Graduation Year

Fall 2012

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

International Relations

Reader 1

Kristin Fabbe

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2012 Emma H. MacFarlane

Abstract

Following Tunisia, Egypt was the second Arab nation to engage in the Arab Spring, as massive civil uprisings in protest of its former repressive dictator Hosni Mubarak succeeded in toppling his regime after thirty years of rule. After seventeen months of military rule in the period following Mubarak’s fall, Mohamed Morsi, a member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, was elected the fifth president of Egypt. Morsi is Egypt’s first civilian president. Ever since the Free Officers Revolution of 1952, Egypt has been ruled by a succession of military leaders, including Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak. Consequently, political and economic authority has since rested in the hands of the military. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the strategic approaches undertaken by Egypt’s former leaders in an overall attempt to provide a comprehensive answer to this central question: what are President Morsi’s strategies for controlling the military in post-revolutionary Egypt? I will argue that, while Morsi has demonstrated his desire to control the armed forces through various institutional changes, his efforts have fallen short of attacking the heart of the problem, which is the deeply-rooted militaristic culture that has come to be valued and accepted by Egyptian society throughout the course of the last sixty years.

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