Civilian President Research Articles

A Comparative Analysis of Dauda Jawara and Yahya Jammeh’s Foreign Policy in the Gambia (1965-2016)

This paper provides a comparative analysis of foreign policies of Gambia under President Dawda Jawara, from 1965 -1994 and Yahya Jammeh, Gambia’s Head of State and a civilian President from 1994-2017. The paper utilized secondary materials from journals, books, newspapers, government reports and other relevant secondary documents. The findings of the study show that the Gambia’s foreign policy under Dawda Jawara exhibits dynamism, in both formulation and implementation. However, evidence from the paper shows a radical transformation of Gambia’s foreign policy on the one hand and some kind of continuity, under the Jammeh administration. The paper also found that Gambia’s foreign policy under the administration of Dawda Jawara was largely pro-west, against its afrocentric claims. Gambia under Jawara relied heavily on handouts (foreign aid) from the West. However, evidence exist to show a paradigm shift and a radical transformation of the Gambia’s foreign policy under Yahya Jammeh that was engraved with anti-West and pro- Asia rhetorics, with considerable attention given to African Affairs. This treatise concludes that leadership personality and the type of government in power played a strong role in determining and shaping foreign policy direction of a state, as demonstrated in Gambian state under Dauda Jawara and Yahya Jammmeh.

Cuban Exceptionalism and Leader Succession: The End of Charismatic Authority in Cuba

This article investigates the leadership succession in Cuba from Fidel Castro, who was widely perceived as a highly charismatic leader, to his younger brother Raúl Castro and then to the civilian President Miguel Díaz-Canel. This leadership succession provides us with an interesting and unusual case study of a successful transfer of authority from one type of leader to another. We examine the narratives of Cuban people through 32 semi-structured interviews, allowing us to draw insights into the Cuban people’s views of their leaders and the leadership succession. We identify themes that may explain how a crisis-free succession was possible, despite Weberian arguments that this was highly unlikely to occur.

Qualitative content analysis of Nigerian heads-of-state and presidents' inaugural addresses: text mining, topic modelling and sentiment analysis.

Political speech acts are critical for politicians launching a regime because they can provide information that can be used to control people's thoughts and opinions. The purpose of this study was to conduct a qualitative content analysis of the inaugural and ascension addresses of Nigerian heads of state and presidents. The textual data used in this analysis were the ascension and inaugural addresses of Nigerian Heads of State and Presidents from 1960 to 2019. They were extracted and analysed using text-mining techniques. Textual data were clustered about their topical content using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and speech cohesion between these addresses was examined using a similarity matrix and heatmap. Furthermore, term frequency and association analyses were performed to examine the high-frequency terms (tokens) and the terms (tokens) that are strongly correlated within each of the ascension/inaugural addresses (corpus). The summarization of characters and words in the ascension and inaugural addresses reveals that the Civilian Presidents used more characters and words than the Military Heads of State. There was an increase in the number of characters and words in the ascension and inaugural addresses among those who had served the nation multiple times. The total sentiment score in the ascension/inaugural addresses from 1960 to 2019 by Civilian Presidents and Military Heads of State revealed that the Civilian Presidents expressed more trust, surprise, sadness, joy, fear, disgust and anticipation in their addresses than the Military Heads of State. The most occurring term (token) in the ascension/inaugural addresses was the word government which appeared 221 times. The most token in the corpus government was found to be moderately correlated with the following tokens: loss, existing and majority. Similarly, economic was found to be moderately correlated with these tokens: inflation, building, education, exchange, loan, workers and technical. In this study, all the ascension/inaugural addresses share similar topic distribution: as seen in Abacha's and Muritala's addresses; and Shonekan's inaugural address was very similar to Balewa, Azikwe and Babangida's addresses; Babangida's ascension, Abdulsalam's 1998 ascension, Jonathan's 2010 inaugural and Buhari's 2015 inaugural addresses discussed similar topics to Obasanjo's 1976 ascension address. The highest average sentiment score was observed in Obasanjo's 2003 inaugural address and the lowest score was in Buhari's 1983 ascension address. The sentiment score for the ascension/inaugural addresses showed that Civilian Presidents inaugural addresses expressed more positive, joy, trust and anticipation than Military Heads of State. These emotions showed that the Civilian President's inaugural addresses are better when compared to Military Heads of State in terms of the sentiment scores.

The restriction of fundamental rights in the face of public security

The 1988 Brazilian Constitution guarantees the right to life, freedom, health, work, housing, leisure, assistance to the homeless, among others, as well as the right to security. Public security is a complex issue with peculiarities that evolve with society, and it is a constitutional right. In the military regime of 1964, fundamentals were repressed and restricted. With the inauguration of a civilian president, Brazil takes as scope, the formation of a democratic country, formed in 1985. There was the construction of a new Constitution, which only on October 5, 1988 was finalized and promulgated. The objective of this article is to carry out an approach on Public Security and its restrictions in the light of the Brazilian constitutions granted or enacted during and after the military regime. A bibliographical research was carried out in the databases of the World Wide Web. It brings together a theoretical basis on fundamental rights and their restrictions as a consequence of guaranteeing public security, throughout the Constitutions of 1967 and 1969, in contrast to the affirmation of these rights on the Federal Constitution of 1988. It can be seen that, in normative terms, there has been an evolution in the guarantee of fundamental rights, as well as in the scope of public security.

Discursive Construction of Synonymous Relations in Political Speeches


 
 
 
 Abstract
 Existing studies on political discourse have investigated the role of language in propaganda, the emotive use of language by politicians, the ideological undertone of modal verbs in political speeches, often ignoring the discursive use of synonyms, especially in the Nigerian context. This paper thus examines the discursive construction of synonyms in selected speeches of former Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo with the aim of identifying the ideological implication of the synonymous construction in the speeches. His speeches are worth studying as he was the first military head of state to be elected a civilian president, thereby leading the country on two good occasions. Twelve speeches were purposively sampled comprising those he made as a military head of state and as a civilian president. These periods are important in Nigeria’s political history. The study adopted evaluative semantics and sociocognitive approach of critical discourse analysis as theoretical basis. The former accounts for the synonymous relations in the speeches and the latter, their ideological import. The findings show that the synonymous relations represent optimism and expectations from individual, society and institution. Synonyms related to optimism are characterised by government’s commitment to positive change, transformation and hope, while synonyms that relate to issue of expectation from the individual, the society and institutions are characterised by societal development, forbearance, disorder, healthy information management and dissemination, and negative practices and values. Thus, these synonymous relations, when considered together with the co(n)text, reflect Obasanjo’s reformist agenda.
 
 
 

Variations among North African Military Regimes

This article explores the differences between two North African military regimes—Egypt and Algeria—which have been selected due to the continuity of military dominance of the political systems. Still, variations have marked their political development. In particular, the Algerian army’s approach to civilian institutions changed after a civilian president was chosen in 1999. This was not the case in Egypt after the demise of the Hosni Mubarak regime of 2011. Other important variations are to be found in the way power has been distributed among the military apparatuses themselves. In the case of Egypt, a principle of collegiality has been generally preserved within a body, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which is absent in the case of Algeria, where conflicts between military opposed factions are more likely to arise in case of crisis. How differences generally impact the stability of military rule in these two cases is the main contribution of this paper.

Nigeria and the Muslim Middle East: Historical, Political, Economic, and Cultural Ties

ABSTRACT Nigeria has the largest Muslim population and economy in terms of gross domestic product in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation among other political, economic, or cultural groupings. Thus, especially in good economic times, Nigeria has a great deal of influence not only on the continent of Africa, but also beyond that geographical region as a middle power. Domestically, Muslims constitute a slight majority in Nigeria’s population with almost all the remainder being Christian. Although Nigeria’s constitution prohibits an official religion, twelve of the country’s thirty-six states (located in the north) follow sharia, or Islamic law. Before Britain’s colonization in the nineteenth century, the northern regions of Nigeria constituted parts of two Sunni Muslim political entities, the Sokoto Caliphate and the Bornu Empire. Although Nigeria’s military and civilian presidents have sometimes acted on their own whims with regard to foreign policy toward the Middle East, in most cases Nigeria’s economic development and internal security have been their overriding concerns. This article addresses Nigeria’s relations with Muslim countries in the Middle East, among them Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, which are also middle powers. Nigeria, through a balanced approach, has been able to avoid getting involved in Middle Eastern regional squabbles and disputes, while at the same time benefiting from economic investment from countries in that region. Nevertheless, corruption and inefficiency have precluded any real benefit for the vast majority of Nigeria’s population from the revenues derived from the export of hydrocarbons. All the while the country has been affected adversely by the actions of both Sunni and Shi‘i indigenous jihadist groups, which have been inspired at least in part by developments in the Middle East.

Above politics? Ex-military leaders in Nigerian electoral politics

ABSTRACT In countries transitioning from military to democratic rule, authoritarian legacies often continue to influence politics. Whereas previous research has focused on the institutional causes of such deficiencies, there is a lack of studies examining the role ex-military leaders who re-emerge as civilian presidents have in sustaining authoritarian tendencies. In this article, we begin to fill this lacuna by investigating the question: how and under which conditions do ex-military leaders' political identity constructions affect their tendency to place themselves above politics (i.e. expressing the attitude and behaviour of being superior to democratic rules)? The literature on neo-patrimonialism and post-civil war politics points to the importance of the political identities of ex-militaries, and we propose a theory that highlights the role identity construction plays in shaping elites’ decision-making processes. Based on a comparison of two Nigerian presidents, Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari, we find that ex-generals' tendency to engage in politics from above is largely a function of to what extent they have diversified their political identities beyond their role as “militaries”. In this process, the degree of democratic consolidation also seems to play a role; ex-militaries operating in newly established democracies appear to have more opportunities to place themselves above politics.

Korean Constitutionalism and the Special Act to Prosecute Former Presidents Chun Doo-Hwan and Roh Tae-Woo

The Republic of Korea has undergone extensive political change over the past few years. After decades of military and quasi-military dictatorships, in December 1992 Korea elected a civilian president, former dissident leader Kim Young-sam. Although a milestone at the time, representing a break from the authoritarian past, events since then have in many ways transcended Kim’s election. The disclosure in October 1995 that former president Roh Tae-woo had amassed a slush fund of over $650 million while in office, and later allegations that Chun Doo-hwan, who served as president prior to Roh, had coerced $900 million from Korea’s chaebols, sent shockwaves throughout the nation. But in all probability the most stunning development was the decision of President Kim, in late November 1995, to direct his ruling party to enact a law to prosecute Chun and Roh for their respective roles in a 1979 coup d’etat and 1980 bloody crackdown on Korean citizens in Kwangju. This law, enacted in December 1995, and dubbed the ‘Special Act Concerning the May 18th Democratization Movement’ (“Special Act”), has been the subject of criticism for its seeming disregard of significant constitutional issues.’ The Special Act was enacted to seek retribution for the past acts of bloodshed and military usurpation, and to give closure to an unfortunate chapter in the recent history of Korea. However, because the law enables prosecution of a past act for which the statute of limitations has run, it raises issues about its retroactivity, and whether it is a violation of the Korean Constitution’s prohibition against ex post facto laws. Other objections have been raised concerning whether the law encroaches on Korean principles of legality and equality before the law, also issues of a constitutional nature. It has also been protested that Chun and Roh were subjected to double jeopardy as a result of the law’s enactment. Although these challenges to the Special Act are formidable, one cannot feel much sympathy for the former presidents, whose acts showed total disregard for the Constitution which they now seek to hide behind. Still, important negative consequences may result from the current circumventing of constitutional law. Significant strides have been made in Korea towards the foundation for the rule of law. This foundation is still weak, and it is important that corners not be cut.

Ruptures revoked: why the Central African Republic's unprecedented crisis has not altered deep-seated patterns of governance

AbstractThe Central African Republic experienced unprecedented violence between 2012 and 2014. We analyse three recent ruptures that developed as a result of this crisis, suggesting a break with the country's past. First, the Séléka rebellion that started in 2012; second, the establishment of a robust UN Peacekeeping mission in 2014; and finally, the democratic election of a civilian president in 2016. However, three deep-rooted patterns of governance have in each case transformed these ruptures. A history of outsourced politics, a plurality of violence and peripheral neglect push actors to perpetuate the violent past rather than breaking with it. We conclude that after an initial attempt to break with the CAR's long-term political economic trends, rebel groups, the UN mission and the democratic government have backtracked and now risk reinforcing the violence that mark politics and everyday life in the country.

TRANSITION TO CIVIL RULE PROGRAMMES IN NIGERIA 1966-1999: HOW SINCERE AND COMMITTED WERE THE MILITARY RULERS?

Within the period of thirty-nine years, 1960-1999, the Nigerian military ruled the country for twenty nine years in a series of coups and counter coup. These coups brought one military government to replace another. These replacements did not convince anyone that the military was sincere to hand over power to the civilians, even when some military governments promised or began the process of transition. Ironsi government promised but was not even allowed to draw up a transition programme before it was overthrown. Another military, Gowon, promised to hand over government but later postponed indefinitely the transition programme. This shows lack of commitment and insincerity. Mohammed learnt a big lesson from Gowon's failure. He overthrew Gowon and started in earnest the process of transition, but again the Nigerian military over threw him and punctuated the transition. Obasanjo derived so many lessons from all of these occurrences and pursued with vigour his transition programme and handed over to a civil rule even though he was not sincere about transition. Again the military over threw the Shagari government. Buhari did not commit himself to hand over power before Babangida over threw him. Babangida tried to transform into civilian president. His attempt failed. But Abacha was not wise enough. After pushing out Shonekan, his attempt to transform into a civilian President was brought to an end by death. Abdulsalami like Obasanjo got the lesson and in a show of determination to prevent another coup, quickly proceeded with transition which brought into power Chief Olusegun Obasanjo as a civilian President under PDP. Thus, circumstances and not sincerity compelled Obasanjo and Abdulsalami to hand over power in 1979 and 1999 respectively. Article visualizations:

Mário Soares (1924–2017)

Mário Soares (1924–2017) João Carlos Espada Mário Soares, a figure widely hailed as the founding father of Portuguese democracy and a member of the Journal of Democracy’s International Advisory Committee, died on 7 January 2017 at the age of 92. Three days of official mourning and a state funeral marked his passing. This formal tribute to his service as prime minister and later president of Portugal was also an occasion to honor and reflect on the key role that Soares had played in his country’s 1974 transition to democracy, which initiated the “third wave” of global democratization. For decades prior to the 1970s, Portugal had lived under a right-wing military dictatorship that was nearly as old as Soares himself—it had begun in 1926, when he was not quite two-years old. A Lisbon attorney and well-known foe of the dictatorship, he suffered no fewer than twelve arrests. In 1968, the regime sent him into exile on the Atlantic island of São Tomé (at that time still a Portuguese colony) off the west coast of Africa. In 1970, he was allowed to leave São Tomé for Paris. A few years after that, at a semi-clandestine meeting in West Germany, Soares and his wife Maria Barroso founded the Socialist Party of Portugal. He served as its first general secretary. On 25 April 1974, a nearly bloodless military coup ended autocratic rule in Portugal, and, as Samuel P. Huntington later put it, “implausibly and unwittingly” began “the third wave of democratization in the modern world.” In the early phase of what would come to be called the Carnation Revolution, Soares became foreign minister in a coalition government that included the Portuguese Communist Party, an unreconstructed Soviet-aligned organization. But Soares’s freedom struggle had not ceased. During the period of uncertainty after the dictatorship’s end, hard-line Communist elements in the Lisbon government began tightening their authoritarian grip on military, political, and civil institutions. Mário Soares resigned from that government in 1975, and then led a spontaneous coalition that managed to thwart the Communists’ power play, with the decisive moment coming in the form of a failed pro-Communist coup in Lisbon on November 25. Immediately after defeating that antidemocratic coup, Soares stood tall against attempts to outlaw the Communist Party, reasserting his vision of Portugal as a country firmly committed to liberal-democratic principles. In 1976, Soares became Portugal’s first elected prime minister and guided the process of joining the European Economic Community (the [End Page 176] precursor to the European Union), which admitted Portugal as a full member in 1985. In 1986, after starting with just 8 percent support in opinion polls, Soares won election as the first civilian president in the history of Portugal’s young democracy. Five years later, he was reelected with an overwhelming 70 percent of the vote. During the January 10 state funeral, a speech that Soares had made during his 1986 presidential campaign was replayed as his coffin was borne to its final resting place. Once again, Soares’s summoning words rang out: After the 25th of April [1974], some of those who had fought against the dictatorship started opening new prisons. They and their predecessors had mainly a blind lack of respect for their fellow citizens. They and their predecessors believed themselves to be the sole owners of the truth. They conceived of themselves as being predestined to save the Portuguese. There is a certainty that I have always had: that truth does not belong to anybody in exclusivity and that nothing can replace toleration. This is one of my great principles. I have always been on the side of those who were and are oppressed, those who felt and feel excluded from their own country. In Lisbon, in exile on São Tomé, as well as at Fonte Luminosa [the site of a landmark anticommunist rally in Lisbon on 19 July 1975], I have always fought for the Portuguese to be allowed to live with one another under liberty, for all to be allowed to feel that we all are an integral part of Portugal. While Mário...

Authoritarian El Salvador: politics and the origins of the military regimes, 1880-1940

December 1931, El Salvador's civilian president, Arturo Araujo, was overthrown in a military coup. Such an event was hardly unique in Salvadoran history, but the 1931 coup proved to be a watershed. Araujo had been the nation's first democratically elected president, and although no one could have foreseen the result, the coup led to five decades of uninterrupted military rule, the longest run in modern Latin American history. Furthermore, six weeks after coming to power, the new military regime oversaw the crackdown on a peasant rebellion in western El Salvador that is one of the worst episodes of state-sponsored repression in modern Latin American history. Democracy would not return to El Salvador until the 1990s, and only then after a brutal twelve-year civil war. In Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940, Erik Ching seeks to explain the origins of the military regime that came to power in 1931. Based on his comprehensive survey of the extant documentary record in El Salvador's national archive, Ching argues that El Salvador was typified by a longstanding tradition of authoritarianism dating back to the early- to mid-nineteenth century. The basic structures of that system were based on patron-client relationships that wove local, regional, and national political actors into complex webs of rival patronage networks. Decidedly nondemocratic in practice, the system nevertheless exhibited highly paradoxical traits: it remained steadfastly loyal to elections as the mechanism by which political aspirants acquired office, and it employed a political discourse laden with appeals to liberty and free suffrage. That blending of nondemocratic authoritarianism with populist reformism and rhetoric set the precedent for military rule for the next fifty years.

Media Review: al-Da'iyya (The Preacher)

THE EGYPTIAN DRAMATIC TELEVISION SERIAL al-Da‘iyya (“The Preacher”; al-‘Adl 2013), broadcast during Ramadan in 2013 (beginning on July 8, ending on August 7), was a minor footnote to dramatic events. The thirty-episode serial began five days after Muhammad Morsy, the only elected civilian president in Egypt's postcolonial history, had been deposed by the military to widespread though far from universal public approval. It ended seven days before the horrific attack on pro-Morsy sit-ins in two separate locations in Cairo. Aside from the sequence of events in July and August 2013, the speed with which Morsy's Muslim Brotherhood (or its formal political mask, the Freedom and Justice Party) went from handily rolling up election victories throughout the previous two and a half years to being flatly condemned in public culture as a terrorist organization fundamentally at odds with “Egyptian identity” (e.g., “Fahmy” 2014) was stunning. The received wisdom is that polarization between Islamists and non-Islamists grew between January 2011 and July 2013. This is certainly true, but the rapid turnabout in the fortunes of the Muslim Brotherhood nonetheless begs many questions about how such intense animosity emerged so quickly. While political polarization was unavoidable and unmistakable at the moment of Morsy's fall, it was nonetheless remarkable how quickly a fully elaborated “War on Terror” rhetoric emerged. Consequently, my review of The Preacher explores a ready-made anti-Islamist rhetoric that had been elaborated for decades in the media, and which could be pulled “off the shelf” and used performatively, as a rhetorical resource, by the Muslim Brotherhood's political and social opponents. I must acknowledge that I did not actually observe anyone “using” this particular serial. I was in Egypt when The Preacher was broadcast, and many people I knew were aware of The Preacher. They could hardly have been ignorant of it since billboards advertising the serial were all over town. But nobody I knew followed it closely. My attention at the time was drawn more to a different serial, al-‘Arraf (“The Oracle”; al-Imam 2013), which was essentially an admiring allegory of Mubarakism, produced, like The Preacher, during the one-year rule of Muhammad Morsy. I did know people who were quite entranced by The Oracle, and for them the serial certainly functioned as a form of moral support, confirming a world-view that saw the January 25 Revolution as at best a mistake, and at worst a foreign conspiracy. But The Oracle dealt with religion only obliquely, so here I turn my attention to The Preacher, which was fundamentally about Islamism. The anti-Islamist rhetoric of The Preacher was common in the summer of 2013, even if, in my experience, few people were referring to it directly.

FAKTOR KONTINUITAS POLITIK LUAR NEGERI MESIR TERHADAP AMERIKA SERIKAT PASCA REVOLUSI 2011

Revolution happening in a country often impact on the country’s foreign political change. However, the revolution that occurred in Egypt in 2011, followed by the election of Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood as the first civilian president of Egypt, it did not change the foreign policy of Egypt, particularly against the United States. In that sense, Egypt is still continuing good relations with the United States as in the reign of Hosni Mubarak. This research aims to explain the factors that affect no change in Egypt’s foreign policy towards the United States after the revolution of 2011, especially in the era of Mohammad Mursi. In this study, the authors use the neoclassical realism theory which states that the foreign policy adopted by a country is the result of domestic political dynamics that are influenced by international structures. By using literature data collection, this study resulted in the finding that no change in the foreign policy of Egypt during the reign of Mohammad Mursi against the United States is affected by international structures which then impact on Egypt’s position which acts as a buffer state of peace in the Middle East.This in turn affects the occurrence of domestic political dynamics that make Mursi Egypt decided not to change Egypt’s foreign policy toward the United States.

An International History of the Brazilian–Argentine Rapprochement

The establishment of political channels that allowed long-standing rivals Brazil and Argentina to pursue co-operation in the nuclear realm is commonly attributed to the work of civilian Presidents José Sarney and Raúl Alfonsín as well as to the re-establishment of democratic regimes in both countries in the 1980s. Nevertheless, archival research, recently declassified documents, and oral-history interviews confirm the hypothesis that these efforts actually date back to the 1960s. The initiative gained momentum in the 1970s with the settlement of the Itaipu-Corpus dispute over common freshwater resources and joint opposition to the United States’ non-proliferation policy. This article addresses the process which led to the establishment of stable forms of co-operation between Brazil and Argentina in the nuclear realm. It explores four different strategies adopted by each country in order to obtain access to nuclear technology and exert regional leadership: alignment with the United States (thereby relinquishing nuclear autonomy); establishment of strategic partnerships with alternative Western powers; development of indigenous technology through secret programmes; and bilateral co-operation at the regional level. The international context, domestic factors, and personal attitudes are taken into account with the aim of providing a comprehensive analysis of co-operation and trust-building processes in a non-Western setting.

Democracy and Democratic Consolidation in Nigerian Fourth Republic: Issues and Challenges

The present Fourth Republic came into being on 29 May, 1999 when the then military head of state General Abdulsalam Abubakar handed over the rein of government to a democratically elected civilian president in person of Chief Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo. Democracy was embraced by Nigerians because of the belief that it would improve their living conditions. But alas! Since restoration of democratic rule, the body politic has become over heated by lots of challenges among which are insecurity, ethno-religious crises, corruption, electoral malpractice among others. This paper takes a critical look at democracy and democratic consolidation in Nigerian Fourth Republic. The paper relying on qualitative approach, using data obtained from secondary sources such as text book, journal articles, etc., analyses the challenges confronting democratic consolidation in the country. The paper contends that these challenges have negative effects on democratic stability and consolidation. The paper recommends among others, good governance which encompasses accountability, responsiveness and transparency on the part of the ruler; provision of employment to the teeming youth who are unemployed, among others.

Arab Spring, Islamist Ice Age

Between June 30th, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Islamist military takeover
 in Sudan, and July 4th, Independence Day in the United States, something
 miraculous happened in the Middle East. Suddenly everyone was in agreement,
 and – almost – everyone was happy. President Bashar al-Assad was ecstatic.
 In an interview with the Baath Party’s newspaper Al-Thawra shortly after the
 army deposed Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s first-ever freely elected civilian president,
 on July 3, Assad applauded the coup as marking “essentially the fall of
 political Islam.”1 In his lengthy interview, he categorized his enemies into two
 groups: those “who completely abandoned their identity and embraced a ‘Western
 Dream’ even with all its flaws” and those “who went in exactly the opposite
 direction and abandoned their identity and embraced religious extremism.”2
 The latter he alternatively designated as “Wahhabis” or “Takfiris.”
 In the presumed bastions of Wahhabism in the Gulf, Morsi’s downfall
 was received with even more elation. Within days, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and
 the UAE pledged an aid package worth USD 12 billion to cash-strapped
 Egypt, showing how much they appreciated this outcome.3 And while Israel
 joined its sworn enemy Hamas in maintaining a guarded silence,4 its media
 (and some politicians) did not hide their glee at Morsi’s political demise.5
 As usual, the Obama administration was either unable to make up its mind
 or was too embarrassed to say what it believed. But that was in itself a clear
 stance, since the United States was happy to permit its key allies to provide
 massive cash injections to the new army-backed regime. It also refrained from ...

Egypt: shifting politics under army control

Nearly four months after President Muhammad Morsi was deposed, Egyptian politics remain profoundly unsettled. A civilian president and government, appointed by the military, are attempting to preserve the illusion of civilian authority in a country dominated again by the military.

Nation-building Initiatives of the Olusegun Obasanjo Administration in the Fourth Republic, 1999-2007

For much of its existence, Nigeria was governed by the military. From 1960 to 2007, a total of forty-seven years, the military ruled for twenty-nine years. The remaining eighteen years was taken up by civilian rule. The search for a functional and cohesive Nigeria was a constant leitmotiv that ran throughout the period. This search is what has been termed nation-building. The federal government of Nigeria was confronted with important nation-building challenges between 1999 and 2007. Some of these nation-building challenges are those of democracy, corruption, federalism and aggressive ethno-regionalism. By 1999, when Nigeria’s Fourth Republic was inaugurated, most of these nation-building challenges were yet to be resolved. When Chief Olusegun Obasanjo became the first civilian president in the Fourth Republic in 1999, he was confronted with the task of creating a functional and cohesive Nigerian polity. Thus, the central questions that this paper addresses are: 1. What are the mechanisms the Olusegun Obasanjo administration used to tackle Nigeria's nation-building challenges between 1999 and 2007? 2. What are the specific programmes the administration used in the nationbuilding process? 3. What are the nation-building challenges that confronted Nigeria between 1999 and 2007? Keywords: Nigeria, Nation-building, fourth republic, Obasanjo, challenges.