PhD Candidate, UCLA · Historical Sociology of Elites
Ketchley, Neil, and Gilad Wenig. “Purging to Transform the Post-Colonial State: Evidence from the 1952 Egyptian Revolution.” Comparative Political Studies 58, no. 1 (2025): 3–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231209966.
Wenig, Gilad, and Neil Ketchley. “Staffing the Revolutionary State.” Under review at the American Journal of Sociology.
Abstract: Who do revolutionaries call on to join the bureaucratic elite in the aftermath of state capture? We theorize five ideal types: holdovers, promotees, outsiders, returners, and revolutionaries. As we argue, the prevalence of these different officials varies depending on the number of revolutionaries available and their skill sets. These constraints, inherited from the revolutionary mobilization, can incentivize a strategy of “layering,” which guides how different officials are placed into certain roles. We empirically validate our typology and the logic of layering using global data on cabinet appointments made in the year following 31 episodes of revolutionary state capture between 1965 and 2015. We then analyze novel biographical data on 510 high-ranking state officials appointed in the aftermath of the 1952 Egyptian revolution. Our results show how the characteristics of revolutionary mobilization, together with revolutionaries’ desire to avert counterrevolution while implementing programs of radical change, shape the composition of post-revolutionary state elites.
Wenig, Gilad. “Coercive Religious Authority: Crisis and Religious Change in Military Organization.”
Abstract: Religious change is typically explained through market competition among religious providers, societal transformations that reshape demand, institutional adaptation to external legitimacy pressures, or regime-level political instrumentalization. These perspectives overlook how state institutions autonomously reshape religion to address problems that formal authority alone cannot solve. Militaries represent an extreme case. They possess coercive religious authority, the institutional capacity to govern soldiers’ religious lives through hierarchical command backed by sanction, and deploy it in response to organizational crisis. This article examines two moments of military-driven religious change within the Egyptian army: re-mobilization after the 1967 defeat, and confrontation with Islamist insurgency in the 1980s–1990s. Drawing on a newly assembled archive of Arabic-language military publications, I build on recent advances in optical character recognition and natural language processing to identify systematic shifts in religious content across both cases. I show how army authorities engaged in religious innovation, and how crisis type shaped its form and content. External defeat threatened fighting capacity and generated mobilizing discourse emphasizing sacrifice and martyrdom, institutionalized through new religious infrastructure. Internal insurgency threatened organizational integrity. In response, the army withdrew from contested religious terrain, suppressing devotional content that could not distinguish loyal soldiers from potential defectors, while expanding surveillance over belief.
Wenig, Gilad. “Coups, Authority, and the Pursuit of Legitimacy.”
Brief Description: Focusing on Hafez al-Assad’s 1970 coup in Syria, this paper examines how coup-makers consolidate power through stratified legitimation strategies.
Primary Sources: • Syrian military journals: Jaysh al-Shaʿb (جيش الشعب) and al-Majalla al-ʿAskariyya (المجلة العسكرية) • Syrian state newspaper: al-Baʿth (البعث)