Urbanism and Authoritarian Resilience: Preventing Popular Uprisings in Egypt
| Název práce v češtině: | Urbanismus a autoritářská rezilience: Prevence veřejných povstání v Egyptě |
|---|---|
| Název v anglickém jazyce: | Urbanism and Authoritarian Resilience: Preventing Popular Uprisings in Egypt |
| Akademický rok vypsání: | 2023/2024 |
| Typ práce: | diplomová práce |
| Jazyk práce: | angličtina |
| Ústav: | Katedra politologie (23-KP) |
| Vedoucí / školitel: | Jaroslav Weinfurter, M.A., M.Sc., Ph.D. |
| Řešitel: | skrytý - zadáno vedoucím/školitelem |
| Datum přihlášení: | 12.06.2023 |
| Datum zadání: | 08.10.2023 |
| Zásady pro vypracování |
| I intend to work only with theoretical concepts only. As I aim to elaborate on the concepts through a single case study, I will be outlining my position through none of the grand theories in IR. I plan to examine the topic through the lenses of the concepts of authoritarian resilience and authoritarian upgrading, as hinted above. Those concepts would allow me to better interpretand understand the processes on the ground, the framing will also hopefully make the study more generalizable.
Then remains the question of how to approach the actual analysis of urban planning in Cairo. Works in the field I came across often use the Foucauldian theoretical framework to explore on power layers behind the structures of top-down urban planning. His work on power structures stresses the relationship between urban planning and social control. 12 He elaborated on practices through which the population became the object of a political strategy of power in modern society, which would basically serve as the underlying theme of the research I plan to conduct. Methodology In my thesis, I want to analyse the recent urban projects and city expansion in Cairo, such as the construction of the New Administrative City, the instalment of barriers to mobility, the demolition of informal settlements and the general reshaping of Cairo’s downtown through governmental top-down planning. The analysis itself would be constituted as an exploratory single case study. Primary Data Type: 1) Urban design diagrams and urban plans of Cairo before and after the Arab Spring uprising, maps (Google). Most of the primary data (videos, urban plans, and descriptive documents on greater vision) are available on the following websites: New Urban Communities Authority, Ministry of Housing, Utilities and Urban Communities, Ministry of Planning, Monitoring and Administrative Reform. 2) Relevant government-issued documents (Cairo Urban Development Strategy, Egypt Vision 2030) 3) Interview – in the ideal case with an Egyptian urban specialist (Noura Wahby?) on recent developments in Cairo Thesis Structure Introduction Literature Review Theoretical Framework Case study of Cairo's redesign of urban structure - Empirical Findings (Haussmannisation of Cairo pre-Arab Spring, changes after) Discussion Conclusions |
| Seznam odborné literatury |
| Bogaert, Koenraad. Globalized Authoritarianism: Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco. Globalization and Community, vol. 27. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The Sinister Side of Sisi’s Urban Development.” Accessed September 24, 2023. https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/84504. Dalia A. Taha, “Political Role of Urban Space Reflections on the Current and Future Scene in Cairo-Egypt,” Architecture Research 6, no. 2 (2016): 38–44. Diren Taş, “Displacing Resistance in Kurdish Regions: The Symbiosis of Neoliberal Urban Transformation and Authoritarian State in Sur,” in Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Resistance in Turkey: Construction, Consolidation, and Contestation, ed. İmren Borsuk et al. (Singapore: Springer, 2022), 81–104, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4213- 5_4. Heydemann, Steven, and Reinoud Leenders. “Authoritarian Learning and Authoritarian Resilience: Regime Responses to the ‘Arab Awakening.’” Globalizations 8, no. 5 (October 2011): 647–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2011.621274. Larry Diamond, “Why Are There No Arab Democracies?”, Journal of Democracy 21, no. 1 (2010): 93–104. Morten Valbjørn and André Bank, “Examining the ‘Post’ in Post-Democratization: The Future of Middle Eastern Political Rule through Lenses of the Past,” Middle East Critique 19 (September 1, 2010): 183–200, https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2010.514469. Safa H. Ashoub and Mohamed W. Elkhateeb. “Enclaving the City; New Models of Containing the Urban Populations: A Case Study of Cairo in Urban Planning,” Vol 6, No 2 (2021), 202-217, https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/3880. Seyed Navid Mashhadi Moghadam and Mojtaba Rafieian, “If Foucault Were an Urban Planner: An Epistemology of Power in Planning Theories,” ed. Peter Stanley Fosl, Cogent Arts & Humanities 6, no. 1 (January 1, 2019): 1592065, https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2019.1592065. Stadnicki, Roman. “An Urban Revolution in Egypt?” In Egypt’s Revolutions, edited by Bernard Rougier and Stéphane Lacroix, 229–44. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56322-4_13. Šupa, Maryja. “Maps of Social Control: an Analysis of Urban Space According to M. Foucault." Kriminologijos Studijos 3 (December 16, 2015): 82. https://doi.org/10.15388/CrimLithuan.2015.0.8951. Ufheil-Somers, Amanda. “Urban Planning and Growth in Cairo.” MERIP, March 17, 1997. https://merip.org/1997/03/urban-planning-and-growth-in-cairo/. جدلية, Jadaliyya-, and Jadaliyya. “Regime-Security Urbanism: Cairo 2050 & Beyond in al-Sisi’s Cairo.” Jadaliyya - جدلية. Accessed September 24, 2023. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/37753. |
| Předběžná náplň práce |
| In political sciences, much attention has been given to the concept of Authoritarian Resilience in the MENA region, especially after the mostly unsuccessful wave of popular uprisings in 2011. Before the Arab Spring, the body of the research was focused on the question of why the Middle East region missed on the third wave of democratisation at the end of the 20th century. The understanding of the authoritarian regimes of the MENA region was mainly built around two dominant scholarly traditions, transitology and the so-called post-democratization paradigm. Both strands were invested in providing a causal explanation of why authoritarianism perseveres in the region. After the turbulences of the Arab Spring, the scholarly tradition was revisited as the regimes also refined their strategies of authoritarian governance. Heydemann defined a new idiosyncratic theoretical concept as authoritarian upgrading or learning. He builds on the strategies which the restored regimes in MEAN adopt and highlights basic elements of containing the civil societies.
In Globalized Authoritarianism Koenraad Bogaert analyses the urban spaces within the Foucauldian framework on governmentality, while he also concentrates on the neoliberal development and politics in the authoritarian states of the MENA region, his case study being urban policies in Morocco. Attempting to refute the "simplistic correlation between the transition to democracy and market liberalisation” he discusses the impacts of global neoliberal politics on urban development projects concerning informal settlements and reinvigoration of public spaces. He argues that such projects in fact help to create new forms of authoritarianism as they help to control the population by generating a divide between the classes. On a similar note, W.J. Dorman, a political scientist focusing on Cairo in the post-Mubarak era, concentrates on the gradual separation of the regime from informal neighbourhoods, where control over poor urban mass has grown more difficult. He has adopted a method of process tracing to explore the causal relationship between the neoliberal structural policies starting in Egypt in the 70s and Cairo’s fragmented nondemocratic urban layout. argues that the Cairo urban trajectory should rather be attributed to the lost lasting authoritarian political order, presenting concrete policies and initiatives. In recent years, several case studies have documented the current manifestations of authoritarian urbanism and have highlighted the role of urbanism in authoritarian state- building. Safa Ashoub together with Mohammed Elkhatib concentrate specifically on Cairo after the event of Arab Spring. In their article “Enclaving the City; New Models of Containing the Urban Population”, they trace the most disruptive changes in Cairo’s urban design infrastructure. Building on the theory of authoritarian urbanism, the article illustrates in much detail how the selected municipality or transport-related projects separate and control the population. Maged Mandour identifies the raids and attacks on police stations during the 2011 uprising as one of the impulses that urged the current government to alter the demographic composition in Cairo’s downtown and to relocate the key institutions to the New Administrative Capital. In a very similar viewpoint, Diren Tus explores the urban transformation in the Turkish city of Sur, mostly inhabited by Kurds. He lists several urbanistic projects that he argues serve as anti-insurgency tools as they allow the state apparatus to reconfigure the local communities and control them. Albeit from a different region, the chapter traces similar processes of how the state suppresses possible mass protests by controlling the socio-spatial sphere. Written from a rather normative perspective is an article by Dalia Taha, who published a study on the Department of Architectural Engineering on October 6 University in Cairo. She is invested in providing a set of design guidelines that would help preserve democracy through a transformation of the urban spaces in Cairo in the post-revolution era. This short study includes normative proposals for the re-production of urban spaces and is relevant for comparison purposes. |
| Předběžná náplň práce v anglickém jazyce |
| In political sciences, much attention has been given to the concept of Authoritarian Resilience in the MENA region, especially after the mostly unsuccessful wave of popular uprisings in 2011. Before the Arab Spring, the body of the research was focused on the question of why the Middle East region missed on the third wave of democratisation at the end of the 20th century. The understanding of the authoritarian regimes of the MENA region was mainly built around two dominant scholarly traditions, transitology and the so-called post-democratization paradigm. Both strands were invested in providing a causal explanation of why authoritarianism perseveres in the region. After the turbulences of the Arab Spring, the scholarly tradition was revisited as the regimes also refined their strategies of authoritarian governance. Heydemann defined a new idiosyncratic theoretical concept as authoritarian upgrading or learning. He builds on the strategies which the restored regimes in MEAN adopt and highlights basic elements of containing the civil societies.
In Globalized Authoritarianism Koenraad Bogaert analyses the urban spaces within the Foucauldian framework on governmentality, while he also concentrates on the neoliberal development and politics in the authoritarian states of the MENA region, his case study being urban policies in Morocco. Attempting to refute the "simplistic correlation between the transition to democracy and market liberalisation” he discusses the impacts of global neoliberal politics on urban development projects concerning informal settlements and reinvigoration of public spaces. He argues that such projects in fact help to create new forms of authoritarianism as they help to control the population by generating a divide between the classes. On a similar note, W.J. Dorman, a political scientist focusing on Cairo in the post-Mubarak era, concentrates on the gradual separation of the regime from informal neighbourhoods, where control over poor urban mass has grown more difficult. He has adopted a method of process tracing to explore the causal relationship between the neoliberal structural policies starting in Egypt in the 70s and Cairo’s fragmented nondemocratic urban layout. argues that the Cairo urban trajectory should rather be attributed to the lost lasting authoritarian political order, presenting concrete policies and initiatives. In recent years, several case studies have documented the current manifestations of authoritarian urbanism and have highlighted the role of urbanism in authoritarian state- building. Safa Ashoub together with Mohammed Elkhatib concentrate specifically on Cairo after the event of Arab Spring. In their article “Enclaving the City; New Models of Containing the Urban Population”, they trace the most disruptive changes in Cairo’s urban design infrastructure. Building on the theory of authoritarian urbanism, the article illustrates in much detail how the selected municipality or transport-related projects separate and control the population. Maged Mandour identifies the raids and attacks on police stations during the 2011 uprising as one of the impulses that urged the current government to alter the demographic composition in Cairo’s downtown and to relocate the key institutions to the New Administrative Capital. In a very similar viewpoint, Diren Tus explores the urban transformation in the Turkish city of Sur, mostly inhabited by Kurds. He lists several urbanistic projects that he argues serve as anti-insurgency tools as they allow the state apparatus to reconfigure the local communities and control them. Albeit from a different region, the chapter traces similar processes of how the state suppresses possible mass protests by controlling the socio-spatial sphere. Written from a rather normative perspective is an article by Dalia Taha, who published a study on the Department of Architectural Engineering on October 6 University in Cairo. She is invested in providing a set of design guidelines that would help preserve democracy through a transformation of the urban spaces in Cairo in the post-revolution era. This short study includes normative proposals for the re-production of urban spaces and is relevant for comparison purposes. |