While democracy is the least likely outcome of any given democratic transition from authoritarianism, this dissertation argues that the likelihood for democratization diminishes even further in a praetorian state. This is because the military continues to play a decisive role in the transition either directly or indirectly. If the transitions appears bound to bring about civilian control, the military will decide to rule overtly.
At a broad conceptual level, this project adds to the existing literature on democratic breakdown that has been comparatively overlooked in relation to transitions and consolidation. The research also expands on the civil-military literature, and aims to explore the role praetorian militaries play during political transitions and processes of democratic consolidation. In particular, it seeks to explain the conditions under which a guardian or a moderator praetorian army would opt to become a ruling praetorian army, and, therefore, preclude the possibility of democratic consolidation. Indeed, this work aims to identify the factors responsible for the undoing of Egypt’s electoral advances, and whether or not that outcome was inevitable. The general assertion here is that the imbalance of power within the state, caused by the army’s oversized political role, and within society, caused by the Brotherhood’s relative organizational prowess, meant a confrontation between the two was virtually unavoidable.
Fearing the prospect of subjective civilian control imposed by a potentially hegemonic party, a praetorian military is bound to check that party’s rise by waging a coup d’état in order to maintain the army’s institutional autonomy, economic privileges and right to rule. The rest of the political class aids this process by playing the role of the disloyal opposition paving the way for the officers to remove civilian officials, and carry out a restorative coup.
While praetorian armies prefer to delegate the burden of governing to pliable civilians, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’ (SCAF) failure to orchestrate a political transition into a tutelary democracy drove the army to shift its posture into ruling praetorianism. Contrary to their wishes and interests, the political transition engendered an intolerable situation for the army: the emergence, in the Muslim Brotherhood, of a potentially hegemonic party that repeatedly attempted (and failed) to subject the military to civilian control. / 2028-02-29T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/45698 |
| Date | 23 February 2023 |
| Creators | El-Shimy, Yasser |
| Contributors | Chehabi, Houchang, Norton, Augustus R. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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