Cronyism and Elite Capture in Egypt: From Businessmen Cabinet to Military Inc.

by Sarah Smierciak

Overview

Examining business-state networks in Egypt (1991–2020), this book highlights the complicity of international actors in facilitating inequality and elite capture. Using interdisciplinary methodology, it argues that Western actors promoting market liberalization have served as central partners in enabling elites to capture the fruits of Egypt’s economic reforms.

In the years leading up to the 2011 Revolution, Egypt’s crony capitalism reached new levels of visibility with the appointment of a "Businessmen Cabinet." The businessmen-turned-state representatives ushered in a wave of "market liberalizing" reforms, expanding avenues for the abuse of power. Providing a detailed look at some of this period’s chief beneficiaries, including a number of Egypt’s wealthiest oligarchs, the volume follows their ascent from former President Hosni Mubarak’s first round of neoliberal reforms in 1991 through his last wave of reforms beginning in 2004 and ending in regime overthrow. The final chapter examines the fate of these elites under the brief rule of Muslim Brotherhood President, Mohammed Morsi, and of Abdel Fattah el Sisi’s current military-backed regime.

Based on five years of fieldwork and dozens of interviews with businessmen and state representatives, this book offers a unique look into the politics of policy, and inequality, in Egypt. It will be of interest to scholars reading political economy, international development, and Middle East studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032028156
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/31/2023
Series:	Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sarah Smierciak is currently based in Cairo where she writes freelance political economy analysis. She taught undergraduate courses on history and politics in the Middle East and North Africa at Oxford University. In 2016 she was awarded a Fulbright Grant to conduct research in Istanbul with Syrian and Iraqi communities. Sarah co-edited the Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Egypt (2021) and wrote Moon Egypt, a travel guide for the Moon series (2022).

Table of Contents

Introduction. 1. Providing Context. 2. Reconceptualizing “Business” and “State” in Business-State Relations. 3. Developing Egypt’s “SMEs:” The Social Fund for Development. 4. USAID’s “Private Sector” Projects: Planting the Seeds of Exclusion. 5. The Businessmen Cabinet’s “Public Private Partnerships” for Exclusive Development. 6. Reform Losers: The Cosmopolitan Capital Deficient. 7. Public Resources, Private Equity: Reaping the Fruits of Financial Liberalization. 8. The QIZ Agreement: Negotiating Networks of Privilege. 9. Expanding Privilege?: International Actors Complicating Domestic Agendas. 10: Reorganizing Networks of Privilege: Disruption, Reconfiguration and Persistence in the Face of Regime Change, 2011-2020. Conclusion. Acronyms. Bibliography. Appendix I: Network Chart.

Editorial Reviews

"This book is both uniquely broad and deep in its approach to understanding Egypt’s development ‘failure’ which has occurred despite massive external support provided to the country. It presents a model by which similar developmental failures, whether in the MENA or elsewhere, can be analyzed and compared."
Robert Springborg, Naval Postgraduate School, USA 

"Sarah’s work is an excellent contribution to the political economy of Egypt and the Middle East. It studies Egypt’s globalized trade and investment sectors. It reveals how foreign financial and developmental institutions were part of the networks of state-business relations, which has been hardly addressed before."
Amr Adly, The American University in Cairo, Egypt

"Interdisciplinary in methodology and theoretical orientation, Cronyism and Elite Capture in Egypt provides the most persuasive account of the networks, domestic and international, that shaped Egypt’s global market integration on neoliberal terms and reaped its benefits. Smierciak also reveals herself as a gifted narrator, and the result is an eminently readable story, absorbing and infuriating in equal parts, of crony capitalism in the late Mubarak era."
Roberto Roccu, King’s College London, UK

From the Publisher