Britain in Egypt: Nationalism and Strategic Choices, 1919-1930 Abstract Egypt has always attracted serious scholarly attention from diplomatic and imperial historians. It was the invasion of Egypt in 1882 that established British hegemony in the region for the next seventy-five years; ended only by the humiliating withdrawal from the region in 1956. At the heart of British policy throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the importance of maintaining control of the Suez Canal to safeguard imperial communications, defence and trade. The 1920s witnessed a crucial phase in British policy in Egypt. Under severe pressure to find economies and retrench large numbers of military personnel in the region, British policy makers faced increasing demands from Egyptian nationalists for greater control of their own affairs. The Anglo- Egyptian relationship was further complicated by the Sudan, which, with the defeat of Mahdist forces in 1899 was administered through the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. The British faced a conundrum: how would they implement economies in the face of growing Egyptian demands for independence, while at the same time protect their vital strategic interests in an increasingly volatile region which stood on the Middle East-African nexus of British policy making? This thesis examines the difficult strategic choices politicians in London had to grapple with throughout the 1920s at a time when extreme financial pressures forced successive British governments to make economies, especially on defence. Using the failed Anglo-Egyptian treaty negotiations as a backcloth, it explores the deep divisions between officials at the Foreign and Colonial Offices who vied for control of policy making. Equally important, it also analyses the role played by the British High Commissioners in Cairo in both influencing and implementing British policy. Indeed, the domineering personalities of such figures as Field Marshal Sir Edmund Allenby (1919-25) and George Lloyd (1925-29) - two of the most colourful and forceful high commissioners - demonstrate wonderfully the jurisdictional battles which unfolded between London and the 'men on the spot' in Cairo. In this, the use of Sudan by the British to check Egyptian irredentism is vital in unravelling and understanding the complexities of Anglo- Egyptian relations. Crucial to this thesis, is the argument that it was Egyptian nationalism, not Russian Bolshevism, which threatened to undermine British power in the Fertile Crescent. In the final analysis, this thesis charts and analyses a hitherto under-researched aspect of British imperial policy in one of its most critical and strategically important territories. J ayne Louise Gifford

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In Egypt, questioning the country’s victory in the 1973 War and its implications can lead to media blackout, public outrage, imprisonment and even exile. Public representations of this alleged victory continue to be thus regulated in spite of 40 years of socio-political change, and in the face of a mass corpus of external and even internal literature which tells a different story. This thesis explores and problematises this persistent war discourse, by tracing the shifting process through which it was constructed and reconstructed by the state throughout the periods of President Anwar Sadat and his successor Hosni Mubarak. It uses Critical Discourse Analysis to combine analysis of texts commemorating the war with a study of the socio-political milieu related to personal authoritarianism and the state’s intricate relations with the army, the press and Islamists. In doing so, it makes an original contribution to theoretical knowledge about the relationship between war and discourse with reference to the Arab world specifically: it unpacks a particular discursive form of legitimacy existing, equitably and significantly, alongside physical forms centred on the ‘use of force’ to rule and endure in power. The thesis, furthermore, is empirically innovative in its use of largely untapped sources of Egyptian war discourse such as newspaper archives, textbooks along with war memorials, stamps and even song scripts. The study finds that the interplay of language and politics left the war represented through three coherent and logically structured patterns over 40 years: (1) Egypt had a ‘massive and consistent’ victory; (2) war was always personalised and personified; and (3) war was always miraclised or/and ‘religionised’.Although these patterns were reordered over time (with both change and continuity evident between the era of Sadat and Mubarak), the official discourse retained an appearance of coherence since it was always so closely attuned to its broader political context. Rather than inferring from this legitimacy that the discourse was as historically ‘truthful’ as any other, however, the thesis provides hard evidence that it relied on intentional falsehoods.

Inspired by Derridean deconstruction, contemporary translation studies hold that translation is a process of transformation that is characterized by indeterminacy. However, little attention has been given to the political aspects of that transformation. By exploring this aspect, this thesis argues that translation is a transformation within sovereignty from a divine to a more secular model that is guided by justice. By offering a comparative reading of Derrida’s and the medieval Turkish/Persian philosopher’s, al-Farabi’s, works on sovereignty and translation, it holds that the switch in the paradigms of sovereignty from a Derridean kingly cape to an al-Farabian imam implies a change in the dynamics of translating sovereignty that is aesthetic in nature. The research starts by exploring the political and theological implications implicit in the translation of sovereignty as expounded in Derrida’s ‘Des Tours de Babel’. Adopting Derrida’s image of the kingly cape turned into a wedding gown, it argues that the translation of sovereignty is an aesthetic shift from a divine-kingly model to a more secular one. The thesis, then, explores traces of this shift within al-Farabi’s model of the Virtuous City where the weeds, dissenting citizens, contest the imam’s logocentric sovereignty in an affective and imaginative medium. Both models will be shown to highlight a reverse structure within the ceremonial aspect of power, which Agamben denotes as ‘acclamation’ or ‘glory’. Acclamation’s reverse role in the translation of sovereignty, the thesis argues, best figures in the political cartoons on the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. These cartoons illustrate how contestation becomes a creative event of redefining sovereignty that is negotiated in terms of language and image. The Egyptian protestors demonstrate how language escapes the fatalism of its role in mediating meaning to acquire the role of poetic mediation in linguistic play. In poetic mediation, the thesis argues, sovereignty is translated within a collectively-shared imaginative construct that a creative form of justice guides.

Why and how do ordinary citizens lacking previous activist experience, come, at certain times, to stage protests, block roads, close public administrations, or occupy public spaces, in order to reclaim what they consider is their right? In Egypt, ordinary people have increasingly, albeit occasionally, endorsed protest as a means to press demands, as shown by a continuous frequency of popular mobilisations despite a very repressive context since July 2013. However, despite the persistence of serious grievances and limited results, most of these collective actions have not exceeded the local scale, remaining dispersed, discontinuous and ephemeral. This thesis argues that beyond repression and other authoritarian constraints, which only provide a partial explanation, most popular mobilisations are also prevented from expanding by the vicissitudes of leadership on the one hand, and a set of local sociocultural features on the other. Beyond traditional social movement studies, which mainly focused on urban and organised movements, this thesis analyses ordinary people’s isolated protests characterised by a basic organisation and a strong local anchorage. Based on fieldwork in southern Upper Egypt between January 2014 and April 2015, it provides an account of recent local dynamics of (de)mobilisation. Focusing on these discontinuous, dispersed and ephemeral forms of activism, it sheds light on the factors that interact in preventing a widening of local collective action. These factors include leaders’ limited ambitions, experience, and difficulties in coordinating in a highly authoritarian environment; activists’ co-optation; local logics of patronage and loyalties; gender, generational and other social divisions; and perceptions of cultural identity. The thesis also establishes that current national campaigns, mainly revolutionary change, labour protests and the proMuslim Brotherhood protest movement, do not appeal to the majority due to their lack of alternative political projects and perceived exclusionary character. This ultimately suggests why the beginning of a revolution was suspended.

While news media coverage of political protest is by no means a new topic of research for media scholars, few studies have attempted to unpack how and why protesters and protests have been legitimised within news media coverage, rather than covered with the expectation of violence occurring (Halloran et al. 1970), marginalised (Gitlin 1980), cast as threats to the social order (McLeod 1995), or denied the status of legitimate political players (Shoemaker 1984). This research project is an attempt to do just that. Therefore, this dissertation examines whether newspapers from the United Kingdom and United States accorded the opposition movement against then president Hosni Mubarak with favourable news coverage during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. A content analysis of 611 newspaper articles from both British and American publications was conducted to determine whether the anti-Mubarak opposition was covered favourably, in addition to revealing what other dominant themes were present within the reporting. This study revealed that the anti-Mubarak opposition protesters were covered favourably by an overwhelming margin within both British (65 percent) and American (66 percent) newspaper articles, and put a particular emphasis on the political motivations galvanising the protests. Conversely, then-president Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian government, and the Egyptian police and security services were portrayed as repressive actors within the reporting on the revolution. Furthermore, the anti-Mubarak opposition was featured most frequently as the first source within the reporting from either nation's newspapers. Another dominant theme emerging from the content analysis, and that was subsequently examined within the empirical chapters of this project, was that geopolitical considerations were frequently included within coverage from both British (60 percent) and American (76 percent) newspapers. Few studies have attempted to assess the prominence and role of geopolitics within the reporting of international politics (Myers et al. 1996). In summation, this research project questions the normative assumptions made about the relationship between the news media and protesters being antagonistic, and to understand how and why protest is granted legitimacy within media coverage of political crises.

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