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

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.