EGYPTIAN FOREIGN POLICY UNDER AL-SISI GOVERNMENT: PATHS TO DIVERSIFICATION OF PARTNERSHIPS

Abstract

A decade after the beginning of Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi’s government, Egypt is living with a complex domestic framework, involving the emerging challenges of political and institutional consolidation following the winds of the Arab Spring, the economic and social consequences of increasing external vulnerability, as well as reintegration efforts in different regional and global arenas. In the midst of such circumstances, changes in the development of its foreign policy reconcile a discourse of full resumption of external action from the last decade with the search for the instrumentalization of its geostrategic position between Africa and the Arab world in favor of new external investments and reversal of the adverse macroeconomic picture, characterized by the devaluation of the Egyptian pound, growth in inflation and trade deficit. This process, however, has roots in the efforts to diversify foreign relations, an aspect observed since the final years of the Mubarak government, through the changes that occurred at the domestic level since 2011. Therefore, this article analyzes the main characteristics that involve the process of global and regional repositioning of Egypt since the last decade. At the intersection between World-Systems Analysis (ASM) and Foreign Policy Analysis (EPA), the potential of Egypt to occupy a historical position of articulation between global and regional dynamics is assessed, considering its condition as a Bridge State between two continents. Through qualitative analysis, combining the exploration of a process of review of specialized literature in contemporary Egypt and journalistic texts, we seek to answer the following questions: what is the nature of the process of diversification of external relations undertaken by Egypt? How do the contemporary macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges limit or provide opportunities for the production of a type of autonomist insertion by Cairo? It is argued that, amid the acceleration of the decline of US hegemony, Egypt cultivates an international insertion strategy of an autonomist nature, approaching the so-called emerging world, resuming its insertion in traditional regional axes of action, in a process that does not necessarily go through the abandonment of its ties with the so-called Western World.