Resilience of the Nasserist ideology in Egypt: from its emergence to the Arab Spring

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2014

Öğrenci: CANAN ŞAHİN

Danışman: ÖZLEM TÜR KÜÇÜKKAYA

Özet:

This thesis aims to analyze the relevance of the Nasserist ideology in the post-Tahrir Egyptian political scene by looking into its formation and transformation to date. It attempts to respond to the central question as to how come Nasserist ideology, which is thought to have fulfilled its mission at the end of the 1960s, seems to have been resurrected in the contemporary Egypt whether at the regime level in the embodiment of a military figure General Abdal Fattah Al-Sisi or at the oppositional level in the organisation and the persona of a once anti-Sadat and anti-Mubarak oppositional figure, Hamdeen Sabbahi. Whether the perceived popularity of the military and the pronouncement of a secular-nationalist discourse against the Muslim Brotherhood in a nostalgic Nasserism symbolized in the iconographic prevalence of Nasser’s images next to Al-Sisi is a marker of a resurrection in the face of a popular uprising that took place in Tahrir three years ago is the central puzzle of this study. The aspects of the Nasserist state regime that have been kept intact so far and their relevance to the action taken by the Egyptian military and civilian opposition since the Tahrir uprising are examined with an in-depth descriptive analysis drawing on the existing literature on Nasserism, Nasserist legacy after during Sadat and Mubarak, programs of Nasserist parties, public speeches of the military and civilian Nasserist figures and their media representation.