Maria Gloria Polimeno, Egypt and the rise of fluid authoritarianism: political ecology, power and the crisis of legitimacy (Manchester University Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Maria Gloria Polimeno (MGP): Immediately after 2013, I realized that the more Egypt took center stage as an economic and political partner from a Western perspective, and especially from EU member states, the more the game of political and diplomatic moral neoliberalism unfolded, while real political, social, and economic challenges were neglected. Moreover, the rhetoric of stability did not correspond with the political fears and fragility of the entire political apparatus, despite the plan for sustainable industrialization and modernization. While works still refer to hyper-militarization, I realized that this understanding was wrong, and that the regime had transformed into something completely different for the first time since the 1950s. This change was reflected more broadly in the reorganization of the political and economic apparatus, its intra-elite relationship, and its recentralization in international and economic agreements. The environment was instrumentalized, which is exactly what is happening in a system that I defined as a “fluid authoritarianism,” approximating what I called a “non-exclusivist personalist regime.”
J: What particular topics, issues, and literature does the book address?
MGP: The book engages with the debate on transformative authoritarianism and the crisis of internal political legitimacy in Egypt under the incumbent and after the shockwaves. Under this umbrella, I have developed the themes of political ecology and power. However, I wanted to take a completely different approach from classical, academic studies mainly oriented towards debating Max Weber by taking traditionalist lenses. In line with my argument of sub-infrastructural transformations and adaptations which resulted in the internal fragmentation and repositioning of the local elite along the international business interests, I have developed what I define as “a modified Weberian conception of legitimacy.” This unique and multilevel approach combines Gramsci and Baumann with Khaldoun’s cyclical theory. At the same time, it expands on omnibalancing and diffused support theory. The book also addresses the debate around political ecology, with the final economic chapter questioning the role of the environment in politics. I had the opportunity to develop these conceptualizations through a critical approach to the prism of the Social Development Goals and considering international actions in support of the 2030 Agenda. I do not undermine the relevance of sustainability in the region, as the area is massively exposed to climate-related effects for which solutions are much needed. However, nature has ended up being weaponized and instrumentalized as a tool of internal cohesion, rather than a determinant for economic and industrial performance.
This volume also builds on some personal memories, and the issues of fuel, energy, and energy subsidies are part of them (as discussed in the economic chapter). I remember power cuts at night in my apartment in Cairo in 2012. Locals ended up “dealing with this as part of everyday life”, and I realized this when I shouted in Arabic from my balcony, complaining that there was no light, again. Blackouts were not accidental. They were part of the regime’s logic. This logic was protracted during the transition period. My book intertwines the politics of subsidies with the overall discourse around performance and the crisis of legitimacy. It sits at the intersection of the literature on non-democratic regime types, international political economy, and political legitimacy, with some additions of political ecology.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MGP: The book is intertwined with my wider research on autocracies and elites in the Middle East and Egypt from a political/structural and economic perspective. It departs from my previous works for the strongly transformative approach taken. In addition, it is different in that it opens up to other fields of research and implications that also look at informal governance and environmental politics. I am an interdisciplinary scholar.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MGP: I am aware that this book is quite complex, but I hope that this sensitive topic can also arouse the curiosity and interest of non-experts as well as experts in the field and of course, academics. I would like it to break ground in studies that look at the intersectionality between contemporary autocracies, the international political economy, and environmental politics. I would like this work to be read also by practitioners and to encourage them to revise policies and realize that the regime is anything but a pillar of political and economic stability in the Middle East and North Africa, for many reasons. However, I do not expect the EU member states to move away from their close relations with the country, due to their interests of different kinds, but there is a lot that is being missed beyond industrial modernization, in which Egypt is investing and borrowing heavily. They are betting on the wrong country and taking risks.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MGP: I am working on and leading a few projects/collaborations. The first, and next, collaborative project stems from my lived experience. It explores what I define “Prohibited States” and looks at illicit trafficking and smuggling intertwined with the transformation of informal governance and support to governments’ interests in the region. It features Egypt as my country of specialism, but it also takes a comparative approach to specific dynamics. I embarked on this project for two reasons: the first was a memory of Egypt and a time when a friend asked us to join him for tea in a “decadent” café in downtown Cairo as he wanted to buy hashish for personal use. The relationship between hashish and Cairo’s society is quite complex. Egypt does not produce hashish but is a main consumer, and tribes trade it. Overall illicit trafficking is a main theme in my research, and gold is also at the core, as the latter is redefining relations between formal and informal actors beyond borderlands. The second reason relates to the broader and collaborative theme of transformative informal governance, for which I was awarded a British Academy Seed Funding grant to craft collaborations between my institution and the CNRS in Paris, which I am leading and for which I expect to generate more funding later this year.
The second larger research project I have designed focuses on ecocides in the Middle East, again with mixed outputs. This is part of the Middle East Institute’s academic research agenda, of which I am in charge, next to additional duties and responsibilities. For now, I can say that I have envisioned a collaboration with Google London and NASA/ESA satellites. There will be a 4K Virtual Reality exhibition.
Finally, in 2024 I signed a new book contract with Routledge in London, and I am the editor of The Routledge Handbook of the Environment and Middle Eastern Politics.
J: What challenges did you encounter in writing this book and in your research?
MGP: I encountered challenges and obstacles during my fieldwork due to the sensitive subject matter of the regime. For security reasons, I was institutionally prohibited from travelling back to Egypt to conduct field research. The process of obtaining ethical approval also took much longer due to the topics and profiles I was interviewing. Conducting sensitive research is always a challenge when it comes to fieldwork and personal safety. I am currently facing similar issues in my work on illicit trafficking, informal governance, and autocracies. Beyond this book, we must recognize that changes in formal and informal power and internal dynamics have transformed the region from within. However, closed political spaces on the ground as well as conflicts cannot stop academic research as well as the social, economic, and political implications of our work, even from a policy perspective. We adapt to risks.
Excerpt from the book (from the Preface, pages xii, xiii, xiv, and xv)
At the time of writing, illiberal powers are on the rise on a global scale – one that transcends regionalisms such as North–South or Western–Eastern divides. Illiberal regimes are proving themselves to be attractive in poisoning the fundamental political, social and moral values of liberal democracies. Likewise, populist narratives are being revived, and while they aim at dividing nations, preventing democratic reforms, in other contexts populist narratives, by relying on ethnosymbolism, aim at recreating the idea and identity of nations, after shockwaves. Myths, memories and symbols have not returned to playing out against neoliberal projects but to tactically reclaiming a welfarist-ethical role and legitimation for business elites’ mandate in new projects of development. In the complexity of these processes, populist narratives and neonationalisms have emerged within a distorted 1950s–1960s socialist-welfarist claim, which is presented as the host-ideology, but anachronistically in a neoliberal capitalist regional system that remains fondly linked to the International Monetary Fund’s loans, and thus condemned to enduring financial indebtedness. The erosion in the qualities of democracies and untransitioned systems, as well as the gap in internal legitimation, that persist in autocracies have been accompanied by a reinterpreted institutionalization of identities, at which core the idea of the greatness of nations started to be employed as a legitimation device. While much is known about the role of regime type and democratisation in international cooperation and the spread of liberal norms, we know relatively little about the regional and international consequences of reverse processes, alias the structural consolidation of autocracies and the role of nature in this process. This book will contribute to the study of internal political legitimacy from a structural, socio-political, and economic perspective in systems that have undergone transformations after shockwaves, like Egypt after the 2013 coup.
From a theoretical perspective, the book engages with the broader debate on autocratic restorations, though it approaches the phenomenon through the prism of non-continuity. What it establishes is intertwined with the theory of rupture and change in times of transition. To this end, the Introduction presents a combined reinterpretation of the Gramscian interregnum through a Baumanian flavour, which sees further development in the theory of fluid authoritarianism, against the immobilism of the scholarship, and which goes beyond empirical and regionalised focuses. In the early phases of this work, the term shockwaves has been limited to Egypt, as the first country that experienced a coup one year after democratic elections in 2012. As the conclusions of the book are approached, other shockwaves have occurred in the region, and Tunisia deserves a mention, next to Lebanon where the persistence of the elite in the country has been at the core of internal protests but also impacted on transforming the system. In a global context of referred ‘authoritarian restorations’, lying in democracy has become normalised in international politics, and this act of lying ended up revealing a struggle to create new bases of internal consensus beyond old practices of coercion, repression and torture. Shockwaves organically can upgrade political machines, thus determining a transition at the level of the organisation of state structure, even from within, and from which the conception of fluid authoritarianism stems. Despite this, violence and coercion have tactically entered a new era of routinisation in the everyday life of the Middle East region, turning into new modes of governmentality that transcend former exceptionalisms. After 2011 elites have returned, playing and consolidating a strategic central function in the economic and development sector, surfing new industrial waves, which have ended up institutionalizing and moralising the environment and nature. In Tunisia, after the collapse of Ben Ali’s regime in 2011, prosperous companies were sold to factions of the elite, which started consolidating their business. This finds application in Egypt, though under different premises and in a sub-transformed political structure in which the architecture of power emerged as polarised for the first time since 1953. Green reforms promoted under the Social Development Goals, including the greening of desert lands, the commercial development of the Suez Canal Area, and the Siwa Oasis project, among others, projected towards green energy transition, saw a constructive presentation through the lenses of a political programme of economic development, were environmentally ethical and committed to making natural resources accessible by all and sustainable. The political seduction of this discourse aimed at a consolidation of the deep internal legitimation void. Despite this, Egypt remains profoundly based on a precarious political and economic stability, which is internationally and diplomatically negotiated with the parable of economic opportunities and growth under the umbrella of Agenda 2030, but which in fact implies major structural and socio-economic risks, which in turn can become boomerang determinants due to the internal realignment of domestic religious, social and military actors along the infrastructural and international spectrum. This lens of analysis with application in the context of Egypt can be exported to other contemporary autocracies in the way illiberal green policies lying about sustainability are being internationally turned into dispositives for political and economic legitimation on the one hand, and for the functioning of a new frontier of moral green capitalism on the other.
Since 2013 Egypt has radically changed many of the historical state’s structural assets, and presents some features reminiscent of a form of ‘personalist’ authoritarianism, though non-exclusivist, embedded into an organically transformed societal materiality which impacted with the linearity of internal alignments. This book distances itself from existing debates, arguing for a simplistic restoration of a militarised structure in the country, and for a continuum between al-Sisi and Mubarak’s model of regime. Illiberal regimes have many sub-faces, they are not static or single level-built entities along the spectrum of their taxonomies. The process of internal legitimation is here designed beyond classical approaches confined to Max Weber. Rather, the book has designed a framework for reinterpreting internal political legitimacy in sub-transformed systems in which micro-structural shifts in the nature of relations are projected towards new categories of material resources. The framework will go beyond Egypt and the Middle East.
A central argument of this book concerns the idea of authoritarian continuity in post-shockwaves settings and the rise of what the book defines as ‘fluid authoritarianism’ as a sub-structural and organic result of shockwaves that collapsed historical and structural certainties and impacted with the transition period. On a transregional scale, this idea of illiberal fluidity is embedded into a regional context that considers the interconnections of domestic political survival with readjustments in transnational alignments in times of transition. The reconstruction of the Egyptian machine of governance through the prism of internal political legitimacy has permitted this book to expand on the broader political design derived at the regional and international level as directly stemming from intra-countries’ structural change. These interconnections can directly influence new forms of political and economic ambitions and rehabilitation along the international system and market that are straightforwardly modulated by the inner-transformations and relationship that take place within the political system itself. In addition, the intradisciplinary multi-level built framework designed in the book has permitted a twofold theorisation where the rise of fluid authoritarianism as a brand-new taxonomy of autocracy that emerged after shockwaves is interlinked with the fluidity of Arab states. The book unpacks these aspects before turning, in the final chapter, to offer a critical radical discussion on political ecology and power as constituting a critical ecosystem for political legitimacy. While the focus is on Egypt, in fact the critique here finds application to what the book calls the fluid Middle East, alias a region in which political, intra-societal and economic relations have become more fluid than in the past as a result of changes at the level of the political structures. The Middle East region remains profoundly brittle, but this is an aspect that is still neglected by Western actors, who continue to view new governments that have emerged and ‘consolidated’ since 2011 or so as politically stable entities and trustworthy economic partners in the Mediterranean area. As the book highlights, these premises risk renegotiating the boundaries and structure of power where nature will become a new locus of political power, exclusion and contestation, in Egypt and beyond.
Please note: references/citations have been removed for the purposes of this excerpt