Good evening, my name is Walter Andrews. I'm a fellow of Middle East Centre, and I'm going to be chairing tonight's seminar.
The speaker this evening is Neil Critchley is an Associate Professor of politics in the Department
of Politics and International Relations at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies,
and is fellow of St Andrew's College and Middle East Centre as well.
Is a political scientist of the Arabic speaking Middle East and North Africa,
working at the intersections of political sociology and comparative politics.
His book, Egypt at a Time of Revolution, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017,
won the Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution Scholarship Award.
His current research interests include episodes of mass protests in the Middle East and North Africa,
the rise of political Islam in the interwar and interwar Egypt, and the changing profiles of regional political elites.
Neil's book was about revolution that occurred a little over a decade ago,
and today's lecture he's going to apply some of the methods he used and analyse in contemporary politics to historical events,
namely revolutions from above.
Specifically, the 1952 Free Officer Uprising, which, as most of you probably know, some describe as a revolution and others as a coup.
And of course, if it was the latter, then it was certainly remembered as a popular coup.
Hence, the blurring of the distinction between coup and revolution, or the exercise of the patriotic viewpoint,
depending on the degree to which you see the free officers seising power as a litmus
test of politics and historical sensibilities you see in the abstract the talk,
so I won't go through it in detail.
Suffice to say that the free officers revolt or coup or revolution, whichever term you use, is conventionally understood as a watershed moment.
In other words, an event that gets inscribed in memory and before and after terms.
But Neil's paper instead conjures with both change and continuity continuity in assessing this important event.
The title of his lecture is the fate of colonial elites in post-colonial regimes.
Evidence from the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. For those of you who may not have attended these online events before.
If you have questions, use the Q&A button and Zoom to ask your questions.
If you want to remain anonymous, say so in the questions you ask.
Otherwise, I will read out your name. If I ask a question and so with no further ado, I will turn things over to Neil Critchley.
Take it away now. Great. Thanks very much.
And thanks to everyone who's joined them. Just look to the participant list and I can see lots of lots of friends and students.
It's really lovely that you have. Thank you. So without repeating what I said too much, this is part of an ongoing project with my co-author.
Godwin is a Ph.D. student at UCLA, who's also here, I think might field some of the more difficult questions during the Q&A.
Where we look, it's actually part of a broader project that's still kind of unfolding, if you will,
where we look at the kind of causes and the consequences of 1952 where we use the
case because we're so secretly substantially interested in what happens in Egypt.
But we also think it's a case that can speak to kind of broader questions and debates the kind of found in political science,
political sociology as it applies to the MENA region and beyond.
As I say, it's a work in progress. It's very much a moving target. So any questions and comments, whether it was the, you know, that much appreciated.
So this kind of tranche of the project that we're really interested in is trying to think through how fifty two and then more broadly,
if we can generalise to a broader universe of cases transforms state and political elites.
And here we think that 52 is like a really nice example because it captures some of the what we think are the kind of
competing logics and tensions around what happens when groups of often junior officers capture the state as occurred,
not just obviously in Egypt, but obviously in Iraq and Libya and Syria and beyond,
and where they then find themselves having to run a state for a first time.
And in this,
what we're really interested in is trying to think about who those people who have come before who were kind of manning the state bureaucracy,
who obviously in the Egyptian context, we might, I think, somewhat clumsily and potentially programmatically framed as a kind of colonial era elite.
Suddenly, as we're going to talk about, we definitely have good and the notable class.
You also have an Ottoman legacy that you were kind of maintained and insulated and continue on the European British
colonial rule and who were manning many kind of key parts of the state on the eve of the 52 revolutions for a coup.
And what happens to them? How much? How many of them survive? They all.
Completely purged or do some of them managed to cling on for one reason or another?
And we think here that there are potentially competing logics that have, I think, mostly summarised here.
For example, this is a quote from having to keep speaking on the 24th of July.
So the day after the free officers seise power, where he says, you know,
we have declared from the beginning that the goal of our movement is to reform and cleanse the army and the institutions of the state.
And indeed, we often find this when we think about comparable cases, and it keeps us on several different occasions.
And also, it also refers to cleansing or purging uses the most to adhere, to cleanse or to purge.
And there's obviously a very clear incentive to do this.
They these free officers are confronted by threats, potentially counter-revolutionary threats that may be counter cues that may be in the offing.
And so they have genuine, you know, there are genuine threats within this and these different bodies that they might want to target and urge.
So there are questions of survival. There's obviously rhetorical incentives to be able to talk about purging and cleansing as a means
of means of having a clear demarcation from what comes before to what they're going to do.
Obviously, they need to be able to justify that. At the same time, we also think that there is a second tension running underpinning this,
which is when groups like the free officers find themselves in charge of a state apparatus.
They are constrained in many ways, both by the need to just keep the show on the road.
They need to be able to keep basic state functions running, but also because they have quite transformative programmes that they want to implement.
And as we're going to talk about that,
the kinds of expertise that are required to be able to implement those programmes can't necessarily come from the coup themselves.
It has to come from somewhere else.
And again, this is captured by this is a question from the givea actually, forget the context in which he says this.
But he says, you know that we need expertise in a number of different fields from engineering and medicine and economics and so on.
That is why I want each of you to write down 10 names and then submit them to me within a week because we are in dire need of technical,
capable patriotic methods for gendered language.
I would think that this that we're going to use this, this kind of tension,
this puzzle to try to try to illuminate why it is that when the free officers take over,
there might be forms of turnover and there also might be forms of continuity and survival of the kind of free revolutionary potential,
even colonial era elite. So let's get into it.
So as this kind of obligatory, if you if you come in kind of like a police kind of background,
you're obviously going to be able to route this into a broader universe of cases.
It seems to me that there are important script conditions for arguments.
One of the things that really characterised this moment again, speaking to broader developments both in Egypt and the MENA region,
is that we see in the Second World War theory a series of what we might think of as transformative
coups or so-called revolutions from above as Trump kind of famously classifies them,
often led by junior military officers often taking place without kind of large scale street
level mobilisation and often without a kind of a kind of independent base of support,
either amongst the people or the aristocracy.
This has to be manufactured later, in fact, because anyone who's going to read the history of the free officers closely knows.
Now. Crucially, in this, as opposed to what you might think of as a social revolution,
or we might think of as a kind of reactive, restorative coup revelations from a global transformative que,
so there's junior officers who seise power as a means to both capture the
state and then use the state and redirected to fulfil a particular political,
economic, social projects.
Actually, the bureaucracy tends to figure very centrally and consolidating the success in establishing the authority of the new regime.
And so in these kinds of contexts. There is purging going on, but it has to be limited purging of one kind or another.
So this then allows us to kind of effortlessly segway into a new fashionable literature that's coming out of political science,
which is increasingly concerned with this question of purging. Why is it that the elites kind of reconstitute themselves?
Why is it that across various discontinuities across democratic transitions accuse failed to use revolutions and so forth?
We tend to see a kind of purging processes, and there's a set of questions around why is it that some individuals may be more or less
likely to be purged than others saying that the kind of extant literature as you see it,
which is very, very recent, is overwhelmingly concerned we might think of as being quite shallow judges.
These are kind of limited efforts to kind of decapitate rebellious members of the upper elite, such as ministers or military leaders.
And this is obviously necessary if you have a failed coup and you only need to.
You don't need to reform the entire state.
You can just selectively target who you want to purge, as this is a sufficiently credible signal to be able to get the job done, by contrast.
And this is what we're kind of more interested in. We might think of actually that also being actually deep budgets,
which are much more structurally transformative and typically occur after revolutions,
either from below that, it's probably popular revolutions or using tempo.
This all got from above. And here are really kind of defining characteristics of the if these you have these revolutions is this kind
of displacement of the state elites primarily enacted or realised through purging till he talks about this?
Quite a lot.
However, and this is where our insight comes, and this is what we want to speak to are still evolving theoretical edifice that we're developing.
These kinds of deep purges, though extensive, have to by the nature.
They can't be indiscriminate. They will target potential threats people who they see as having potentially counter-revolutionary potential.
But they will look to retain certain types of people. We think, necessarily because going back to this point that they talked about earlier,
there has to be forms of continuity and there has to be sources of experience and expertise to be able
to implement the kind of revolutionary programmes that these people come to power promising to do.
So with that kind of awkward for clearing theoretical justification aside,
let's obviously get into the case in which I'm sure many of you you're familiar with,
but we'll just rehearse some of the comments of key who, how, where and when.
We know that on the choice of joint 1952, the three officers seise power.
And in doing so, publicly commit to purging the army, the state.
So this this question settings of purging is already immediately apparent is essential
to the political project exemplified by that Anichebe quote that I started with and by.
And then after initially coming to power, we see like a kind of like very polished and sudden interregnum transitional period where we have
brief moments of pockets and government before the military formally take over in September.
And shortly thereafter, the army announces the appointment of officers to all departments and administrations in the state
bureaucracy in an attempt to take control of it and then redeploy it to its own to their own ends.
Now, what we think of this is this is kind of a challenge for the free officers in many ways,
a bit like the keep quote at the beginning where he says, you know, we're really desperately in need of technical expertise,
and that's because our expertise cannot come from the ranks of the free officers and selves.
We know Gilbert and I, we have a data set now that we've constructed of all of the free officers currently
populating different biographical characteristics about not just their age,
but their background. They come from what they serve and so forth, and when they want to serve, we just talk a little bit about the very end.
And we know that when we just surveyed the offices, the middle rank of the four officers was captain.
40 percent of them. These are very young individuals that are thirty three years old and thirty six.
I'm not sure I would know how to run a state. I mean, they're very relative. They're inexperienced.
They don't really have any experience of higher education. The Revolutionary Command Council,
the political leadership of the free officers of its members and the two of them have graduated
from university and happened to give in many ways peripheral actually to day-to-day missions,
decision making. And then the only other thing I have admired in pictured pictured here and again, this, I think,
motivates this kind of puzzled that we're thinking about, which is given the kind of expertise that this group can draw on.
This must have implications for who they purge and who they retain within the state bureaucracy.
So this is going to be just the general research question that will speak to which
is this how did the 5G revolution transform Egypt's state and bureaucratic elites?
So to get to this is kind of empirically, you might think difficult, but we think we've got a really good we've got a really good way of doing it.
And that is by exploiting what is, I think, a hitherto unexplored or underutilised source, which is called Who's Who in Egypt.
It's also published under several other names. Here is the this is the front cover of the issue from 1953, and This is a Time series.
It's published from the 1930s, up until 1958 1959, when it ceases publications.
So these are held in kind of incomplete collections like this took a long time to kind of track down the various volumes,
but the majority of them were held between a set age and Cairo, which I'm sure many of you know the British Library holds quite a few of them.
University of Wisconsin-Madison, for some reason, has has a lot of the time series, so we've basically managed to.
What we're going to do is we're going to we're going to exploit the source to try to
give us some kind of time varying insight into who is the elite during this period.
And that's because one of the really nice things about the source material is that the front
matter of every issue this is I should also mention this is a volume that's published in Cairo.
It's printed in Cairo. It's edited by people based in Egypt, and it's published annually and the front matter of every issue, every volume.
There is a seemingly complete list of all ministers and senior bureaucrats in in the state at this period.
So this is, for example, as you can see, it's it's a kind of mix between.
It's mainly French for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and this is just assuming the kind of detail that we get.
We don't just get this the minister and the senior civil cents, we get the call of the top echelon of the state bureaucracy.
Now what's really nice about about these issues is not only do we have the names in their ranks and their titles,
but in the interior of these volumes, which are very thick, by the way, you could kind of use them as a doorstop or to beat a burglar with.
You have disaggregated biographical information about each person.
So this is of the end, including people who you would think are actually including quite sensitive positions.
So this is General Mohammed and then they we see some information about it.
In Zimmerman's right hand side, he's won an award. He's got a royal honour, the Nile.
He's the director of the special department at the Ministry of Interior sounds a bit spooky.
We have stuff like where he's born, we have his date of birth, we have his education, we even have where he lives.
And indeed, in some of the other biographical sketch sketches, we have even more than that.
We have who they're married to, which social clubs they belong to.
We have quite a lot of quite rich, disaggregated information that we can draw on and internal.
It should be noted, we've heard in all of these.
So from 1939 to 1959, have information for about two and a half thousand ministers and senior civil servants in Egypt.
And the project that I'm currently talking about now, we're only using a very thin slice of data.
So this gets us to some growth health warning that there will be some growth where we can start to get into this question of elite survival continued.
So this is just using this data to just basically plot how long people stay in office, who's 52?
So one of the really nice things about these issues here in Egypt is that the one that's published in 1952 is published in June of 1952.
So it's extremely current. It's it's literally a snapshot of the state and bureaucratically just before the free officers take over.
And then what we can do is we can use the subsequent editions to track whether
these same people appear in these kind of seemingly complete lists over time.
And this is the general distribution. We can see that nearly half of our individuals, they don't survive one year.
So by 1953, nearly half of them have disappeared and.
Here, maybe a bit more than 20 percent of them, and we lost one year and then we get this kind of interesting tale.
We're actually nearly 10 percent of all athletes actually stay till the end of our time series when these additions stop publishing,
which is at the end of our analysis period up until the consolidation of the United Arab Republic.
We can formalise this in different ways of any stats. We can think of this as a survival problem,
so we can think about the probability of individual survival in the aggregate over time for a Kaplan-Meier survival estimates.
So we can see that by year one after the coup, the probability of somebody surviving drops by 50 percent and then of the 25 percent.
And then again, you see this flattening going off. And it's really this that we're interested in who is being retained in the tail and who is more
likely to be purged in the kind of opening years as the kind of revolution unfolds and consolidates.
So this is when it gets a little bit numerical. So to do this,
we've got to think systematically and we've got to draw tools from often regression
analysis to be able to to account for the different kind of factors that we might.
We think that might be influencing this. So this is what we're going to do.
We're going to have a unit of analysis is going to be an individual.
We've got six hundred and seventy four ministers and senior bureaucrats who are in post in just on the eve of the coup in June of fifty two.
And we're going to index them. We're just going to pull these people I. And they're located in 19 ministries or institutions.
That could be the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ministry, Interior Ministry of Supply,
the Diplomatic Corps, Foreign and so on and so forth through Parliament, et cetera.
And what we're going to do is we're going to observe every one of these individuals yearly from 52 to 59.
And the thing that we're going to try to explain is who is going to exit the elite first?
So the way to think about this is, you know, what kind of familiar with these kinds of approaches.
I don't want you to think I'm just waiting a statistical one wonder the way to think about this is that every single,
every single time you observe these individuals, the question is we're going to multivariable as one when they exit the elite.
And the question is how many units of time does it take measured in years for them to exit the elite as opposed to
others as a function of a of a set of both individual level and ministry level institutional level characteristics?
So this is if you're kind of I'm very happy to talk about this in the Q&A, just briefly mention.
So the way we're going to estimate this is using a form of regression analysis in this case
is bit of a mathematical multilevel look normal accelerated failure times over the analysis.
Otherwise, you can think of this then history analysis.
People use this a lot, and it's actually a technique that's pioneered by a statistician based at Nuffield Oxford,
who died recently, said David Cox, proponent of the inventor of the occupational hazard models.
What you want to do is something happen. See what you have medical. You have medical records for a bunch of patients.
Some of them take the medicine, others don't. And it's the time to a medical outcome like survivable death.
We can use this in the same way to think about survival or turnover or exiting the
elite to study what happens to the state bureaucracy in Egypt after fifty two.
So here this is just going to explain why I went through the equation.
On the left hand side, the thing we're explaining is the time to the event for an individual located in the ministry in any given year.
And we're going to explain that by a bunch of independent variables measured at both the Independent,
at both the individual ministry level with basic the coefficients to be estimated.
We've got just a dummy time varying variable, which will capture a two minute regime consolidation.
And that's it. And then the key thing is that we probably think that individuals who are based in the same ministry,
the hazard of being purged is probably not independent of each other.
That is to say, if one person's purged in the Ministry of Interior,
that might affect the likelihood that another person working in the same ministry, they get punished.
They survive. And so we account for this by having ministry or institution level at random intercepts,
having to talk about this in the future, if that's in any way interesting or not clear.
So this is what we're going to do.
We're going to operationalise these ideas numerically using these individual level characteristics that we get from these biographies.
And we're going to we're going to structure around this competing dual logic of threat and experience.
So we know from who's who's in Egypt, you have quite a lot of information about these people.
We know, for example, if they're a minister and secretary, we can measure the closeness to the king at this point and who might be seen as a kind of
source of some revolutionary threat for the number of world honours that they receive.
This is all kind of proxy for proximity to the as good as we as we managed to get this far.
We also know the titles. We know if they are from the notables, we know if there are Asher, for example,
we might think that people with military training are more likely to be purged because they're seen as threatening these after it was,
after all, a junior officer. Q So we can account for that. And we can also.
We also think that there's something about spatial proximity that matters.
So after 52, we see the palace become the Republican palace, and we think that people,
which is the 52nd revolution, is in the in the words of the coup plotters.
It's a national revolution. What was a foreign conspiracy? We think that as a concept.
That threat is going to be felt much more locally within the confines of Egypt.
And so people who operate at a distance might see, for example, diplomats who are based far away from Egypt.
So we'll talk about a little bit about Egypt's diplomatic corps.
And just the second, we might think that these people are seen as less important.
And so because we're interested in talking to the events, we might think that threat also travels both spatially across and across time.
And so people who are further away are just not prioritising that. So they're more likely to be retained as a function of this distance.
So we can actually measure distance very, very easily. So we actually have maps.
This is a map on the left hand side of Cairo from 1951 one to just the eve of the of the Revolution Street View.
And we know these what you can see on the left hand side, the Ministry of Public Works, Parliament, Ministry of Public Health, and so forth.
And what we can do is we can just draw Polygon's around these buildings, get this central,
which is the average wage at centroid of these often multiple building spaces.
And then we can just measure the distance in kilometres between the building and the and what becomes in this case, the Abdeen Palace.
On the right hand side of the map, all the Republican policies of the Commons later on, this is actually much more interesting for diplomats.
We think that they're probably because of the political programme with the three or four offices.
They're probably going to be a set of privatisations around who's going to be recalled first, if indeed they are recalled.
This again, this is using the source material.
We can actually reconstruct the diplomatic presence of the Egyptian state or the fruit state on the eve of the 52 events.
So this is just obviously a chloroplast, not followed by the number of different acts we've actually seen.
Interestingly. And just on the eve of the revolution, most Egyptian diplomats are obviously in the United States and Europe.
They're actually very few in the Arabic speaking Middle East. And this changes over time.
But for our purposes here, the intuition is that if you're the ambassador to Argentina,
you're just not threatening in the same way as a senior official in the Ministry of
Interior and says a function of this distinction is more likely to survive for longer.
And then we also have some measures for this kind of competing set of hypotheses related to experience this idea that actually the free officers,
they do need to keep some people around to be able to get the job done. So we measure that in two principal ways.
The first one is just the amount of time that people spend in their position of data starts to think.
It's just going to mention the amount of years of persons held that position since starting line
with the with the expectation being that controlling for will net of all these other factors.
You know, if you know that if you notice a senior official or minister and undersecretary and you've been in your job for a long time,
that might be quite a desirable person to keep around.
Equally, we know quality in the case details that there's a real, real desperate need for technical expertise.
And so we might think that people with Temple University degrees are just seen as more desirable.
They're more important. And so they're also more likely to be kept around.
So the implication of this is that the threat these these independent variables are coefficient should be in this case, positively side.
They should be more likely to lead to somebody exiting the elite and contrary wise.
These variables should be negatively deciding that they should mean that you can survive longer effectively.
And this is a selection on observables designed to help you to think through at a kuto causal inference approach that you can think of.
And so we have to control for potential confounding stuff, and we get that from the case.
We know, for example, that in 52 53,
a kind of sop to the Muslim brothers is that they allow they appoint the Muslim Brotherhood to knock off the Ministry of Endowments
and that those are the brothers are allowed to kind of like take over some perhaps religiously inflected roles in the state.
So those individuals who are empowered, they may be more or less vulnerable.
We also think that when also takes power and 54, this represents a movement of regime consolidation, which could go one of the two ways it could be.
Either that this then elicits a further round of purging or as we think, is really the case.
You know, it is effectively being in control since since the three officers take power.
And so this might actually lead to regime consolidation and so coups purging will take off.
And then finally, it's self-evident that in larger ministries, that's just going to be naturally more turnover.
And so people in those ministries and just there's just going to be more. There's going to be a ministry level effect as a consequence of that.
And we do have even more populated models that I went on to talk about, what we talk about,
where we can for things like age because we might think that older people are just more
likely to retire or suffer health and than die naturally leave the data set that way.
There are some gender dimensions. There are a handful of women in in this position during this period.
We know their religion from the names, we know the membership. For things like social clubs.
We test additional models, including these. They don't do anything.
They're not important. But it's just worth flagging that we're trying to think through controlling out anything, any potential confounders.
So these are the results. Hopefully, some of you at least have seen what a coiffed plot looks like before.
All the way to understand this. Again, this is this is a regression model.
So these are independent variables on the left hand side, these little dots, these are the estimated effects.
In this case, the dots are exponentially entered into what's called a survival time ratio,
or the median time that you would expect somebody to survive, given this characteristics in this case.
If you're a senior official and these are located on the 95 percent confidence interval,
so the intuition here when we think about statistical significance we're often talking about is an association distinguishable from zero, for example.
If it's not, then the tail of these 95 percent confidence intervals will cross the red line here.
Mark this one. And so we would say this is not statistically significant. That is to say it's not distinguishable from zero.
And the way to interpret this is if these are effectively if you're a senior official and these are survival times,
that means that senior officials are on average 22 percent less likely to survive and have median.
The median survival is twenty two percent less compared to someone who's not a senior official.
After adjusting for all these other factors. So a good thing, and I think typically we basically in summary,
we do find blame for the strong evidence for this idea that there is this tension between threats and.
Appearance leading to patterning individual outcomes, so we can see that if you're a senior official,
you're it reduces your median survival time by about 22 percent.
People with more rural illness, obviously they've received more baubles and walks from the king,
which we're using as a measure of proximity to the king.
They're also more likely to be at their survival time is also significantly a substantially reduced.
These are continuous variables, so I'll show you some plots that make it a little bit more sense of this in a minute.
And actually being a being a ostensibly notable is actually it's negative.
It reduces your survival time, but it's not statistically significant.
And that's when we look at this. When we decompose the models a little bit and we populate the variables in different orders.
It's because this is also highly correlated with just being a more senior official and being more connected to the king.
Interestingly, military officers, we know that they're poaching the army and the state, those with a kind of military training.
They are. They look like their survival time is negatively impacted, but again, not statistically significant.
Zero. And we do find support for this idea that those people who are distant from that power as it's playing out in incorrect,
that as you increase distance, actually your survival time increases again.
Unpack this a little bit more in a second. Equally, those people who have more experience are more likely to survive.
The survival times increased and those people with the Terminal University degree.
This is a binary variable. Their survival the median survival time is about nearly 20 percent greater than those without a ton of university degree.
Again, adjusting for all these other factors. I went through the controls.
They behave broadly as as we might expect, and it was not distinguishable from zero.
So we can start to to to give a little bit more flesh and understand what these kind of relationships look like.
Again, for our continuous variables, like if we think about years of experience, a free Q will take over.
This is this can be measured as some people have one year and people have five years, some people have 10 years and people have 15 years.
So it's a continuous variable,
and we want to know how different values of that experiment will impact the outcome of interest in this case on the y axis.
This is the survival time as a percentage. And then obviously, on the x axis, this is the time varying change.
And what we what we operationalise this as is people who are the 5th and the 25th percentiles of experience.
So for example, if you're at the 5th percentile of experience, you don't have much experience.
If you're in the 95th percentile of experience, you're pretty experienced, right?
And what we see is that if we compare the two survival curves of these two different characteristics,
we can see that those people with more experience on average in a given unit time, their survival is about 10 to 15 percent less.
So it's it's important. Equally, exactly the same logic applies to owners.
The difference between people who have more or less it's not as substantive, but still it's still present.
It's maybe about seven or eight percent. If the more honest you have, the closer you are to the king.
Your survival time reduces by seven or eight percent in any given unit of time.
Then it narrows as we get to the end of our analysis period because most of these people have been purged, basically.
And then finally, this question of distance, those people who are again at the 5th percentile,
those people who are very spatially proximate to the Republican palace in that day to day working lives versus
people who are quite far away and those people are much further away than much more likely to survive.
And again, in the kind of qualitative details, I'm happy to talk about this in the Q&A.
It really is the case.
The diplomatic corps is broadly retained with some exceptions, and there are interesting exceptions to that that fulfil the broader patent.
So, for example, the British about the Egyptian ambassador to the UK,
the Egyptian ambassador to Italy, both people who are known to be very, very close to the king.
They're both purged. But then generally, the average tendency is that people who who are in the diplomatic corps are retained.
So this is the last graph, the promise and this this gets at this idea.
So in our modelling strategy, we're trying to think about variants or the thing that explains the outcome.
That is how long it takes for you to get purged as operating on two fundamental different levels.
You can have individual level characteristics like all you, a senior official involved,
or you can have the place where you work in one place, regardless of who you are and your experience.
Some places just your association with them.
There's going to be like what you might think of as a residual institutional effect on being personal and if we do find evidence of that.
So this year, what we're doing technically is applauding the random intercepts from models, and we have two two different sets of intercepts here.
We have two sets of running into sets in the light grey from what we might think
of as the null model that is a model where you don't have any covariates.
On the right hand side, we're just going to look at the residual variants at this level two factor, which is the Ministry of Institution.
And then we have the darker grey ones, which is the residual variance once we take into account all these variables.
I went on to talk about that scene being a senior official distance experience and so forth.
And what we find is actually sometimes quite quite interesting in the normal.
Actually, this seems.
To be a kind of residual importance, if you work in the royal court or associated with the Royal Court, you're much more likely to be purged.
If you work in parliament, you're much more likely to be purged.
However, when we start to take into account actually individual level characteristics in the former,
we can see that once we take into account like ties to the King, actually, then the effect of the Royal Court is attenuated to zero.
That is to say, this institutional effect is really just proxy for individual level characteristics.
Parliament However, if you have any kind of connexion with parliament,
net of whatever your background is, you're just much more likely to be purchasing.
If anyone knows the case, details of Egypt 152, that makes complete sense.
Equally, the diplomatic corps no model. What we just don't take into account is things like spatial distance.
It looks like you're more likely to survive.
But as soon as you take into account distance and all these other factors, again, it's not distinguishable from zero.
However, when we do still have these two other institutional effects that can't just be explained by other variables,
it looks as if the institution itself has an independent effect on individual survival and turnover.
And those are the following. So on the one hand, education which I think totally aligns with what kind of expertise experience loyalties.
If you work in the ministry, if you work in Ministry of Education, and this also includes the leadership of universities,
you just you're not going to get punched, you are much more likely to be retained.
That seems to be some kind of protective halo being associated with these institutions.
That means that you're more likely to stick around and at the same time, foreign.
If there's something that I had not picked up from case readings that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs again is broadly retained intact.
And you could probably tell a kind of post-hoc story about what that is because
that there is forms of knowledge of expertise about different parts of the world. That's language or experience the three officers just do not have.
And so they keep these people around, although we know it as well.
From the case details that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when it comes to really important diplomatic issues,
they're basically sidelined and then you have personal emissaries. So Heikal, for example, who the free officers used to kind of conduct business.
So here's the rushed conclusion discussion. We actually find that these competing logics of threat and expertise,
we do think that they powerfully patent the survival of colonial era state athletes in a post-colonial period.
When you have this kind of revolution from above individuals connected to Egypt's deposed monarchs and very senior officials,
which is much more likely to be purged. Also, people who are attached to these particular institutions experienced officials,
on the other hand, and those with advanced university degrees will retain their survival.
Time is just much greater. They were kept around for longer.
And again, we have these kind of residual workplace effects that suggest that some institutions were just seen as too important,
like the Ministry of Education or too threatening, like the Parliament and these.
Instead, they were these kind of institutional effects that we can also statistically detect.
Now here's my kind of defensive. So the point?
Just anticipating some questions. This is ongoing. So we've got two big unresolved questions that we want to we want to attend to that.
We just haven't had time to yet.
One is that for those people who were retained, we can trace the careers we can know if they stay in the same ministry or not.
We can tell you if we're not. We're quite interested in the career trajectories of these 52 352 elites who keep their positions.
We don't have strong expectations about that. It's kind of an open empirical question.
We also, as I mentioned,
we have a list of the kind of original three hundred and thirty five free officers and we know who joins the states and who doesn't,
who keeps, who stays in the army, who goes and joins different ministries.
And we think that might be also quite an interesting question to see who gets parachuted
into which bits of the state and why and what others retain their army commissions.
That's it for me. That was kind of interesting and urgent. Thanks.
Thank you, Neal. Very interesting. I have a question, which is that.
I can see that. The data that you're.
Compiling the revolution needed can be used.
In the sense of the study of political upheavals broadly across many different regions of the world and that I understand.
But in terms of Egyptian history, are you putting empirical flesh on something that everybody already knows intuitively?
Or are you arguing against someone? Is there actually anyone?
I mean, I mean, I mean, granted, 1952 is, you know, perceived sort of in popular terms as a watershed.
Everything changes. But. Presumably, people who write history know that that's not the case, I mean, certainly if you're writing about cinema, I mean,
you get a lot of people talking about, you know,
the cinema of the Nasser period and you do find people who assume that everything suddenly changes after 1952.
But anybody who. Even fairly casually, studies the history of Egyptian cinema knows that that's not the case and that, you know,
things don't actually change very much at all immediately and then arguably not really very much until after the public sector.
After Nasser dies in 1971, graduates from Institute began directing films.
And so I guess, you know, the basic question is, are you arguing against somebody in terms of Egyptian history?
Yeah, that feels like a very damning comment on my career to date, which is I just happened see things that the shootings that people already hold.
They think it's a good point.
I mean, it's certainly the case in the secondary literature and the kind of suddenly the kind
of historical v popular story of the movement and the mobilisation of the revolution.
52. It does. It is these forms of kind of these forms of continuity have not been fleshed out and kind of pointed to it does.
It is often portrayed as like just a point blank. This continuity movement or radical political change where it is absolutely the case.
We do find this enormous purging going on with this question about who is retained and who's kept around that is seemingly absent.
I would be interested to know if there are, if anyone has any suggestions of people who have kind of documented that and one which they haven't.
I would also say that this is my kind of stock answer to this kind of question.
I think there is merit in arbitrating established knowledge or truisms.
Things that we will hold to be self-evident in a lot of cases.
A lot of these truisms, when you start to kind of scratch at them empirically with the best kind of information available,
kind of systematic empirical analytical techniques,
it becomes a little more nuanced and a lot more and a lot more messy and complicated than perhaps extant understandings of law.
And so even as exercise of just confirming what we already know, I would kind of insist that it's it's valuable again, like, where's the findings?
It's not so much that we're kind of arguing against people, but rather showing things that hadn't previously been appreciated.
So, for example, of the kind of forms of continuity and the retention of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Diplomatic Corps,
as far as we know, is this just not been picked up by anyone? And again,
like this is quite interesting and gives us some insight into the logic and thinking
of the free officers and in turn helps us to explain kind of what comes later.
Yeah, let's maybe it's slightly unsatisfactory answer to your to your all too familiar question with others.
In fact, I'm sure I've asked you the same question from the lectures that you've given at Harvard,
but I'm actually it was a good it was a good answer to the question. I should remind everybody that we should use the Q&A button.
If you want to ask questions, we have a question from Yasmin Mathur, which is that she says,
Maybe I missed this, but can you say something about the security services in terms of redeployment?
Yeah. So for what we're looking at in the underboss study and just in terms of the information that we have available to us,
the kind of coercive arms of the state that we can empirically observe is the Ministry of the War in the Navy, as it's called at this point.
And then also is formally called the Ministry of Interior was a failure.
In those cases, it seems to be that that there isn't so much of an institutional effect going on.
I mean, I could show you the slides where I say this, where we find this.
It seems that these that these these Sunni as opposed to the the Ministry of Interior, this is broadly cleared out.
And this is being pretty well explained by the fact that people who are leading the ministry at this point
fulfil all the characteristics that we think would be seen as like a source of counter-revolutionary stress.
These are people who you may have some military training. They've got maybe not so much experience.
There aren't very many of them because these are quite small ministries, often as a consequence of.
Claiming policy of the residue of British colonial policy and the people who are starving are often quite close to the king, for example,
so these would all be people that we would say it's not the fact that they work in the Ministry of Interior that's explaining this.
It's just actually the individual level characteristics.
What we were surprised to find, I kind of I hesitate to say this, but if you read the abstract of the war,
we did actually find that people with military training were more likely to be purged.
However, this turns out to be quite sensitive to how you model it statistically and.
It behaves I mean, look, I mean, depending on the kind of analytical choices that you make,
it does seem to be that people with, for example, military training are perceived as being especially threatening.
However, this could be an artefact of the kind of of the of how we decide to kind of statistically estimate these associations.
So take it with a pinch of salt that this is going to affect the kind of drops in and out of importance, depending on, as I say, analytical choices.
Sorry, I you.
We have a question from an anonymous attendee which is who says thank you very much for your wonderful sharing of your data and analysis.
I want to ask if three officers were assimilated into elite culture of the former dynasty as people who were running the state?
Or is it more that those who were that those old elites were incorporated into the new military culture?
That's a good question. I want to bring in my classic Glantz, who is otherwise in free writing on my on my activities thus far.
You may have some interesting, insightful to say about that because I see nothing immediately jumps to mind Gilbert.
Sure, happy to. I mean, I think it's an interesting question. It's something we have to give a little bit of more thought to.
I think that we have to be precise when we talk about which elites are being incorporated or we incorporated back
into the state and which military elites are actually leaving uniform to those serving other arms of the state.
And I think that once we can start to empirically answer those questions, we might have a better sense of which way the arrow points.
So it is a kind of former athletes being socialised or incorporated into a new culture,
or is it that the new military elite itself is being incorporated into this kind of historically statist culture that existed under the priority?
So I think it's a question that we still have to answer, but it's a good one.
OK, I have another question, this one's from Marilyn Booth, and she says, Thanks, Neal,
this is fascinating and having myself worked a bit in the 19th century equivalent to those who's who volumes.
It's interesting to see the level of detail, but I'm wondering about what isn't in those sources and how that might matter.
For instance, I wonder if some senior bureaucrats moved laterally back to the for a while or into a
company and might have remained an important part of this elite still connected in,
but not so visible in these sources. And also, I wonder about family.
I wouldn't be surprised if who was married to whom still counted in revolutionary Egypt.
Yeah, this is a very astute question in kind of so the the questions are both important substantive as it relates to the case,
but also kind of very insightful as opposed to the kind of statistical kinds of strategies that we're undertaking here,
which are necessarily quite sensitive to what you might think of as an admitted variable,
so-called admitted variable bias where some portion of our effect could actually be capturing something we're not taking into account in the model.
And so the associations that we're finding a potentially spurious we all all of the points that you raised, we thought about.
So as it as it relates to family, we have thought about trying to capture some kind of measure about all these people connected to each
other in some kind of the way that we're not currently observing in the analysis we can observe,
like do they just work in the same place together? We are kind of capturing that residual variance.
But of course, it could be that you could be straddling lots of different ministries and institutions.
We do have this variable. We know which social clubs they belong to, these who's who.
They're kind of remarkably candid and contain a remarkable amount of detail about some of these people's personal lives,
including what their home address the telephone number. But also, importantly, which social clubs they belong to.
And our assumption being is that there could be forms of kinship or other kinds of anonymous
social networks connecting these people that we're not currently taking into account.
So what we can basically do is we can construct the measure, which is do people.
That's I mean, there's several of them. One of them is just how many social clubs do you belong to?
And the implication being more social clubs, you belong to this the more connexions that you might have another one.
And when we take that into account, it doesn't change anything.
The other one, which we haven't taken into account yet because it kind of problem ties,
is our analysis and maybe ways that we haven't really sort through,
which is as soon as you start talking about people being connected, that means that they're not necessarily independent from each other.
And that actually can do some pretty, some difficult questions for the way that we're currently analysing things.
It is possible to say, for example, that if somebody survives and they belong to a social, a certain social club,
does that mean that someone who also belongs to the club is also more likely to survive in a given year, for example?
We haven't. We can take that into account, but I haven't thought of a clever way of doing it otherwise in terms of like again,
just looping back to questions like marriage. One of the problems that we face is that the biographical sketches are quite inconsistent in how
much information we report and and some people don't have these biographical sketches at all.
And so what we have to do is we have to use a statistical technique called multiple imputation,
where we simulate the missing value using of the characteristics that we do know about this person that we think also predicts the value.
We can do that and try to recover this missing information, although it's not,
it's not ideal, but it's still the gold standard about how we should be going about it.
And it also say also say there are some statistical workarounds.
We're currently thinking about this issue and that we don't have I don't have a complete answer to it.
This issue at this question of how people can get purged,
they can leave the state early and then go back to the isbut or the whatever and and then lay low for
a couple of years and then move back to Carter and retain the influence that is absolutely possible.
Absolutely. Like our definition of the elite here is necessarily quite thin.
So it's about the direct exercise of political power as you are kind of ensconced in office.
It could well be that these people aren't just going to disappear into the other evaporate.
They're still behind the scenes. They're still influential in one way or another.
And we can't account for that. So there could be other forms of continuity that we're not taking into account.
And that's an interesting question.
And as a 5:52 on the 20th of January, I don't have a kind of a clever way of getting at it, but it's definitely relevant.
I suspect this might be something where we just have to hold our hands up and say,
this is obviously plausible and this is kind of worthy of further empirical research because having kind of we've looked at this,
this is quite exhaustively. I'm not sure it's something that we can recover.
What I would say that does speak to your question when people exit the elite with a very,
very with kind of vanishingly few exceptions, once they exit elite, they never come back.
So this kind of light departure and return, reinventing yourself type dynamic,
at least as it applies to getting back into all of these kind of like formal fancy jobs or like high status jobs doesn't seem to be at stake.
I actually have another question that I want to ask, which is that you must have.
Not been able to avoid thinking about 2011 when you're doing this paper, because in 2011 there were all kinds of desire to purge.
But one thing about 2011 was that, you know, the fall of the regime wasn't actually a uniform thing.
There were some parts of the government that arguably never fell and that always remained in the house.
I mean, certainly the security services were never in the hands of revolutionary forces and the military and the,
you know, the Foreign Foreign Ministry, for example. And so from from the data that you looked at,
have you seen any evidence that the fall of the regime was actually incomplete and was only consolidated over time?
Yeah. I mean, we all kind of showing that in some sense. I mean, it does seem to be that there are all kind of holdout parts of the state.
So, for example, Education Ministry, the diplomatic corps in which again, it's almost as if they don't kind of get to them.
So there's this question of ambassadors, for example, or the kind of diplomatic representation abroad.
That does seem to be a kind of prioritisation going on in which people who are kind of at hand who may
be seen as more threatening are much more likely to be purged and people who are kind of further away.
What I would say, I mean, this is what we're trying to think, like contemporary parallels.
The more interesting one for me is actually not 2011, it's 2013. And here,
I think this gives us some insights into what we might think of as different dynamics of purging as a function of the political event itself.
So in 2013, we would think about what we see as a kind of almost like a restorative period of time.
Right. So it's not necessarily transformative. It's just undoing what's happened in the couple of years previously.
And in that instance, the literature actually suggests that we should expect quite shallow purging.
So we should only have some people being strategically kind of cold, if you will.
But in fact, actually what we see is actually, I think that the kind of elliptical return to authoritarianism in 2013 really
sees parts of the state being hollowed out and new people being brought in.
And that's an interesting question for the literature, for political scientists,
because I wonder whether these dynamics of deep transformative purges versus shallow purges.
I wonder whether the shyness of purging they're claiming is actually reflecting the shallowness a data
which is that they tend to just they just empirically focus at an even narrower slice of the state.
I can also see I can see a question from Mohammed, who is looking to see just about to ask that once there was a technical question which I.
Oh please. I'm here for the technical questions.
Mohammed yet this year, or at least read your writing, let me read the question so that everybody else knows what question you're addressing.
The question is in your statistical analysis, did you preserve the common assumption of independence and identical distribution?
That's the question. Yeah. So the answer to that is no.
So the data structure is level. So first of all, we assume that individuals who were located within the same institutional ministry,
the individual has it rates or survival times probably correlated with each other.
And so we account for that with an explicitly multilevel structure where we have random intercepts of the ministry
and information level institutional level to be able to take into account that clustering or non independence.
In terms of distributions, I'm not quite sure this is exactly what you're asking for, but it does have some bearing on our analysis.
There is an assumption in terms of unsurvivable is a so-called proportional hazards.
I kind of briefly just this halfway through the talk, which actually our data village so often in the in kind of proportional hazard models.
The idea is that you have parallel trends given whatever exclusionary you have.
So, for example, we have a binary variable 1.0. We should see the survival lines being parallel for both statuses for zero and one.
Actually, that's not the case for all is actually what we say to see is a violation of that where,
for example, I wish I had a plot to show you at the beginning of all of our time series.
Being a senior official, for example, the the hazard of being a senior official,
the hazard of purging is much greater than towards the end of the time series,
so that the significance of the salience of these covariates changing of the changes over time.
So to address this, we use an accelerated, failure tolerant model,
which is something that I had to learn about relatively recently because I found out that these assumptions were being violated.
And indeed, we implement that and they are substantively similar to our main results,
with one exception, with the exception of military officers referred to in previous answer.
This is the one that's actually very sensitive to the kind of distributional assumptions behind all models.
And if you have if you assume proportional hazards, actually,
military officers do become quite having military training is quite an important predictor of purging,
as is a kind of institutional effect of being associated with or working in the Ministry of War and the Navy.
If you don't and you have what I think is probably a more defensible approach,
which is what we're doing now, that finding is then becomes indistinguishable from zero,
suggesting that actually the result itself is actually a factor of these non proportional hazards,
as opposed to it being substantively important whether you have military training or not.
Hopefully, that's clear and cogent.
There's a question also from the one question, which I haven't asked yet, which is from Brody McDonald saying, thanks very much for the presentation.
Do you theorise that the relatively reduced purging for foreign affairs is explained
by the need for their knowledge of languages and international countries, the distance from the palace, or perhaps both?
So that is kind of the answer that I would give. That is our post-hoc explanation.
This is what actually we're going into. We're getting into into case study research.
So this is we're trying to find confirmatory evidence for this. And here you could think of what a distribution of different types of evidence.
What we really want is a kind of smoking gun were held by Dean or some of them also says We need to keep these guys,
you know, we just keep the diplomats around because we don't speak Spanish.
We don't know anything about Indonesia. We're currently kind of thinking about ways of looking for this.
But this these are all intuitions that would certainly neatly and potentially
quite conveniently align with other findings and explanations that we have.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then I have one last question since there aren't any more in the Q&A, but I'll ask one more,
which is that one of the one of the truisms or stereotypes about 1952 that one often hears from people who objected to the revolution,
who thought it was a terrible thing and it ruined the country? Was that putting all these?
Relatively ignorant, boorish military officers in charge of government, you know, resulted in disaster.
And of course, you're suggesting that there was actually quite a bit of institutional continuity.
But do you have a systematic way of assessing, you know, the relative success and failure of relatively untrained directors being put into government?
So that's a great question. I don't have a good answer to it.
I would caveat very briefly, and this is something that I find happens a lot in this kind of like revisiting history type work.
I seem to do all too often, which is that as soon as we find something that slightly contradicts the kind of received wisdom,
we might endow it with a bit too much emphasis and importance.
Well, there is forms of continuity the modal person is post, so there's enormous talent as well,
which is which is just worth underlining here that it is interesting. We think that still some people are retained, but actually the middle person,
if you are in office and 52 on the eve of the Q, your future of earning a salary for one of these jobs is not looking good.
But you probably are going to get punched. So the continuity is kind of at the margins.
And then we try to explain why it is that some people managed to survive as a standards in terms of like this question of where do
the free officers parachute in their people and then what are the effects of having these people on institutional performance is.
We would love to be able to answer that. It's just a question of like, how do you measure?
How do you measure the performance of these institutions that they really get taken over
by four officers as opposed to institutions with those forms of light 352 continuity?
I don't have a good answer to it.
It's a great question if you can think of a way of measuring that in the kind of numerical, systematic way that I was obsessed with.
And Glaude is obsessed with gay friends. Because at the moment, we're kind of stumped on that question.
But I think it's silly because there is potentially interesting variation there.
It's like,
how does the how do the free officers when they actually really have to do the day to day list management of a given administrative position?
How do they perform compared to the people who have been doing it for a while and have some expertise?
Intuition says not as well. It's kind of it's an open empirical question that I could learn the hard way at this point.
Unfortunately, in American systematic, it's not me. But, you know, hopefully somebody else will come along and do that.
Neal, thank you very much for that excellent talk, which which I hope is the first of many.
And on behalf of your colleagues and I thank you very much and I'm sure all your participants are saying the same thing to themselves.
Thanks lot. Thanks, everyone, for coming. OK.