Gadallah, Dina (2025) Framing Egypt's foreign policy in the western press : 2018-2021 : triangulating quantitative and qualitative content analysis with expert interviews. (PhD thesis), Kingston University, .
Abstract
The research seeks to monitor and understand the Western press portrayal of Egyptian foreign policy during 2018-2021, which marked the onset of a new term in office for the El-Sisi government. On the heels of unsettled decades following the so-called Arab Spring, the country faced numerous challenges, domestically, regionally, and internationally. Significant shifts in foreign policy principles and behaviours sought to address these challenges, prioritising interest and national security over values, and neo-liberalism reform and multidimensional diplomacy over traditional alliances. The study aims to analyse the reception and framing of these features, which underpin Egypt’s middle-power aspirations, in Western press, to understand why some themes are primed while others are ignored. Building on theoretical insights in the theory of media events, framing and priming effects in agenda setting, and approaches to the study of middle-power features in the context of the MENA region; the thesis builds a theoretical framework to engage Western media selective approach to covering Egypt’s foreign policy affairs. The analytical framework of the study highlights the prominence of “disruptive” frames over the “ceremonial” ones, while the literature review section of the study elucidates the key components of Egypt’s foreign policy strategy as a complex, interlinked whole. Triangulating quantitative and qualitative content analysis with expert interviews constitutes the main corpus of the data explored in the thesis. First, 800 items dealing with Egypt’s foreign have been selected from nine media outlets to determine the size and the nature of the coverage. Second, the foundational data revealing five prominent topics in the Western press is analysed using qualitative content analysis (QCA) to elucidate narrative tropes and frames of representation applied in the coverage during the study timeframe. Third, an interpretive approach is applied to data gleaned from expert interviews, involving ten participants representative of Egypt’s foreign diplomacy civil servants, researchers- academics, and journalists and foreign correspondents, with first-hand experience in Egypt’s foreign policy and Western media. The gathered data from the interviews is presented thematically to foreground competing narratives about causes underpinning the inadequate framing of Egypt’s foreign policy in the Western press. The findings suggest the Western press’s particular frames are selective, insofar as they reduce the complexity and composite nature of foreign policy to individual and isolated issues. This complexity does not only pertain to the region’s tangled geopolitics; rather it concerns broader shifts in the exercise of foreign diplomacy as far as middlepower politics is concerned.
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