Elections and Expectations

Ellen Lust, associate professor and scholar of elections at Yale University, believes that a shift in people's attitudes toward elections is as equally important as rewriting the electoral system. "We tend to imagine individuals who are voters voting for individuals who are candidates, but that's not necessarily the case," she said. "Individuals going into elections and embedded in broader social structures with mutual relationships see themselves as being distinct from other s in other g roups. ... It's tempting to think that we've changed all that, and there's no reason to believe that people will go to the polls for the same things that they used to, but if you look at the literature that comes out of sub-Saharan Afr ica and Latin America, you see that clientalism is still alive. While the political system may be changing, there are lots of reasons that people's perception of themselves in society or how society fits together has not changed. It's not helpful to expect that problems will disappear just because there's a new system in town."

Reimagining Security Sit down with Hossam Bahgat of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, and he will tell you a story about the "slippery slope," his term for what he sees as Egypt's gadual
dissolution of human and civil rights.
"In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a serious threat of Islamist violence, and a green light was g iven to the security service," said Bahgat. "What we allowed to the counterterror
ism forces later expanded out to the State Security Investigations Service, then to the entire interior ministry until we reached the point of endemic cor r uption, abuses and violence." The revolution, he explained, has given Egyptians an opportunity not seen in years to reclaim their rights. "We need to revise the entire legal framework of the structure of the interior ministry as well as the specific rules for some departments," he said, emphasizing the importance of parliament as an oversight structure and civil society as a monitoring mechanism. "We should move the prisons department to the Ministry of Justice. Civil affairs, birth certificates and driving
licenses should not be given by uniformed officers. Instead, we really need to slim down the department to just issues of law and order."

Bruce Rutherford, author of the presciently titled book Egypt After Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam and Democracy in the Arab World (Princeton University Press, 2008), explained that the way to conceptualize security sector reform is to view it as the re-establishing of boundaries between
state and society. "If we start with the observation that the security services are an instrument of state power, the boundary between state power and society largely disappeared under the old regime," he said.

 

Rutherford also noted that the parallel court system, created under Nasser and employed to try civilians in exceptional courts and military courts, circumvented the legal system and was responsible for denying many Egyptians their rights, but had also left the ordinary judiciary largely untouched. "It is this judiciary that has been instrumental in many of the reforms and actions taken against the former regime thus far, from dismantling the NDP [National
Democratic Party] to detaining Mubarak and his family," Rutherford said. "To allow the judiciary to reclaim its intended role permanently will require reforms of that sector as well. Judges have been calling for a number of reforms, including a larger budget, the capacity to carry out their own investigations rather than relying on investigations conducted by the public prosecutor and the capacity to ensure that court rulings are implemented quickly and fully."

 

 

 

Consolidating Peace

Now that Mubarak is gone, it's time for the real work to begin, particularly given the recently contentious relationship between the role of religion and government in Egypt.
"Democracy is less likely to be consolidated if there are deep, unresolved divisions in the polity
about fundamental constitutional issues such as the relationship between state, religion and society," explained Alfred Stepan of Columbia University, adding, "Of all the major freedom and
democracy-ranking statistical bureaus, not one has labeled any Arab state a democracy in the last 35 years. Many Americans see that no Arab country is a democracy and all Arab countries
are Muslim, and conclude then that no Muslim countries are democratic. This is untrue, but clearly, the way religion is adopted into the state will make a huge difference in how democracy is consolidated."

In addition to religion, many are worried about how choices made to support the country's economy will affect the pace of political reforms. However, according to David Stark, also of Columbia University, the choice between economic and political reforms is a false one.
"Strength in the sense of being very powerful and unchecked did not bring about economic reform," he said. "Rather, the post-socialist surprise was that the main obstacles to democracy and economic development were not posed by those who gained the least from economic
reform, but rather by the early winners." Democracy, Stark noted, must have both vertical and
horizontal accountability. "Such extended accountability must go beyond those who hold office to organized groups and actors in civil society," he said.

 

 

 

By Madeline Welsh
Photos by Ahmad El-Nemr