Shaping the “War on Terrorism” in Foreign Policy Discourses: A Rent-Seeking Strategy for Egypt Since 2013.

This presentation aims to study how the Egyptian regime, since Abdel Fattah al-Sissi's official rise to power in 2014, has successively employed expressions that invoke notions of risk and threat to describe the country's security situation. The expression "war on terrorism" has been particularly prominent from around 2013 to 2020, especially in statements of cooperation directed towards Western partner states (the United States, France), Gulf countries (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates), and the region, at a time when the international coalition against the jihadist group ISIS was being formed. Responding to the security needs of its partners, Egypt has employed, particularly in foreign policy speeches, a vocabulary centered around these threats in order to make itself indispensable and to legitimize both external and internal actions. In this sense, what interests us in the formulation of this foreign policy is the link between national identity and the fact that it is threatened, as well as the export of this identity on an international scale to defend a strong position as the region's leading country.

This study is based on an empirical analysis combining interviews conducted with diplomats from these partner countries regarding the reception of such discourse from 2019 to 2024, as well as an analysis of statements produced by the Egyptian presidency aimed at these partners.

This research will be interested in the performativity of such discourses mobilizing the risk, both in a process of formulation and staging (Alberg 2017) of foreign policy.