Population Mobility, Illiberal Norms and Autocratic Cooperation: Egyptian Migration in the Arab World, 1970-1989

How does labour migration impact upon processes of cooperation among autocracies? Scholarly work on the international dimension of authoritarian rule and, in particular, on the forms that autocracies’ cooperation assumes suffers from a lack of analysis on the mechanisms of such cooperation. This paper argues that authoritarian regimes employ the management of migration as a means towards the diffusion of illiberal norms in two ways. Firstly, the liberalisation of migration functions as an instrument of ideological rapprochement between like-minded regimes of the sending and host states. Secondly, migration management fosters paternalistic relations between elites. Building on elite interviews and archival data, the paper employs the single-case study of Egyptian migration in the Middle East during the 1970-1989 period to demonstrate how the ruling regime employed the issue of migration in order to sidestep Arab states’ suspicion of Nasserite Egypt, and to develop personalistic relations with other Arab elites that allowed Egypt to overcome the hurdle of the economic embargo that followed the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty. Overall, beyond adding novel information on how Egyptian migration solidified post-Nasserite Egypt’s position within the regional Middle Eastern system, this paper aims to nuance our understanding of migration as an instrument of authoritarian regimes’ cooperation.