues that the Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi had contested several of the military’s corporate interests, including its constitutional prerogatives, monopoly over national security decision-making, economic empire, and largely secular identity. Drawing on a survey of 2000 Egyptian military personnel, this paper shows that each of these encroachments on the military’s interests bred support for the 2013 coup. The second half of the paper then turns to explaining why Morsi would pursue a confrontational course with the military. Based on interviews with exiled members of the Brotherhood, it finds that Morsi faced both electoral and normative incentives to reign in the military’s power, but ultimately miscalculated the extent to which he could do so, sparking a coup. Overall, the experience highlights the difficulties and uncertainties that plague democratic transitions with powerful militaries.

Whether visibly or mostly invisibly, the Egyptian military institution was an integral part of President Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarian regime and its liberalized economy from 1981 until 2011. Upon the fall of Mubarak in 2011, the long-entrenched system of military privileges almost fell apart under a massive wave of labor protests that targeted ex-officers and officers in government authorities and business premises. But the military quickly succeeded in restoring back its political and economic supremacy by using repressive means—including anti-strike laws and military police. After sweeping the presidential election twice in 2014 and 2018, the former minister of defense Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has launched a new era of unprecedentedly visible military domination over the state and the economy. Applying a political economy approach, this paper investigates the role of the Egyptian officers in the bureaucratic apparatus and civilian production and services before and under al-Sisi. It argues that the military institution took advantage of the post-2011 political turmoil and social unrest to transform its previously mostly invisible political and economic domination into conspicuously visible monopolies over government posts, projects of public works, and commercial activities. It also explores how this noticeable degree of militarization impacts the various social classes and generates simmering discontent in the localities of Cairo and provincial Egypt. The paper relies on a wide variety of primary sources, such as Arabic newspapers archives, laws, court records, company profiles, official budget documents, U.S. congressional records, interviews, etc. The paper finally addresses the prospects of “demilitarizing” the state and economy under al-Sisi.

Is there a normative proscription against military coups? A consensus in the civil-military relations literature holds that soldiers lack the necessary legitimacy to step into a political role. This study intervenes in that conversation to ask two broad questions. First, does any political agent, soldier or civilian, possess the requisite social and/or political capital to perform an armed takeover? Second, beyond levels of legitimacy, can we more precisely conceptualize the normative environment in which the politics of the coup d'état operate? This essay argues that if a coup taboo exists, then conspirators will adhere to the norm even when they are its transgressors. The paper examines three “coup environments”—in which public discourse surrounding the use of coups becomes activated—in three coup-prone states: Tunisia, 2013; Egypt, 2013; and Turkey, 2016. The coup taboo helps observers of Middle East affairs better understand why the region's politicians and soldiers have denounced coups and labeled theirs revolutions, since as far back as the Young Turks.