Farrah Hawana is the author of a stimulating thesis in International Studies entitled “The Historical Transformation of Military-Society Relations and Legitimacy within the 1952 Free Officers’ Regime: Implications in Light of the 2011 Egyptian Uprising”. Her research, carried out under the joint supervision of Professor Keith Krause and Professor Riccardo Bocco, takes an historically informed approach to understanding the transformation of military roles within the 1952 regime; the shifting position of the armed forces vis-à-vis a powerful centralised presidency (military-executive relations); and the political implications of the military’s unique institutional legitimacy and close symbolic association with state-based nationalism for the 2011 Egyptian uprising.

Your thesis is primarily concerned with the ways in which the Egyptian regime has succeeded in maintaining some sort of “stability” over the past few years.

Yes, the core question of my research is: How is it that the Egyptian Armed Forces not only survived the crisis of legitimacy that threatened the nondemocratic regime status quo in 2011, but emerged from it with their relative power and institutional legitimacy largely intact? The objective was to better comprehend authoritarian regime continuity – understood to be underpinned by the overlapping dimensions of legitimacy, repression and co-optation – through close study of the selected case, Egypt. My thesis begins by tracing the transformation of military-society relations since the 19th century, leading up to the 1952 coup d’état and three successive officer-presidents within a “stable” yet contested Free Officers’ regime. It then provides a detailed analysis of the military’s role in the 18 days of uprising and direct seizure of executive power on 11 February, and through the end of the military junta-managed “transition” period (2011–2012). This case study illustrates the mechanisms underpinning regime continuity in the post–Mubarak era, preserving the military’s relative power and legitimacy, by taking a military-centric perspective in light of historically constructed patterns of military-society and military-executive relations.

How did you come up with this topic?

I started my doctoral studies in 2009, after working with international organisations and NGOs in Egypt and Lebanon, with the intention of studying relationships between conflict and the small arms and light weapons trade in the Arab context. However, by 2010 I had ascertained that certain governance challenges were common and shared to varying degrees across the region, and the root causes of such problems were far more complex than arms supplies and external military support – which took my research in a very different direction, towards the broader study of legitimacy, authoritarianism and militarism in the Arab regional order. In my preliminary thesis dissertation, I presented an argument based on certain assumptions regarding the appearance of national and regional-level “stability” that, at the time of writing in December 2010–January 2011, I had no reason to suspect would suddenly become irrelevant. With the start of the 2011 Arab uprisings, I was understandably thrilled and elated by the prospect of constructive political change in a region I am personally attached to. After defending my preliminary dissertation on 14 February 2011 – after the shocking departure of both Ben Ali and Mubarak – I had to re-examine and re-evaluate all my arguments and assumptions. What was immediately obvious to me was that the region had suddenly entered a period of extreme uncertainty, and that the military (and civilian security services) were playing a pivotal role in determining the content of eventual political outcomes. Until 2014, when I began drafting my thesis, my doctoral research was inevitably shaped to some degree by political events in Egypt and the region, which I was closely following.

Your findings about “stability” surely apply to many contexts apart from the Egyptian one.

There has been recent resurgence of academic interests in research related to nondemocratic legitimacy, and the complex domestic power relations in authoritarian regimes that reinforce what is often described by external observers as “stability”. This is especially relevant in the context of intensifying political mobilisation of both pro-status quo and pro-change societal actors, either in support of or in protest at incumbent elites around the world. I hope that my thesis will be able to shed some light on the difficulties that can be faced by pro-change social movements in regime contexts similar to the Egyptian one, as well as on the strategies and rationales deployed by what have been called “political armies” when faced with crises sparked by large-scale mobilisation against the status quo. So yes, unfortunately, I expect that my research will continue to be highly relevant.

What will you remember of your doctoral experience?

I will remember most the extreme sense of uncertainty that not only surrounded my own research, including fieldwork, but (more importantly) that engulfed the Arab political world. I doubt that anything in the future will be able to match the wild unpredictability and sheer, constant shock and sense of surrealism that permeated everything. I learned it is extremely challenging to study a “moving target”, i.e. performing qualitative political research in a constantly changing field.

How will this experience impact your career plans?

While it is impossible at this point for me to speculate about my future career plans, I do expect that my doctoral experience will impact the professional choices I will make later on. I no longer hold the same priorities nor the same evaluative standards that I did before 2011. My understanding of political realities and my expectations for the future have also changed as a result of this somewhat unusual experience. Moreover, my original plan to complete my doctoral studies and immediately return to seek meaningful academic or policy work in the Arab world, with an eye towards gradual political reform, also now seems much more difficult than it once did.

Full citation: Hawana, Farrah. “The Historical Transformation of Military-Society Relations and Legitimacy within the 1952 Free Officers’ Regime: Implications in Light of the 2011 Egyptian Uprising”. PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2016.