An Egyptian diplomat-turned-scholar provides a detailed analysis of events from the fall of Mubarak through the aftermath of the 2013 military move to oust Egypt's first democratically elected president. The Arab Spring caught the world by surprise and was truly inspiring. Then, many watched with bewilderment as the process unfolded in unforeseen directions. This lively and well-documented book tells the story of events in Egypt from the end of the Mubarak era in 2010 through the revolution in 2011 and the military interference in the summer of 2013. Written from an insider's perspective, it discusses what occurred and analyzes the motives of the parties involved, putting each incident in context so the reader can see—and understand—the big picture. The author's background as an Egyptian diplomat provides insights that fuel a nuanced and richly detailed study. Among other topics, the book sheds light on the Egyptian military and economy, the life and written opinions of the military leader Al Sisi, and ties between the United States and the Egyptian armed forces. It reveals evidence of a conspiracy against the first elected civilian administration in Egypt, details the conflict between the Islamists and the deep state, and examines the rise and fall of political Islam. A final chapter speculates about possible scenarios for the future of Egypt.

The popular protests in early 2011 were once seen as a turning point in the history of the Arab world, raising hopes for democracy, freedom, and justice in the Middle East. A decade after the uprisings, these hopes are largely dashed in each country swept by popular protests with the exception of Tunisia. Tunisia became the only democracy in the entire region while Egypt saw its first freely elected president and government thrown out by the army in a bloody coup which resulted in a regime that is no less authoritarian than Mubarak’s. This book provides a detailed analysis of the political, economic, and constitutional developments in Tunisia and Egypt. In the light of the existing literature on comparative democratization, the author explores why Egypt’s path to democratization was eroded by several transitional actors while Tunisian political elite managed to move the country towards democracy. The book centers its focus on the role of the political agents in designing the transition and explores the transitional period with respect to the interactions among the political elite and their cost-benefit assumptions, ideological interests, as well as their commitment to democratic processes.

An intimate account of the Arab Spring, and Egypt’s past and present, seen through the eyes of a wide range of Egyptians: political operators, archaeologists and garbage collectors; women, the queer community and migrants.

In its modern history, Africa has experienced different waves of constitutional ordering. The latest democratisation wave, which began in the 1990s, has set the stage over the past decade for what is now a hotly debated issue: do recent, new, or fundamentally revised constitutions truly reflect an African constitutional identity? Thoughtfully navigating a contested field, this volume brings to the fore a number of foundational questions about African constitutionalism. Constitutional Identity and Constitutionalism in Africa asks whether the concept of constitutional identity clarifies our understanding of constitutional change in Africa, including an exploration of the relationship between constitutional identity and a country's unique culture(s) and histories. Building on this, contributions examine the persistent role of colonial heritages in shaping constitutional identity in post-Independence African nations, and the question of path-dependency. Given the enduring influence of the colonial experience, the volume asks how, why, and to what end African constitutions must be 'decolonised' to form an authentic constitutional identity. This theoretical insight is supplemented and further deepened by detailed case studies of South Africa, Ethiopia, Cape Verde, Cameroon, and Egypt and their diverse experience of constitutional continuity and change. This volume in the Stellenbosch Handbooks in African Constitutional Law series, brings together contributions from established scholars and emerging voices on the study of constitutional processes. They provide an urgent critical analysis of existing paradigms, concepts and normative ideologies of modern African constitutionalism in the context of constitutional identity.

A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and IndieBound bestseller Finalist for the Colby Award A new, revised and updated edition of a modern classic of foreign policy, a harrowing exploration of the collapse of American diplomacy and the abdication of global leadership, by the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. US foreign policy is undergoing a dire transformation, forever changing America’s place in the world. Institutions of diplomacy and development are bleeding out after deep budget cuts; the diplomats who make America’s deals and protect its citizens around the world are walking out in droves. Offices across the State Department sit empty, while abroad the military-industrial complex has assumed the work once undertaken by peacemakers. We’re becoming a nation that shoots first and asks questions later. In an astonishing journey from the corridors of power in Washington, DC, to some of the most remote and dangerous places on earth—Afghanistan, Somalia, and North Korea among them—acclaimed investigative journalist Ronan Farrow illuminates one of the most consequential and poorly understood changes in American history. His firsthand experience as a former State Department official affords a personal look at some of the last standard bearers of traditional statecraft, including Richard Holbrooke, who made peace in Bosnia and died while trying to do so in Afghanistan. Drawing on recently unearthed documents, and richly informed by rare interviews with whistle-blowers, a warlord, and policymakers—including every living former secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton to Rex Tillerson—and now updated with revealing firsthand accounts from inside Donald Trump’s confrontations with diplomats during his impeachment and candid testimonials from officials in Joe Biden’s inner circle, War on Peace makes a powerful case for an endangered profession. Diplomacy, Farrow argues, has declined after decades of political cowardice, shortsightedness, and outright malice—but it may just offer America a way out of a world at war.

How did Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood win power so quickly after the dramatic "Arab Spring" uprising that ended President Hosni Mubarak's thirty-year reign in February 2011? And why did the Brotherhood fall from power even more quickly, culminating with the popular "rebellion" and military coup that toppled Egypt's first elected president, Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, in July 2013? In Arab Fall, Eric Trager examines the Brotherhood's decision making throughout this critical period, explaining its reasons for joining the 2011 uprising, running for a majority of the seats in the 2011-2012 parliamentary elections, and nominating a presidential candidate despite its initial promise not to do so. Based on extensive research in Egypt and interviews with dozens of Brotherhood leaders and cadres including Morsi, Trager argues that the very organizational characteristics that helped the Brotherhood win power also contributed to its rapid downfall. The Brotherhood's intensive process for recruiting members and its rigid nationwide command-chain meant that it possessed unparalleled mobilizing capabilities for winning the first post-Mubarak parliamentary and presidential elections. Yet the Brotherhood's hierarchical organizational culture, in which dissenters are banished and critics are viewed as enemies of Islam, bred exclusivism. This alienated many Egyptians, including many within Egypt's state institutions. The Brotherhood's insularity also prevented its leaders from recognizing how quickly the country was slipping from their grasp, leaving hundreds of thousands of Muslim Brothers entirely unprepared for the brutal crackdown that followed Morsi's overthrow. Trager concludes with an assessment of the current state of Egyptian politics and examines the Brotherhood's prospects for reemerging.

This book provides a new theory for how democracy can materialize in the Middle East, and the broader Muslim world. It shows that one pathway to democratization lays not in resolving important, but often irreconcilable, debates about the role of religion in politics. Rather, it requires that Islamists and their secular opponents focus on the concerns of pragmatic survival—that is, compromise through pacting, rather than battling through difficult philosophical issues about faith. This is the only book-length treatment of this topic, and one that aims to redefine the boundaries of an urgent problem that continues to haunt struggles for democracy in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

What happens when Christians reconsider political engagement? Among leading Christian thinkers, political engagement is either unavoidably necessary or theologically impossible. Is this a false dilemma? Between Faith and Power examines how Christian groups are grappling with the demands of a pluralistic public square while remaining faithful to their tradition. Using the lenses of social science research and theological analysis, the book examines the successes and failures of these groups as they engage the public square. What emerges are models of Dynamic Engagement that Christian leaders are using to consistently pursue religious liberty across faiths while contributing to the common good.

While the contemporary era has witnessed a series of spectacular failures with severe and widespread global consequences, failure is still broadly understood on an individual level, while its broader causes and consequences receive little attention. This book reconceptualises failure as a method for characterising and critiquing systems and institutions on both a global and a local level. It defines global failure as comprising global inequality, economic crisis, and ecological disaster, and as a condition which informs and is informed by localised failure. It examines the negotiation between global and local failure in narratives of failed quests by four contemporary authors: Cormac McCarthy, Julia Kristeva, Michael Ondaatje, and Basma Abdel Aziz. As a genre, the quest narrative is associated with the idea of hard-won success. The failed quest narrative, or the narrative of the failed quest, is therefore the ideal vehicle through which to examine the socio-political and institutional conditions of failure. Primarily a contribution to the field of world literature, this book is also relevant to those with an interest in the contemporary novel, failure studies, and the quest narrative.

The date is January 11, 1911. A young German paleontologist, accompanied only by a guide, a cook, four camels, and a couple of camel drivers, reaches the lip of the vast Bahariya Depression after a long trek across the bleak plateau of the western desert of Egypt. The scientist, Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach, hopes to find fossil evidence of early mammals. In this, he will be disappointed, for the rocks here will prove to be much older than he thinks. They are nearly a hundred million years old. Stromer is about to learn that he has walked into the age of the dinosaurs. At the bottom of the Bahariya Depression, Stromer will find the remains of four immense and entirely new dinosaurs, along with dozens of other unique specimens. But there will be reversals—shipments delayed for years by war, fossils shattered in transit, stunning personal and professional setbacks. Then, in a single cataclysmic night, all of his work will be destroyed and Ernst Stromer will slip into history and be forgotten. The date is January 11, 2000—eighty-nine years to the day after Stromer descended into Bahariya. Another young paleontologist, Ameri-can graduate student Josh Smith, has brought a team of fellow scientists to Egypt to find Stromer’s dinosaur graveyard and resurrect the German pioneer’s legacy. After weeks of digging, often under appalling conditions, they fail utterly at rediscovering any of Stromer’s dinosaur species. Then, just when they are about to declare defeat, Smith’s team discovers a dinosaur of such staggering immensity that it will stun the world of paleontology and make headlines around the globe. Masterfully weaving together history, science, and human drama, The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt is the gripping account of not one but two of the twentieth century’s great expeditions of discovery.