Rafah border: between terrorism, exogenous and endogenous pressures

Abstract

This working paper tackles border control policies in Egypt, focusing on Rafah border, possibly one of the most complex in the region and also in the entire world. Furthermore, I analyze the possible relation between the control of this border and terrorism in Sinai during different ruling regimes in Egypt – Mubarak, Morsi and el-Sisi- filling a crucial gap in the literature. This has been based on qualitative methodology, using case selection to identify and select major terrorist attacks during the different ruling regimes, and analyzing primary and secondary documents, jointly with expert interviews, to analyze the decisions taken by the different actors and reveal the inter-subjective reasoning behind each reaction in terms of border control. The results show that, surprisingly, all the different regimes analyzed took very similar paths of the adversarial approach. Also, despite the supposed relevance of terrorist attacks for border control, exogenous and endogenous pressure play a major role in shaping the border policies.