The Armed Forces and Transitions: A Comparative Analysis of Tunisia's Police State and Egypt's Military State

The primary task of the military, unlike any other state institution, is to safeguard the survival of the state. Hardly any revolution can succeed without the support or at least the tacit approval of its armed forces. Although the success of revolutions requires political, economic and social preconditions, the support of the armed forces is a necessary prerequisite. The successful democratic transition in Tunisia is credited to its small apolitical army which overthrew the autocratic regime and allowed a civilian-led transitional process to pave the way for Tunisia's democracy. In contrast, although the Egyptian military establishment gradually sided with the popular protests and helped in ousting the Mubarak regime in 2011, the military nevertheless controlled the transition and rolled back the gains of the revolution as it overthrew the nation's first civilian-elected government in 2013. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the role of the armed forces during and after the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. It closely scrutinizes the armies' logic of abandoning the regimes they served for decades. It also scrutinizes the divergent roles of the two armies during the transition and how each responded differently to the calls to dismantle the civilian-elected governments. The paper uses Bellin's (2004) theory of authoritarianism in the Middle East which explains the military's capacity and willingness to crush protestors or withdraw their support for autocratic regimes.;Keywords: Civil-Military Relations; Democratic Transition; MENA; Egypt; Tunisia.