Mustafa Menshawy
Biographic Data
| ID | 1122300 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mustafa Menshawy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mustafa |
| FAMILY NAME | Menshawy |
| SIGNATURE | MENSHAWY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0092-1638 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Beautiful authoritarianism: Contributions of the leader’s wife in Egypt and Jordan
Authoritarian leaders constantly search for allies to harness their strategies for maintaining their hold on power such as repression, legitimation or co-optation. In this article I argue that the wife of a leader is one key ally contributing to implementing these strategies as she uniquely occupies two positions; she is a woman who aims to control other women for strategic reasons by claiming to represent them as part of performing ‘hegemonic fe…
Love Me, Love Us, Love Him: Entangled Emotions, Marriage and Membership in the Muslim Brotherhood
Emotions in the Muslim Brotherhood have been largely overlooked in the literature. This article examines how the movement strategically regulates specific emotions—and the processes that generate them—to keep members in as well as to prevent and deter them from leaving. It focuses on conjugal love as it is produced through endogamous arranged marriage practices. Drawing on frame analysis of Brotherhood literature and fieldwork conducted in Egypt,…
Sectarian Identities in Bahrain and Kuwait: Constructing and Contesting the State
Why Arabs hate their leaders’ wives? More than a woman, less than a man
During the Arab Spring, anti-regime demonstrations involved shouts and slogans specifically targeting the wives of authoritarian leaders and their identities as women instead of directly targeting their brutal husband-leaders. This is often explained by characterizing these women as ‘easy targets’. The article challenges this explanation by demonstrating how the leaders’ wives in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Jordan were key agents of auth…
The hegemony tax: Performing masculinities and femininities by Egypt's Mubarak and Mrs. Mubarak
Hegemonic femininity has previously been defined as a static entity describing the behaviour of some women as they oppress other women for the sake of reinforcing hegemonic masculinity. In return, those women are paid limited and marginal benefits, alongside heavy “taxes” (Hamilton et al., 2019), including entrenching the subordination of all women as a group to men. This article makes a number of arguments. First, the benefits, or, “premiums” pa…
Public diplomacy of authoritarianism: Strategic use of Suzanne Mubarak
A leader's wife can be a key player in consolidating his authoritarianism through her public diplomacy activities. Taking the example of Egypt's former First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak (1981-2011), this article demonstrates how her role in public diplomacy framed her as a "modern" woman with a mission of "modernizing" women or the country's whole population. The modernization model adopted in these frames presumes the need for agents to transform "tra…
Is the Muslim Brotherhood a Sect
This article proposes the novel understanding of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a sect, going against the grain of the existing literature, which posits it as a political group, a social movement, or a religious movement (or some combination of all of the above). The sectarianisation occurs within the group via ideological build-up, organisational tactics, and internal socialisation of behaviour. The group is also a sect by constituting its u…
Ruling by Wife
Research on the powers or roles of first ladies in authoritarian Arab states suffers from two gaps. First, there are always attempts to homogenize women under which the president’s spouse is simply subsumed within categories such as “Arab women,” “Muslim women,” or “Egyptian women.” Second, literature explaining the dynamics of authoritarian durability has mainly focused on what is institutional, for instance, the army, legislature, and political…
The irony of sectarianism: Sectarianizing by desectarianizing in Syria
The study seeks to resolve a conundrum in Syrian politics: the ruling regime has always claimed and celebrated a harmonious social fabric, national unity, and a long-standing tradition of coexistence despite the prevalence of an opposite grim reality marked by sectarian divisions and factionalism which the regime itself mainly created or sustained. I explore the process of acting "as if not" by analyzing the speeches of Syria's President Bashar a…
"Discoursing sectarianism" approach: What and how to analyse in sectarian discourses
This article puts forth 'discoursing sectarianism' as an approach helping overcome gaps in essentialism, instrumentalism and constructivism as the three main lines of analysing sectarianism. The approach takes language as a point of departure, showing how it can dually describe reality as a 'neutral' medium of communication and also create reality as constitutive component of practices sectarianisation. The approach also focuses on workings of id…
The Muslim Brotherhood Faultline in Saudi-Qatari Relations: Domestic Divisions and Regional Rivalry
The commentary argues the Saudi-Qatari tensions lie in conflicting perspectives about the role of political Islam within the fabric of both states and their actions regionally. Funda-mentally, the rivalry stems from contrasting relations between political and religious elites in each country which has taken on an increasing political importance in tensions between Riyadh and Doha. Central to much of this are questions about the role played by the…
Sovereignty alignment process: Strategies of regime survival in Egypt, Libya and Syria
Sovereignty is an ambiguous concept. It is always saturated with multiple meanings, especially as other concepts are either defined in terms of it or depend on it for their own meanings. It gets more ambiguous as scholars, especially those adopting constructivism as a theory of politics and international relations, move onto divergent paths, creating a gap between theory and practice. The article proposes the sovereignty alignment process as a tw…
Becoming an Ex: Dynamics of Disengagement from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood after 2011
This article explores the disengagement of members from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Following both the 2011 uprising and the 2013 coup, increasing disenchantment with the group’s ideology and political project have led many members to reconsider their commitment to, and membership in, the Brotherhood. While scholarship examining the Brotherhood’s processes of recruitment and forming of collective identity is burgeoning, few works have assessed me…
The Ideology Factor and Individual Disengagements from the Muslim Brotherhood
Since 2011, there has been a growing wave of individuals leaving Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and many of them have opted for documented publicity by writing autobiographies narrating their whole journey. This article explores the ideological components of the disengagement process on the basis of a frame analysis of these writings. It seeks to understand how individuals acted against some of the meanings central to the Brotherhood's ideological c…
Leaving the Muslim Brotherhood: Self, Society and the State
The Legitimating Power of Discourse: Constructing the 1973 War under Mubarak
In this article, I examine a corpus of texts that address the 1973 war; these texts cover the period from 1981 to 2011, marking the beginning and end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule. Utilizing Critical Discourse Analysis ( CDA ), I explore how Mubarak’s regime employed the war to legitimize its power and defend its policies by deploying longstanding culturally-embedded ‘macro themes’. These macro themes refer to the war as an overwhelming and undisputed …
Constructing state, territory, and sovereignty in the Syrian conflict
The article argues that sovereignty claims and counterclaims are still very much at work in international and civil conflicts involving state actors. Focusing on the case of the Syrian conflict, the article engages in methodological triangulation using Critical Discourse Analysis and international relations theories. It finds that the sovereignty-first narrative adopted by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and its external allies such as…
Locating religion in victory-making: The 1973 war discourse in Egypt
Most of the literature on the Arab–Israeli war in 1973 takes material gains and military advances as measurements that indicate victory or defeat. Accordingly, based on the magnitude of weaponry used and the associated tactics employed, scholarly works declare Egypt or Israel the winner. This article moves away from such ‘materialistic’ accounts of the war’s conclusion by exploring a similarly significant victory-maker: the use of the discourse o…
State, Memory, and Egypt’s Victory in the 1973 War
This book explores and problematises the war discourse regarding Egypt's victory in the 1973 War. It traces the process through which this discourse was constructed and reconstructed by the state throughout the periods of President Anwar Sadat, his successor Hosni Mubarak, and afterwards. It uses Critical Discourse Analysis to combine analysis of texts commemorating the war with a study of the socio-political milieu related to personal authoritar…
Turning ‘defeat’ into ‘victory’: The power of discourse on the 1973 war in Egypt
The article examines the construction of the 1973 war as a legitimating discourse in Egypt. After an analysis of formal texts (for example, school textbooks), semi-formal texts (for example, the Ahram newspaper) and informal texts (for example, songs scripted to commemorate the event), the article finds a pattern which constructed the war as a ‘massive, consistent and unquestionable’ victory for Egypt under the rule of Anwar Sadat (1971–81). Base…
The irony of sectarianism: Sectarianizing by desectarianizing in Syria
The study seeks to resolve a conundrum in Syrian politics: the ruling regime has always claimed and celebrated a harmonious social fabric, national unity, and a long-standing tradition of coexistence despite the prevalence of an opposite grim reality marked by sectarian divisions and factionalism which the regime itself mainly created or sustained. I explore the process of acting "as if not" by analyzing the speeches of Syria's President Bashar a…
The Ideology Factor and Individual Disengagements from the Muslim Brotherhood
Since 2011, there has been a growing wave of individuals leaving Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and many of them have opted for documented publicity by writing autobiographies narrating their whole journey. This article explores the ideological components of the disengagement process on the basis of a frame analysis of these writings. It seeks to understand how individuals acted against some of the meanings central to the Brotherhood's ideological c…
Constructing state, territory, and sovereignty in the Syrian conflict
The article argues that sovereignty claims and counterclaims are still very much at work in international and civil conflicts involving state actors. Focusing on the case of the Syrian conflict, the article engages in methodological triangulation using Critical Discourse Analysis and international relations theories. It finds that the sovereignty-first narrative adopted by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and its external allies such as…
Public diplomacy of authoritarianism: Strategic use of Suzanne Mubarak
A leader's wife can be a key player in consolidating his authoritarianism through her public diplomacy activities. Taking the example of Egypt's former First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak (1981-2011), this article demonstrates how her role in public diplomacy framed her as a "modern" woman with a mission of "modernizing" women or the country's whole population. The modernization model adopted in these frames presumes the need for agents to transform "tra…
Ruling by Wife
Research on the powers or roles of first ladies in authoritarian Arab states suffers from two gaps. First, there are always attempts to homogenize women under which the president’s spouse is simply subsumed within categories such as “Arab women,” “Muslim women,” or “Egyptian women.” Second, literature explaining the dynamics of authoritarian durability has mainly focused on what is institutional, for instance, the army, legislature, and political…
Why Arabs hate their leaders’ wives? More than a woman, less than a man
During the Arab Spring, anti-regime demonstrations involved shouts and slogans specifically targeting the wives of authoritarian leaders and their identities as women instead of directly targeting their brutal husband-leaders. This is often explained by characterizing these women as ‘easy targets’. The article challenges this explanation by demonstrating how the leaders’ wives in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Jordan were key agents of auth…
The hegemony tax: Performing masculinities and femininities by Egypt's Mubarak and Mrs. Mubarak
Hegemonic femininity has previously been defined as a static entity describing the behaviour of some women as they oppress other women for the sake of reinforcing hegemonic masculinity. In return, those women are paid limited and marginal benefits, alongside heavy “taxes” (Hamilton et al., 2019), including entrenching the subordination of all women as a group to men. This article makes a number of arguments. First, the benefits, or, “premiums” pa…
Is the Muslim Brotherhood a Sect
This article proposes the novel understanding of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a sect, going against the grain of the existing literature, which posits it as a political group, a social movement, or a religious movement (or some combination of all of the above). The sectarianisation occurs within the group via ideological build-up, organisational tactics, and internal socialisation of behaviour. The group is also a sect by constituting its u…
Sovereignty alignment process: Strategies of regime survival in Egypt, Libya and Syria
Sovereignty is an ambiguous concept. It is always saturated with multiple meanings, especially as other concepts are either defined in terms of it or depend on it for their own meanings. It gets more ambiguous as scholars, especially those adopting constructivism as a theory of politics and international relations, move onto divergent paths, creating a gap between theory and practice. The article proposes the sovereignty alignment process as a tw…
Becoming an Ex: Dynamics of Disengagement from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood after 2011
This article explores the disengagement of members from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Following both the 2011 uprising and the 2013 coup, increasing disenchantment with the group’s ideology and political project have led many members to reconsider their commitment to, and membership in, the Brotherhood. While scholarship examining the Brotherhood’s processes of recruitment and forming of collective identity is burgeoning, few works have assessed me…
Turning ‘defeat’ into ‘victory’: The power of discourse on the 1973 war in Egypt
The article examines the construction of the 1973 war as a legitimating discourse in Egypt. After an analysis of formal texts (for example, school textbooks), semi-formal texts (for example, the Ahram newspaper) and informal texts (for example, songs scripted to commemorate the event), the article finds a pattern which constructed the war as a ‘massive, consistent and unquestionable’ victory for Egypt under the rule of Anwar Sadat (1971–81). Base…
State, Memory, and Egypt’s Victory in the 1973 War
This book explores and problematises the war discourse regarding Egypt's victory in the 1973 War. It traces the process through which this discourse was constructed and reconstructed by the state throughout the periods of President Anwar Sadat, his successor Hosni Mubarak, and afterwards. It uses Critical Discourse Analysis to combine analysis of texts commemorating the war with a study of the socio-political milieu related to personal authoritar…
Locating religion in victory-making: The 1973 war discourse in Egypt
Most of the literature on the Arab–Israeli war in 1973 takes material gains and military advances as measurements that indicate victory or defeat. Accordingly, based on the magnitude of weaponry used and the associated tactics employed, scholarly works declare Egypt or Israel the winner. This article moves away from such ‘materialistic’ accounts of the war’s conclusion by exploring a similarly significant victory-maker: the use of the discourse o…
Constructing state, territory, and sovereignty in the Syrian conflict
The article argues that sovereignty claims and counterclaims are still very much at work in international and civil conflicts involving state actors. Focusing on the case of the Syrian conflict, the article engages in methodological triangulation using Critical Discourse Analysis and international relations theories. It finds that the sovereignty-first narrative adopted by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and its external allies such as…
Leaving the Muslim Brotherhood: Self, Society and the State
The Legitimating Power of Discourse: Constructing the 1973 War under Mubarak
In this article, I examine a corpus of texts that address the 1973 war; these texts cover the period from 1981 to 2011, marking the beginning and end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule. Utilizing Critical Discourse Analysis ( CDA ), I explore how Mubarak’s regime employed the war to legitimize its power and defend its policies by deploying longstanding culturally-embedded ‘macro themes’. These macro themes refer to the war as an overwhelming and undisputed …
The Muslim Brotherhood Faultline in Saudi-Qatari Relations: Domestic Divisions and Regional Rivalry
The commentary argues the Saudi-Qatari tensions lie in conflicting perspectives about the role of political Islam within the fabric of both states and their actions regionally. Funda-mentally, the rivalry stems from contrasting relations between political and religious elites in each country which has taken on an increasing political importance in tensions between Riyadh and Doha. Central to much of this are questions about the role played by the…
Sovereignty alignment process: Strategies of regime survival in Egypt, Libya and Syria
Sovereignty is an ambiguous concept. It is always saturated with multiple meanings, especially as other concepts are either defined in terms of it or depend on it for their own meanings. It gets more ambiguous as scholars, especially those adopting constructivism as a theory of politics and international relations, move onto divergent paths, creating a gap between theory and practice. The article proposes the sovereignty alignment process as a tw…
Becoming an Ex: Dynamics of Disengagement from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood after 2011
This article explores the disengagement of members from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Following both the 2011 uprising and the 2013 coup, increasing disenchantment with the group’s ideology and political project have led many members to reconsider their commitment to, and membership in, the Brotherhood. While scholarship examining the Brotherhood’s processes of recruitment and forming of collective identity is burgeoning, few works have assessed me…
The Ideology Factor and Individual Disengagements from the Muslim Brotherhood
Since 2011, there has been a growing wave of individuals leaving Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and many of them have opted for documented publicity by writing autobiographies narrating their whole journey. This article explores the ideological components of the disengagement process on the basis of a frame analysis of these writings. It seeks to understand how individuals acted against some of the meanings central to the Brotherhood's ideological c…
The irony of sectarianism: Sectarianizing by desectarianizing in Syria
The study seeks to resolve a conundrum in Syrian politics: the ruling regime has always claimed and celebrated a harmonious social fabric, national unity, and a long-standing tradition of coexistence despite the prevalence of an opposite grim reality marked by sectarian divisions and factionalism which the regime itself mainly created or sustained. I explore the process of acting "as if not" by analyzing the speeches of Syria's President Bashar a…
"Discoursing sectarianism" approach: What and how to analyse in sectarian discourses
This article puts forth 'discoursing sectarianism' as an approach helping overcome gaps in essentialism, instrumentalism and constructivism as the three main lines of analysing sectarianism. The approach takes language as a point of departure, showing how it can dually describe reality as a 'neutral' medium of communication and also create reality as constitutive component of practices sectarianisation. The approach also focuses on workings of id…
Ruling by Wife
Research on the powers or roles of first ladies in authoritarian Arab states suffers from two gaps. First, there are always attempts to homogenize women under which the president’s spouse is simply subsumed within categories such as “Arab women,” “Muslim women,” or “Egyptian women.” Second, literature explaining the dynamics of authoritarian durability has mainly focused on what is institutional, for instance, the army, legislature, and political…
The hegemony tax: Performing masculinities and femininities by Egypt's Mubarak and Mrs. Mubarak
Hegemonic femininity has previously been defined as a static entity describing the behaviour of some women as they oppress other women for the sake of reinforcing hegemonic masculinity. In return, those women are paid limited and marginal benefits, alongside heavy “taxes” (Hamilton et al., 2019), including entrenching the subordination of all women as a group to men. This article makes a number of arguments. First, the benefits, or, “premiums” pa…
Public diplomacy of authoritarianism: Strategic use of Suzanne Mubarak
A leader's wife can be a key player in consolidating his authoritarianism through her public diplomacy activities. Taking the example of Egypt's former First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak (1981-2011), this article demonstrates how her role in public diplomacy framed her as a "modern" woman with a mission of "modernizing" women or the country's whole population. The modernization model adopted in these frames presumes the need for agents to transform "tra…
Is the Muslim Brotherhood a Sect
This article proposes the novel understanding of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a sect, going against the grain of the existing literature, which posits it as a political group, a social movement, or a religious movement (or some combination of all of the above). The sectarianisation occurs within the group via ideological build-up, organisational tactics, and internal socialisation of behaviour. The group is also a sect by constituting its u…
Why Arabs hate their leaders’ wives? More than a woman, less than a man
During the Arab Spring, anti-regime demonstrations involved shouts and slogans specifically targeting the wives of authoritarian leaders and their identities as women instead of directly targeting their brutal husband-leaders. This is often explained by characterizing these women as ‘easy targets’. The article challenges this explanation by demonstrating how the leaders’ wives in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Jordan were key agents of auth…
Beautiful authoritarianism: Contributions of the leader’s wife in Egypt and Jordan
Authoritarian leaders constantly search for allies to harness their strategies for maintaining their hold on power such as repression, legitimation or co-optation. In this article I argue that the wife of a leader is one key ally contributing to implementing these strategies as she uniquely occupies two positions; she is a woman who aims to control other women for strategic reasons by claiming to represent them as part of performing ‘hegemonic fe…
Love Me, Love Us, Love Him: Entangled Emotions, Marriage and Membership in the Muslim Brotherhood
Emotions in the Muslim Brotherhood have been largely overlooked in the literature. This article examines how the movement strategically regulates specific emotions—and the processes that generate them—to keep members in as well as to prevent and deter them from leaving. It focuses on conjugal love as it is produced through endogamous arranged marriage practices. Drawing on frame analysis of Brotherhood literature and fieldwork conducted in Egypt,…
Sectarian Identities in Bahrain and Kuwait: Constructing and Contesting the State
Political science (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (10 works) · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts (10 works) · History (9 works) · Islamic Studies and History (9 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (9 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (9 works)