Based on structured interviews with business leaders in Egypt and Tunisia, I show how business support for undermining democracy varied between these two countries, and how that support also affected regime change and durability. I argue that democracy's survival in Tunisia is in part a result of the inability of elites to work together to undermine democracy despite their shared interests, and I demonstrate this through an examination of Nidaa Tounes' splits and factions that have hampered this party's efforts to roll back democratic freedoms. By contrast, I show how business engagement with Tamarod, the movement that provided the cover for the Egyptian military coup, dramatically increased the movement's profile and ability to mobilize popular support. While business engagement in Tunisia tended to be spread among competing parties, businesses in Egypt became increasingly uniform in their support for the pro-authoritarian movement that culminated in the election of President Al-Sisi. Crucially, the Egyptian military's widespread linkages with firms helped bring business leaders together and coerce them into supporting the military-led coalition for regime change.

Beyond its tragic consequences, ambiguity remains surrounding the Turkish military’s failed coup on July 15, 2016. The military’s recent intervention is widely seen either as a return to older habits in Turkey, which has experienced five military interventions and troubled civil-military relations since 1960, or a marker of the decisive end of the military’s political dominance at the hands of an increasingly authoritarian government. However, the 2016 coup not only followed two decades of unprecedented demilitarization of Turkish politics, but was also highly unusual in being led by middle-ranking officers rather than the commander-in-chief, and was the first failed coup since 1963. What explains this breakdown in the long-term demilitarization of Turkish politics, and why did the coup take the particular form that it did? While most accounts remain fixated by discussion of the coup’s ultimate political agency, this research contends that recent events cannot be understood without reference to deep-rooted institutional and social-cultural shifts within the Turkish military itself since 1997. Drawing on ethnography, interviews with active-duty and retired officers, and archival work in Ankara, Istanbul, and smaller military garrisons like Polatli, Eskisehir, and Tekirdag since June 2016, my research emphasizes the impact of organizational, cultural, and structural changes in the Turkish military on the military’s interventionist behavior from the ‘soft coup’ of 1997 until the failed coup attempt in 2016. Turkey began to recruit officers with civilian degrees in 2001, which gradually altered the socio-economic, educational, and ideational make-up of the officer corps. Also, staff officers, a very small and exclusive elite group, who played central role in all interventions from 1913 to 2016 (Akyaz 2002; Hale 1994; Ahmad 1993), have lost their hegemony in the military ecosystem over time because of the rise and diversification in other officers’ education. Finally, a compulsory and protracted transition to a semi-voluntary recruitment model (Varoglu and Bicaksiz 2005) has changed the military’s entire social base and its ties to and view of society. Cultural changes are also important. A gradual increase in the military’s social, educational, and gender diversity (Gürcan 2016), coupled with greater lawfulness and transparency has lessened the organizational culture’s highly patrimonial character. I argue that these largely inadvertent organizational, structural, and cultural changes, have significantly altered the intra-institutional distribution of power, and constrain the military’s capacity and motivation to intervene, notwithstanding the persistence of intervention as a viable option for officers.

This paper uses Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s celebrated model for explaining regime transitions to compare the competitive authoritarian orders of Chadli Benjedid and Abdelaziz Bouteflika that held power in Algeria during the mass protests of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the Arab Spring respectively to determine the ways and extent to which they were similar and different. Its objective is twofold. First, to see if the configuration of each regime influenced either the start or direction of these periods of protest. And second, to determine how the country’s authoritarian order has evolved over the past 25 years. In so doing, the paper makes two important contributions to the debate over authoritarian resilience in the region. In addition to interrogating the start of these protests in a novel way (by using Levitsky and Way’s thesis), it shows that Algeria’s authoritarian order is not static but continues to adapt successfully.

In the late 1990s, as the Mubarak regime accelerated the implementation of market reforms the number of labor protests grew significantly. The wave of protests continued in the 2000s, reaching 3.9 a day in 2008, 4.4 in 2009, and 5.8 in 2010. Following the 2011 uprising the number of labor protest rose significantly averaging 38.6 protest per day during Morsi’s tenure. This high rate of strikes has persisted since Sisi’s coming to power despite growing repression. Although the number of labor protests has declined compared to Morsi’s time in office, they remain significantly higher, at more than 29 per day between mid-2014 and the end of 2015, than during the last years of the Mubarak regime. Even as repression intensified, there were 1,736 labor protests in 2016 and continued throughout 2017. This paper will rely on Global Database, Language and Tone (GDELT) and Land Center for Human Rights in Cairo among others to document the patterns of labor protest since the late 1990s. It will focus on two questions: 1) Why do high levels of labor protests continue in Egypt despite the increasing repression? 2) Are blue-collar workers in all sectors equally likely to engage in protest actions, and relatedly do they utilize the same protest tactics across sectors? The paper draws on prospect theory to explain the continued willingness of workers to mount protests despite growing repression which has intensified in the lead-up to the presidential elections in 2018. This theory argues that people respond to and act differently depending on whether they perceive themselves to be in the domain of losses or the domain of gains. When in the domain of gains, people tend to act to protect what they have and thus are more risk averse. Because workers in Egypt have found themselves in the domain of loss, their assessment of risks associated with staging protests have shifted and they have become more willing to engage in high risk activities. Paradoxically, the heightened repression under Sisi may well be pushing more workers into the domain of loss and thus is making them more not less willing to engage in protests. In answering the second question, the paper will map out the patterns of protest across different sectors of the economy and argue that prospect theory can help us better understand why particular groups of workers are more willing to engage in high cost protest actions.