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.

This thesis deals with the media representation of president Muhammad Morsi in five Egyptian newspapers. The main goal is to find out what kind of image these periodicals create and in what ways these images differ from each other. The research method used is qualitative content analysis and image analysis that examines articles, photographs and cartoons related in some way to president Morsi. Examined period is six weeks after the official announcement of the results of the presidential elections, i.e. from 25th June to 5th August 2012. The thesis consists of three parts. In the first theoretical part, the reader is introduced to the media concepts which represent the basic frame of the research. This section also contains the outline of the political development in Egypt with an emphasis on the changes in 2011 and 2012. Furthermore, it describes the life of the new president and the development of Egyptian press. Finally, the first section includes short description of the five examined newspapers. The second part describes the research methodology including the research sample, questions and hypothesis. The last part presents and interprets the results of the analysis and comes to a final conclusion of this thesis.

This paper is designed to analyse the situation regarding the attempt to implement democracy in Egypt and why it failed. Theories regarding democratic transition and consolidation is acting as scientific instruments to carry out this case study. This essay directs its focus on several key factors that has contributed to the prevention of democratic reforms. The theory concerning path dependence is used to compliment the remaining theories to distinguish vital historic aspects to this issue. Key factors such as the Muslim brotherhood, the Egyptian military and regime, as well as the liberal movement is examined in this paper to illuminate their respective contribution to this situation. The conclusion of this paper focuses on the military, unwilling to surrender its power, along with the religiously fundamental brotherhood, growing rapidly. A democratic transition was in the making, only to be shut down by the military, regaining its former power. Although chaotic and military-biased reforms continued, they were far from democratic.  Because of all the key factors not sharing any political ideals, the situation has come to an abrupt halt regarding a democratisation process. The democratic ideal has become worn among the protestors and another try at a democratic transition is far from reality.

The Qatari-funded channel, Al-Jazeera Arabic (AJA) has been subject to criticism as being in favour of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt. The approach taken by AJA Satellite Television to represent the MB, the Mubarak regime and other political actors in Egypt, during its coverage of four key electoral moments - before and after the 2011‘revolution’- is reviewed in this research. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is applied to study the constructive effects of AJA’s language in an interpretive way (Parker & Burman, 1993). The effect of the language used by two predominant AJA TV programmes, Without Borders بلا حدود and Opposite Direction الاتجاه المعاكس has been investigated and a number of current and former AJA journalists have been interviewed. Van Dijk’s Ideological Square and Pier Robinson’s Framing Model, in conjunction with Chouliaraki’s Three Rhetorical Strategies (Verbal Mode, Agency and Time Space) have been used as analysis tools to study the process of AJA’s representation of different political ideologies: the MB’s Islamic ideology and the Mubarak regime’s secular ideology. Van Dijk’s Ideological Square helps to identify the boundaries between ‘us’ (the good) and ‘them’ (the bad), and to classify people according to their support of specific ideology against another - the ‘in-group’ or the ‘outgroup’. AJA positively framed the Islamic MB movement on the basis that the group and its members were democratic, Islamic and victims, whereas it negatively framed the Mubarak regime and the Military Council in Egypt as repressive, secular and villains. The assigned role of different actors (including; the Egyptian people and opposition parties) in AJA TV programmes changed from one electoral moment to another. While the Mubarak regime, its supporters and the Military Council were represented as the ‘out-group’ at all times, the role allocated to the Egyptian people and the opposition shifted between the ‘in-group’ and the ‘out-group’, depending on the political mood they held towards the MB.