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After the ousting of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, much debate surrounded the reasons for the former regime's longevity and its collapse. Here, Safinaz El Tarouty provides an original contribution to the study of authoritarianism in Egypt by focusing on the role of businessmen in authoritarian survival. As the regime intensified neoliberal economic reforms that led to social deprivation and frustration among increasing numbers of Egyptian citizens, they co-opted businessmen in order to defuse challenges and buttress the regime, constructing a new political economy of authoritarianism. Extending the existing literature on clientelism, El Tarouty creates a typology of regime-businessmen relations to describe the multiple mechanisms of co-option in the context of economic liberalization. Ultimately, though, these businessmen proved too narrow a constituency to provide legitimacy to the regime and, in fact, formed one of the reasons for its collapse.
This book explores the unintended consequences of security governance actions and explores how their effects can be limited. Security governance describes new modes of security policy that differ from traditional approaches to national and international security. While traditional security policy used to be the exclusive domain of states and aimed at military defense, security governance is performed by multiple actors and is intended to create a global environment of security for states, social groups, and individuals. By pooling the strength and expertise of states, international organizations, and private actors, security governance is seen to provide more effective and efficient means to...
Albrecht’s work presents a comprehensive account of contemporary Egyptian politics, with a particular focus on the years 2002-2007. The text contains a theoretical dimension that considers the role political opposition and the core working mechanisms of state-society relations under authoritarian rule.
Governance failures, combined with 21st-century social, economic, environmental and demographic conditions, have all contributed to paving the way for the rise of highly heterogeneous non-state and quasi-state actors in the Middle East. Has the state, then, been irremediably undermined, or will the current transition lead to the emergence of new state entities? How can the crumbling of states and the redrawing of borders be reconciled with the exacerbation of traditional inter-state competition, including through proxy wars? How can a new potential regional order be framed and imagined? This volume provides a historical background and policy answers to these and a number of other related questions, analysing developments in the region from the standpoint of the interplay between disintegration and polarization.
Rethinking Private Higher Education takes the university as a core institution in modern nation states, which is currently undergoing a serious revision. It offers fresh insights into the actual meaning of ‘private’ in different higher education contexts, contributing to a deeper understanding of the actual effects of global policies in local contexts through ethnographies. This book explores how private universities were established, their context and history, and their changing business models and operations. The strengths of this book are its ethnographic detail, which shows the complexity and fast changing forms of private higher education, and its reluctance to jump to simplified labelling of public and private. It is a model for further ethnographic studies of local developments in higher education. Contributors are: Ayça Alemdaroğlu, Daniele Cantini, Carmela Chávez Irigoyen, Enrico Ille, Sylvie Mazzella, Alexander Mitterle, Annemarie Profanter, and Susan Wright.
The Arab uprisings of 2011 have sparked much scholarly discussion with regards to democratisation, the resilience of authoritarian rule, mobilisation patterns, and the relationship between secularism and Islam, all under the assumption that politics has changed for good in North Africa and the Middle East. While acknowledging the post-2011 transformations taking place in the region, this book brings to the forefront an understudied, yet crucial, aspect related to the uprisings, namely the interplay between continuity and change. Challenging simplified representations built around the positions that either ‘all has changed’ or ‘nothing has changed’, the in-depth case studies in this v...
The effects of neoliberal economic reforms in the Southern Mediterranean are now widely regarded as a main underlying cause of the Arab uprisings. An often neglected dimension is that of the reforms’ implications for local governance. The contributions to this edited volume examine how state power is being re-articulated but also challenged at sub-national levels in Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon and Turkey. They explore the effects of neoliberal economic and local governance reforms such as decentralization, public-private partnerships, and outsourcing in the area of public service delivery, poverty alleviation, and labor market reforms on local patronage networks, public account...
Berlin is increasingly emerging as a hub of Arab intellectual life in Europe. In this first study of Arab culture to zoom in on the thriving metropolis, the contributors shed light on the dynamics of transformation with Arabs as agents, subjects, and objects of change in the spheres of politics, society and history, gender, demographics and migration, media and culture, and education and research. The kaleidoscopic character of the collection, embracing academic articles, essays, interviews and photos, reflects critical encounters in Berlin. It brings together authors from inter- and multidisciplinary fields and backgrounds and invites the readers into a much-needed conversation on contemporary transformations.
This book offers a diachronical and inter-/transmedia approach to the relationship of media and fear in a variety of geographical and cultural settings. This allows for an in-depth understanding of the media’s role in pandemics, wars and other crises, as well as in political intimidation. The book assembles chapters from a variety of authors, focusing on the relation between media and fear in the West, the Middle East, the Arab World and China. Besides its geographical and cultural diversity, the volume also takes a long-term perspective, bringing together cases from transforming media environments which span over a century. The book establishes a strong and historically persistent nexus between media and fear, which finds ever-new forms with new media but always follows similar logics.