Maged Mandour, Egypt Under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge (Bloomsbury / I.B. Tauris, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Maged Mandour (MM): I have been writing this book without knowing I was writing it. It was a journey that spanned the better part of a decade. I started to write in the summer of 2013, what I call in the book “the summer of massacres.” Writing was my way of coping with the shock of that summer. I simply wanted to understand how Egypt’s democratic opening was shut brutally and with so much popular support. This later evolved into an obsession with the regime that developed from such mass state violence, and with the man who leads it, Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi. In essence, the book is an attempt to shed light on the working of the regime, what makes it so different and dangerous to the stability of the country and the region. I was driven by a peculiar mix of curiosity, survivor’s guilt, anger, and hope over the past decade. At the end of the road lay this book, and with it some hope that it contributes to our understanding of how this regime functions and the hurdles it has placed to the prospect of democratic transition.
... this regime represents a radical break in modern Egyptian history, the first time that Egypt falls under direct military rule with no civilian partner or façade to balance out the military.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MM: The book looks at the evolution of the regime over the past decade. The crux of the argument is that this regime represents a radical break in modern Egyptian history, the first time that Egypt falls under direct military rule with no civilian partner or façade to balance out the military. This has allowed the military to concentrate social, political, and economic power in its own hands to an unprecedent degree. Practically, this meant the complete militarization of the state, political system, and the economy that bred an extremely repressive and brutal regime. This concentration of political power also allowed the military to refashion Egyptian capitalism into a militarized form of state capitalism that is fueled by mass debt, sparking spectacular debt crisis that is still unfolding. These radical changes bred a regime that is poorly equipped to deal with dissent, except through mass repression, which makes it brittle and prone to crisis, but also extremely dangerous and destabilizing.
In this analysis I used Finer’s classification of military regimes and the Gramscian conception of passive revolution and hegemony. Using this theoretical lens, I classify the regime as a case of direct military rule and using the concept of passive revolution I argue that the new military regime embarked on a revolution from above. In doing so, the regime mobilized popular support while ensuring that no popular participation in decision making took place. In other words, it used popular mobilization to suppress popular participation, all with the goal of ensuring that events of 2011 are never repeated.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MM: As already alluded to, this book is a continuation of my work over the past decade; it is most closely connected to the work I did for Carnegie. The bulk of this work looked at the regime’s repression and how it functions, as well as the legal and constitutional changes that provided immunity to the security forces and greatly enhanced the position of the military within the political system. I also covered the political economy of the regime, what I perceived to be an economic collapse in the making, which spectacularly erupted in 2022.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MM: My ego would say everyone! Alas, one needs to be realistic. The audience I had in mind when I wrote this book is those interested in the prospect of democratic transitions, not just in Egypt but also in the Middle East. However, I hope that this book is read widely in Egypt and that it will not only inform debates on the prospect of democratic transition in the country, but also highlight the plight of the victims of the regime, as a step towards the recognition to the damage done to the Egyptian social fabric from a decade of historic levels of state violence. Indeed, one of the most prominent hurdles that the prospect of democratic transition faces in Egypt is a lack of consensus on the nature of the regime and its crimes. I hope that this book will be the first in many attempts to initiate public debate amongst Egyptians on what happened in the last decade and to start to deconstruct the regime’s narrative that is anchored in chauvinistic nationalism with fascist undertones.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MM: My main project now is convincing my ten-month-old baby to sleep through the night. When I am not terribly sleep deprived, I continue to focus on the development of the Egyptian debt crisis, which has proven to have more twists and turns than a soap opera. The regime is constantly evolving and, surprisingly, becoming even more sinister, and I hope to continue to document and deepen my understanding of its evolution.
J: What are the most prominent challenges that Sisi will face in his third term?
MM: The country is going through a dramatic debt crisis that will have long-term social consequences. The most prominent of these are the dramatic rise in poverty and the evisceration of the middle class. However, another important aspect is that the regime has shown a remarkable resistance to avoiding any type of reform over the past two years, at the risk of catastrophic consequences. This signals a deepening of the military penetration of the economy, as the private sector continues to collapse under the weight of the crisis. Even if the Gulf intervenes, which seems to be a distinct possibility after the Ras El-Hekma thirty-five billion USD deal, this will only serve to shield the military elites, and probably deepen the crisis in the long term, leading to more economic deformities.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 3, pp. 108-111)
Empowered by a draconian legal system, and in complete control of the state apparatus, the military has cast its repressive net far and wide. Its victims include researchers and academics like Ismail El Eskandrany; activists like Ala Abdel Fatah; politicians like Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, and ordinary citizens that caught in repressive machinery of the regime, like the Tik Tok girls. The regime’s repression appears to have a clear logic: by raising the cost of minor acts of dissent to the extent that it guarantees the complete closure of the public space, continuation of direct military rule is ensured. It is a policy aimed at making the regime impervious to change from below. However, a closer examination shows a much more complex dynamic at play, one that holds the regime hostage to its own repressive policies, reducing its ability to manoeuvre and its ability to absorb popular shocks. This reduces the regime’s resilience and makes repression rather than co-option its default policy choice.
The most glaring characteristic of the regime’s repression is its ideological imperative, not just to maintain its popular appeal but to maintain the cohesion of the security forces. The regime’s raison d’ être, based on its own narrative, is to protect the Egyptian state from collapse by combating traitors, terrorists and foreign agents. This logic not only helps the regime to consolidate its support base but it also justifies the complete closure of the public space, and the intenserepression required to do so. Hence, any attempts at easing repression would raise questions about the need to completely close the public space, the necessity for the continuation of military rule, and, most importantly, the truthfulness of the regime narratives that are used to solicit popular support for its repression. Indeed, a simple questionfrom its base, such as why release accused terrorists from prison, would be extremely difficult to answer. The regime is therefore under pressure from its own base to continue its repression. Indeed, popular support for the regime exists because of its repression, not in spite of it.
The pressure, however, is not limited to the base alone, as it also comes from within the security apparatus, especially from the petty security official and judges, the ones on the front lines in the regime war against dissent. These men have been indoctrinated in the regime’s chauvinistic version of nationalism, which is founded on the existence of an internalenemy, threatening the fabric of the nation. This became apparent in the Regeni case. When he was believed to be a spy by the regime’s security officials, the standard operating procedure was applied, namely severe torture which led to his death. Hence, any attempts at easing repression jeopardizes the credibility of the regime narrative – which is essential for maintaining the cohesion of the security apparatus – and is bound to be strongly resisted by its members. This brings us to the second characteristic of the regime’s repression, namely its decentralized nature. In essence, theideological indoctrination and the widespread popular support, as well as the legal immunity of the security forces, have made repression and torture endemic and decentralized. Indeed, the use of state violence has become a standard operating procedure, rather than a tool employed by the security forces to protect the regime, a feature that Human Right Watch has called ‘an assembly line of torture’ (HRW, 2017). This means that the centre can no longer control the periphery, and even if Sisi wished to rein in the repressive apparatus, he would struggle to do so.
The regime’s reliance on repression, and Sisi’s inability to rein in the security apparatus at will, stems from another structural feature, namely the lack of a civilian counterweight to the military and the security apparatus. Unlike Mubarak, Sadat or Nasser, Sisi does not seem interested in establishing a ruling party, which he could then use to hold in check the military and the security forces. Indeed, his main strategy seems to revolve around tightening his grip over the security apparatus and intelligence agencies through the appointment of loyalists, rather than developing a civilian counterweight to the military’s dominance. The most prominent example of this feature of the regime was the appointment of Abbas Kamel, a close confidant, as the head of the General Intelligence Services (GIS) in June 2018 (Egypt Today, 2018).
The absence of a mass ruling party, along the lines of Mubarak’s NDP or Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union (ASU), significantly reduces the ability of the regime to co-opt the citizenry, making repression the primary tool for managing dissent. This situation is exacerbated by the regime’s success in decimating and discrediting the moderate opposition, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood, which had a long history of working with the regime and the military establishment in moments of crisis (Gerges, 2018), most notably in the 2011–12 period (Kandil, 2015). This is very similar to the role that the secular opposition played in the aftermath of the coup of 2013, when the first post-coup government included secular and leftist figures like labour activist Kamal Abu Eita and the liberal figure Ziad Bahaa El-Din, helping to legitimize the coup. This has a simple yet significant consequence, namely the inability of the regime to negotiate with anorganized, moderate opposition at times of mass social upheaval, making mass repression the only possible policy option. Indeed, the Muslim Brotherhood has been so thoroughly vilified that any attempts at reconciliation or negotiating with the group would lead to a disintegration of the regime’s ideological edifice and the rapid loss of popular support, which would have catastrophic consequences for the regime. The same applies to the secular opposition, albeit to a lesser extent. Repression has become endemic and is unlikely to abate due to ideological and structural constraints that are beyond the control of Sisi and his generals. This would explain cases where repression seemed senseless, and more costly than beneficial for the regime. Such a case is that of the economist Ayman Hadhoud, who was arrested and forcibly disappeared in February 2022 (Egypt Watch, 2022). His body was found in April 2022, in Al-Abbasiya mental hospital, bearing what appeared to be torture marks, including bruises, cuts and dislocated bones. Hadhoud had been a member of the Reform and Development Party, led by Anwar El-Sadat, the nephew of Egypt’s ex-President. Sadat was a member of the parliamentary human rights committee at the time of Hadhoud’s abduction, and was leading the negotiations with the regime for the release of a small number of political prisoners. Hadhoud was by no means a radical, but rather a member of a legal political party, which, by all counts, was close to the regime and the security apparatus – part of the domesticated opposition. His death baffled many, but considering the endemic nature of repression in Egypt, it should have come as no surprise. The regime’s policy of repression has clearly gone beyond its control, in a manner that will prove costly to Egypt and Egyptians.
