From Manshiya to Alexandria: Re-Examining the Process of Constitutionalizing and Normalizing the Emergency Status in Egypt


  •  Nora Taha    
  •  Asem Khalil    

Abstract

Recent political and legal developments within the Arab region have resurrected previously dormant historical debates and endowed them with a new life and vitality. The theory of exceptionality has been prominent within these debates, being repeatedly reasserted in different constitutional drafts, and even celebrated, as a means through which political authority maintain and secure ‘the public order’.

Egypt long lasting rule relying on an emergency context has provided a worthy manifestation of how emergency rule have been installed in political and legal settings; and become presented as an only way to govern; in which it had been incorporated in different constitutions and manifested into a political exercise. We dedicate this article to witness these overlapping challenges to analyze why post-revolutionary regimes have failed to deliver a meaningful transformative constitutionalism that is based upon the principle of the rule of Law, and continued instead to rely on the emergency status as module of governance.



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