North Africa

Nominee for US Ambassador Emphasizes Engagement with Egypt

By Elissa Miller

Egypt’s security, prosperity, pluralism, and its democratization remain vitally important to the United States. This was the key thrust of Ambassador Robert Stephen Beecroft’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 11, where he appeared as President Barack Obama’s nominee to become the next US ambassador to Egypt.   The United States has been […]

On the Price Egypt Paid, Unacceptable Arrogance, and Major Challenges to Come

By Amr Hamzawy

There is a price to be paid for the absence of democracy and for the way that security practices have dominated the system of rule in Egypt, utterly corrupting political life and subjugating it to the social and party elite such that one must either support these power arrangements, along with their decisions and actions, […]

Tackling Security Sector Reform in Tunisia: An Uphill Battle

Security sector reform (SSR) was a major demand of the Arab uprisings of 2011. And yet, three years later, little progress has been made toward SSR in these countries. On Tuesday, June 10, 2014, the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East hosted Hariri Center Nonresident Fellow Bassem Bouguerra and George Washington University […]

A Tunisian Public-Private Partnership Needed to Fight Terror

By Bassem Bouguerra

A group of armed assailants, made up of fifteen masked men, attacked the house of Tunisian Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou on May 27, only a few meters away from the regional National Guard center.

The Field Marshall Plan

By Matthew Hall

What can the Development Corridor mega-project tell us about how Sisi will govern? In a spate of television interviews during the final stretch of the campaign, presidential hopeful Abdel Fattah al-Sisi spoke of the entrenched structural problems facing the nation—an economic rut so deep that Egyptians could not hope to “run” from it, but instead […]

Freedom of Expression is not the only Victim

By Sarah El Sirgany

A day before the presidential elections results were officially announced, popular TV satirist Bassem Youssef announced the end of his comedy show, El Bernameg, telling reporters he was fed up with worrying about his and his family’s safety. MBC, the Saudi channel that gave him a platform, he added, had come under pressure to cancel […]

Marginalized in Mansoura

By Eric Knecht

If you were looking for a place to understand why Egypt’s younger voters were the least well represented at the presidential polls in May where the choice came down to presidential hopefuls Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Hamdeen Sabbahi, you could do worse than visiting Mansoura. The bustling Nile delta city, once sharply divided in its […]