The Arabist

The Arabist

By Issandr El Amrani and friends.

Egypt power map: back to the drawing board

The above chart is something I created about 2-3 weeks ago to illustrate a still-to-be-published report. It's all changed now, and I'm going to have to restart mostly from scratch. The map was put together before the formation of the new cabinet, and I got the question of who would control the ministry of information wrong. But otherwise it stands at a fairly accurate map, I think, of how power flowed in Egypt before Morsi's August 12 decrees. And one of the striking thing looking at it is that many of the same issues remain — the cabinet now in place is still one representing a compromise between SCAF, the president, and corporate identities inside ministries and elsewhere. We still only have a cabinet with about 6-7 Muslim Brothers, at least for now (one might expect that to change once a new parliament is elected.) The big change may come in how external political forces relate to Morsi and the Brothers now that their hopes in the SCAF as a counter-balance are (again, for now) dashed.

The biggest mistake (and something I did because I did not want to overcomplicate an already complicated chart) was not detailing the splits inside SCAF, obviously, although I did highlight the separateness of the major armed forces services from military intelligence and general intelligence.

You can download a high-resolution PDF here.