Militarizing the Nation

Zeinab Abul-Magd examines both the visible and often invisible efforts by Egypt’s semi-autonomous military to hegemonize the country’s politics, economy, and society over the past six decades to show how it gains and maintains control.

Zeinab Abul-Magd is associate professor of Middle Eastern history at Oberlin College. She is the author of Imagined Empires: A History of Revolt in Egypt (2013) and coeditor of Businessmen in Arms: How the Military and Other Armed Groups Profit in the MENA Region (2016).

Philippe Droz-Vincent, Middle East Institute:
A must-read...Unlike the flurry of publications after January 2011 that viewed the Egyptian military from the outside as a black box making crucial decisions (i.e. to let Mubarak fall and then govern, and then to deal with and later topple the Muslim Brotherhood), this book provides more context. It describes how the Egyptian army, especially after the 1980s, managed to entrench itself in the state apparatus, the economy (even during times of privatization), and society. This book supersedes all previous empirical works in this area of study. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the decisions of the Egyptian military after 2011, and the enduring weight of these actions.

Shana Marshall, George Washington University:
Abul-Magd has written an empirically-rich and thoughtfully organized book. By capitalizing on many newly-available sources of information and contextualizing this in a broader theoretical literature on militarization, she has made the otherwise opaque subject of Egyptian military politics into a comprehensible case study. This text will be useful to students of Middle East politics but also to comparativists interested more broadly in political economy and critical military studies.

Hazem Kandil, University of Cambridge:
The insidious connection between saving and militarizing the nation is the subject of this fascinating investigation of Egypt's current travails. Abul-Magd offers an impressive and meticulously documented account of this bleak process, from the establishment of military dominance in 1952 to its resurgence after 2011, and concludes with prescriptions on how to reverse it. Militarizing the Nation is essential reading for those lamenting the fate of the 2011 Arab revolts.

Robert Springborg, author of Mubarak's Egypt: Fragmentation of the Political Order:
No other work provides such a detailed account of the military's penetration of the economy or the state administration, nor of the causes or consequences of that penetration. The topic is of major importance and the range of sources drawn upon is without parallel.