All the President’s Men

Viewed from a distance, El-Sisi’s is an authoritarian regime that employs the standard troika of repression, inducements, and manipulation to serve the interests of the few and violate the rights of the many. Up close, the ruling formula consists of a concentration of powers in the president’s hands; an expansion of military prerogatives in the economy as a coup-proofing strategy; a continuous stream of foreign loans and grants; control over the population through a blend of urban engineering, coercion, and nationalist myth making; and constant adjustments to manage the fallout from these conflicting strategies. The authors of Egypt’s New Authoritarian Republic dissect these features in detail, self-consciously invoking El-Sisi’s own self-branding as the architect of a new regime. Whereas he defines it as “a republic of development, building, progress, and change,” the authors show it to be a composite of old tactics and new elaborations.

What brough all this about? As coeditor Abdel-Fattah Mady points out on the first page, El-Sisi is “a reaction to the major threats of popular uprisings and Islamist political opposition.” The magnitude of his policy shifts can only be understood as an outgrowth of what preceded them. I called this Egypt’s “revolutionary situation” (Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, 2021), referring to the triennium of intense political conflicts that followed the mass uprising against Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and terminated in the nonrevolutionary outcome of a Mubarak appointee seizing power in 2013; Abdel Fattah El-Sisi was Mubarak’s director of military intelligence. In other words, the Sisi mode of rule is a counterrevolution.

The volume’s 13 chapters are a mix of brief general reflections and more detailed studies of how the president wields power compared with the country’s three prior military officers-turned-presidents (Hosni Mubarak, Anwar Sadat, and Gamal Abdel Nasser). After an introduction and an anchoring overview chapter by Emad El-Din Shahin laying out what is new and what is not in El-Sisi’s policies, individual chapters detail the counterrevolutionary work of not only repressing citizen groups, but also bringing order to “the state’s too many hands,” in Mohamed Mohamed’s apt phrase (p. 85). As suggested by Mohammad Affan, we may analytically compress this extraordinarily complex drama into a two-tier operation: control by security services over the summits of the state’s civilian domains— the parliament, judiciary, diplomatic corps, and al-Azhar religious establishment—and control by the president and his viziers over the security institutions of the military, the intelligence agencies, and police forces.

General elections were meticulously engineered by intelligence agents, and parliament neutered as a space of even performative discussion. Presidential elections were turned into plebiscitary rituals of acclamation. In a break with the practice of Egyptian presidents chairing parties of cronies and supplicants, El-Sisi dispensed with a civilian ruling apparatus. In another break with precedent, Waleed Salem shows how judges were formally stripped of autonomy through new laws, the trimming of court jurisdictions, and the direct presidential appointment of chief justices. Informally, candidates for posts in the judiciary were subjected to greater screening by security agents. As the literature on authoritarian security organs expects, distinct security apparatuses were coordinated and brought under direct presidential control. Abdel-Fattah Mady details how the military was elevated to paramountcy and given immunity in various domains—the economy, the constitution and laws, and local government—while actual and potential military rivals to El-Sisi were retired, imprisoned, or placed under house arrest. The president’s two sons and brother were appointed to strategic sentinel posts in both the civilian and military bureaucracies. The police, against whom the 2011 revolution was launched, were rehabilitated and reintegrated into the ruling coalition, as Hossam el-Hamalawy tracks, albeit under the tutelage of the military.

To all the authors’ credit, they do not make the mistake of prior scholars who overstated the power of authoritarianism. They do not airbrush out the contradictions and vulnerabilities besetting El-Sisi’s strategies—his “increasing inability to manage regime and loyalty costs,” as Emad El-Din Shahin writes (p. 31). Several contributors underscore that by giving the military free rein and failing to chart a path for presidential succession, El-Sisi may be unwittingly digging his own grave. “He is thus positioned to be a convenient scapegoat for the military when and if political pressure mounts as it did in 2011,” speculates Robert Springborg (p. 276).

May Darwich spotlights how the current president merely accelerated the Mubarak-era conduct of foreign policy, spouting an inflated rhetoric of Egyptian regional power while deepening the reality of Egypt’s declining influence. What is marginally new is the government’s unabashed dependence on Gulf Cooperation Council funds and deference to the foreign policies of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. We may add to this the deference to Israeli unilateralism, before and after the annihilation of Gaza. In May 2024, when Israel seized the Philadelphi Corridor in violation of the 1979 Egypt–Israel Treaty, the Sisi government did not protest.

A standout chapter by Mohamed Mohamed relates the astonishing story of the one civilian state official who managed to withstand El-Sisi’s pressure and remain relatively untouched. The head of al-Azhar, the center of Sunni learning, is a holdover from the Mubarak era who shrewdly leveraged his connections with secular intellectuals, Coptic leaders, and the government of the UAE to resist El-Sisi’s attempts to instrumentalize al-Azhar as a tool of regime legitimation. Moataz El Fegiery offers a judicious assessment of how human rights defenders in Egypt and in exile capitalize on international advocacy networks to name and shame the government’s human rights abuses.

The conception of regime that comes most readily to mind when reading this volume are the formal and informal rules “that identify the group from which leaders can come and determine who influences leadership choice and policy” (Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set,” Perspectives on Politics 12 [2], 2014, 314). Geddes, Wright, and Frantz’s definition is especially important in the wake of a regime change, when much of politics centers on reconstituting the ruling group—promoting some, demoting others, expelling still others. A much-noted feature of the Sisi ruling coalition is the expulsion of the civilian crony capitalists privileged by the Mubarak regime, replacing them with Military Inc. What the Egyptian experience under El-Sisi shows is how much the work of reshuffling ruling coalitions takes place within the state, and involves foreign actors cementing ties with their state clients. Just as US–Egypt policy centers on maintaining unbreakable ties with Egypt’s high command, now the UAE and Saudi Arabia also have their connections with distinct personnel within the state. Regimes are the relations among the components of the ruling coalition, including their external patrons. Governments tout their nationalist bona fides, but the regimes in which they are embedded transcend borders. “If external forces become an integral part of a ruling formula,” write Bank and colleagues, “then authoritarianism itself cannot be viewed as a purely domestic phenomenon” (André Bank, Eva Bellin, Michael Herb, Lisa Wedeen, Sean Yom, and Saloua Zerhouni, “Authoritarianism Reconfigured: Evolving Forms of Political Control,” in The Political Science of the Middle East: Theory and Research since the Arab Uprisings, eds. Marc Lynch, Jillian Schwedler, and Sean Yom, 2022, 55).

Constituted by Repression

Where Egypt’s New Authoritarian Republic focuses on how El-Sisi narrowed the ruling coalition, Lucia Ardovini’s Surviving Repression looks outward and into the internal world of the main opposition. The Society of Muslim Brothers (MB) is one of the oldest social movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Founded in Egypt in 1928 and spreading across the region, one basis of the movement’s strength was its energetic participation in limited elections (Nathan J. Brown, When Victory Is Not an Option: Islamist Movements in Arab Politics, 2012). In the political opening made possible by the 2011 uprising, the MB experienced a rapid ascent, winning founding elections for the parliament and presidency and gaining international recognition. But El-Sisi’s 2013 coup subjected them to the most intense crackdown in their history, its effects reverberating to cognate movements in Tunisia and Palestine. The government declared the MB a terrorist organization, incarcerated its leaders and members, seized $3.4 billion of its assets, and launched an ideological campaign casting it as a diabolical transnational foe that has long threatened Egypt’s integrity.

One shocking event is now indelibly carved into public memory: the government’s violent disbanding of huge protest encampments of the ousted president’s supporters. On August 14, 2013, military and police forces killed over a thousand civilians in what rights groups called “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history” (Human Rights Watch, “All According to Plan: The Rab’a Massacre and Mass Killings of Protesters in Egypt,” August 12, 2014).

Surviving Repression spells out four reasons why this juncture is unprecedented in the MB’s history: (1) the repression was indiscriminate, targeting not only peak leaders but the rank and file, and (2) the organization’s stint in governance exposed “the ineptitude and lack of political vision of its leadership,” which (3) emboldened individual members to criticize leaders and demand a larger say in charting a new path, which in turn (4) accelerated the partial disintegration of the MB’s lines of command. After an open struggle, the organization’s reconstituted politburo is now based in Istanbul, under the protection of the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and other senior leaders reside in London and interface with international bodies and governments.

Over a six-year period between 2013 and 2019, Ardovini interviewed leaders and members in Istanbul and London to understand how they processed the novel experience of forced exile (many fled Egypt without their family members). In the book’s last and in some ways most interesting chapter, “Divided, Together,” she identifies five kinds of responses: endurance, tapping into the movement’s decades-long history of weathering state violence by eschewing change and focusing on survival; adaptation, or demanding a loosening of the organization’s Leninist structure and more inclusive membership; return to fundamentals, promoted by purists who want to abandon the MB’s foray into electoral politics and rebuild the organization’s foundation in proselytizing and grassroots social work; departure, encompassing ex-members who left the organization altogether; and inaction, represented by dormant members who ceased to be active but did not officially leave.

In its attention to the experiential dimension of repression, Surviving Repression points to an important takeaway for conceptualizing regimes: repression is not only inflicted by governments on oppositions; it constitutes them both, outlasting its immediate effects. This calls to mind an older definition of regime built on this image of interpenetration: “The regime includes the method of selection of the government and of representative assemblies (election, coup, decision within the military, etc.), formal and informal mechanisms of representation, and patterns of repression” (Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, 2nd edition, [1991] 2002, 789).

Collier and Collier examine how patterns of repression constitute the polity. Ardovini shows how it constitutes the opposition. One comes away from the book realizing how much repression now defines the MB’s ethos and political “brand.” It determines how members see themselves, one another, potential constituencies, and political adversaries. State violence governed how the movement acted even when violence levels were momentarily diminished after the uprising and Egypt’s politics were freer and more competitive than they had ever been in its republican history. This interactionist definition will also serve well when we consider another social group that has cocreated national politics in Egypt, but not under conditions of its own choosing.

Demobilization in Real Time

There is a modal image of student politics in Egyptian history and popular memory: massive crowds of chanting young people bursting out of university gates to contest the policies of national leaders. Farah Ramzy wants to unsettle this motif, not because it is false but because it is one dimensional. In her stimulating Egyptian Students and Politics beyond Protest, based on fieldwork conducted mostly in Cairo between 2013 and 2015, she conceptualizes public university campuses as arenas for student politics broadly defined, including but not reduced to protests (on pp. 79 and 92, simple but effective graphics visualize the university as an arena at different points in time). This is an important conceptual move for making sense of student politics, especially after the 2013 coup’s near extinguishing of autonomous student protests.

Out of all the works under review, Ramzy’s is the most attuned to change over time, using universities as a microcosm to illustrate this dynamism. She shows how student politics are a product of four temporalities that intersect in the postcoup context. The contentious 1970s were a period of peak student activism and innovations, leaving behind a rich trove of slogans and songs that students and the broader public know by heart. In the 1990s, university culture changed. Higher education reforms stipulated by structural adjustment programs created privatized degree tracks within public universities, introduced student activities such as model United Nations and model EU, and led to a familiar global shift in what it means to be a student: entrepreneurial, steeped in extracurriculars, and ready for the job market. The 2011–13 interregnum blew the lid off campus restrictions, allowing students to experiment with multiple political options and cliques. The postcoup environment entailed various mechanisms of depoliticization beyond overt violence.

Ramzy succeeds in her goal of tracing this “process of demobilization in real-time” (p. 191). One salient incident shows how demobilization works as an indirect effect of repression. In the fall of 2013, an engineering student was killed by police on the Cairo University campus. Real ambiguity about the murdered student’s politics led to a divide in how to organize protests: non-MB students portrayed him as an ordinary, nonpolitical student to focus outrage on the threat to all students. MB students framed their outrage in anticoup demands to reinstate the ousted president. As a non-MB student told Ramzy, “[t]hey have their slogans and symbols, and they insist on raising Morsi’s photo. That is not our cause. Our aim was to focus on students. We agreed that they would have their routes and we will have ours” (p. 94). Student activism was divided into separate, competing streams.

Another example shows a different mechanism of demobilization: co-optation. Tapping into the existing campus infrastructure of depoliticized, preprofessional student activities, the Sisi government has launched several initiatives to promote a counterrevolutionary careerist pathway for ambitious university students. Employing buzzwords such as “leadership” and “innovation,” the initiatives center on televised youth conferences where preselected student participants engage in scripted discussions with President El-Sisi. More importantly, in 2017, the National Training Academy was inaugurated to prepare a state elite, modeled on and in partnership with the French École Nationale d’Administration, and a similar program (the Executive Presidential Leadership Program) trains a second line of executives to plug them into various state institutions. “The message is clear,” writes Ramzy. “[Y]outh of the new republic, who have a place in the new authoritarian polity, are neoliberal, obedient, nationalistic subjects” (p. 184).

Egyptian Students and Politics is a window into a key attribute of authoritarian regimes that is invoked more than it is analyzed: limited political mobilization. In his classic definition of authoritarianism, Juan Linz observes that unlike totalitarian systems built on a coherent, codified ideology disseminated through mass membership organizations, authoritarian regimes are antithetical to developing well-worked-out official ideologies. Based on a limited pluralism within the governing group, authoritarian cliques would be destabilized by constantly mobilizing the broad public. “Effective mobilization, particularly through a single party and its mass organizations, would be perceived as a threat by the other components of the limited pluralism, typically the army, the bureaucracy, the churches, or interested groups” (Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, 2nd edition, [1975] 2000, 166). Authoritarian regimes are thus characterized by manageable tussles between ruling elites and oppositional counterelites, with the broader public disengaged from politics.

Demobilization is the least articulated dimension of Linz’s concept. Ramzy shows how it was actively produced among a social sector often considered synonymous with radical activism. Without question, state violence and a battery of administrative regulations were used to pacify Egypt’s campuses, in part by thwarting the momentary postcoup solidarity among students across ideological divides. But the government also held out an alternative careerist option to join the status quo rather than rail against it from the sidelines.

Archiving Coercion

In 2021, Badr Prison, the largest penitentiary complex in Egypt, was inaugurated and touted as a US-style correctional and rehabilitation center. Cells were brightly lit around the clock and outfitted with surveillance cameras. Longtime activist Ahmed Douma, serving out a life sentence for participating in protests, wrote an erudite reflection on the torturous effects of continuous lighting, “Seeking Refuge in the Darkness”:

Douma is one of 46 prisoners whose letters, poems, reflections, and artwork are masterfully collated and translated as Imprisoning a Revolution: Writings from Egypt’s Incarcerated by Collective Antigone, a curatorial team of human rights defenders and scholars in Egypt and abroad. While there is an established genre of prison writings in Arabic letters called Adab al-Sujun (carceral literature), its works are often single-authored memoirs published after a regime change, and tacitly encouraged by new presidents to smear their predecessors. The singular achievement of Collective Antigone is in curating dozens of reflections written inside prisons (or after release) in the period between 2013 and 2023 and publishing them even as the regime whose practices they document remains in power. The authors span internationally renowned activists such as Douma and Alaa Abd El-Fattah (both now released after presidential pardons), anonymous prisoners, and ordinary citizens caught up in the state’s prosecutorial zeal.

Thirty-five new prisons were built after the 2011 uprising (Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, “Waiting for You: 78 Prisons, Including 35 Built after the January Revolution,” April 11, 2021). At least 1,160 incarcerated people died in custody between 2013 and 2025, 75% as a direct result of deliberate medical negligence (Women Journalists without Chains, “Prisons without Keys,” June 2025). Perhaps the most prominent was former president Mohamed Morsi, ousted by El-Sisi in 2013 after only one year in office. In 2019, Morsi died in custody at the age of 67. Detailing his harrowing six-year imprisonment—solitary confinement, no family visits, denial of diabetes medication, sleeping on a concrete floor—a group of UN experts concluded, “Dr. Morsi’s death after enduring these conditions could amount to a State-sanctioned arbitrary killing” (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “UN Experts Denounce Morsi ‘Brutal’ Prison Conditions, Warn Thousands of Other Inmates at Severe Risk,” November 8, 2019). Imprisoning a Revolution includes a message Dr. Morsi wrote to his supporters while in prison in 2014, but as the curators acknowledge, the difficulties of accessing more writings by MB prisoners means they are underrepresented in the anthology even as they are overrepresented among political prisoners.

The writings cover a range of sensibilities and mental states. There are meticulous descriptions of daily prison functioning and the behavior of wardens, cruelty and torture being paramount; sketches of relations among prisoners under conditions of unimaginable overcrowding; introspective, diaristic reveries that plumb the depths of imagination; intrusive thoughts that continually relive the trauma of arrest and torture; and the sheer mental effort it takes to remain sane, holding on to anchoring rituals and small triumphs to ward off despair. And overwhelming bafflement at the arbitrariness of it all. “My mind haunts me with its damned question,” writes architectural planning engineer Ibrahim Ezz Al-Din. “What did you dream about and what did you do to find yourself here?” (p. 131). A Coptic prisoner glossing a passage in his Bible on angels releasing the apostles from jail wonders, “Who can bring me out? The Egyptian prisons seem more resistant to miracles than the Roman ones during the first days of Christianity” (p. 64).

In the introduction, the curators argue that imprisonment has been at the core of the relationship between modern states and political subjects. Indeed, while it is often folded under abstract categories of repression and coercion, imprisonment is less commonly elaborated in detail by those who experience it. In Regimes and Repertoires, Charles Tilly offers an unusually concrete definition of coercion as “all concerted means of action that commonly cause loss or damage to the persons, possessions, or sustaining social relations of social actors” (2007, 19). In writing down their experiences and smuggling them out to human rights groups and family members, Egypt’s prisoners of conscience have created an extraordinary record of the losses and damage to their bodies and minds, and the violent rupturing of their sustaining social ties. They have also blocked the state’s erasure of their memories with a counterarchive of what was done to them and how. As the novelist Ahmed Naji writes in his foreword, they have turned lost time into history (p. xxi).