Hossam el-Hamalawy, Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi’s New Republic (Verso, 2026).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Hossam el-Hamalawy (HH): The book is based on my doctoral dissertation, which I completed at the Freie Universität Berlin between 2018 and 2023. But the project also grew out of a much longer personal, political, and journalistic engagement with Egypt’s coercive institutions.
I came of age politically in the late 1990s, joined the Revolutionary Socialists, and was active in the student, antiwar, pro-Palestine, and labor movements. Like many of my generation, I encountered the state first through its police stations, prisons, surveillance networks, and torture chambers. I wanted to understand the enemy: how the army, police, and intelligence agencies think, how they compete, how they cooperate, and how they survived the 2011 revolution before reorganizing themselves under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The book is my attempt to make sense of the defeat of the revolution without reducing it to betrayal, conspiracy, or the mistakes of individual actors. It asks how the counterrevolution was built institutionally, and why Sisi’s order is not simply a restoration of Mubarak’s regime, but a new republic of repression.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
HH: The book examines the evolution of Egypt’s repressive apparatus from the 1952 coup to the present, with particular attention to the army, police, General Intelligence Service, Military Intelligence, State Security, and later Homeland Security. It looks at coup-proofing, militarized policing, torture, counterinsurgency, the War on Terror, the 2011 uprising, the 2013 coup, the Rabaa massacre, the Sinai war, and the consolidation of Sisi’s so-called New Republic.
The book intervenes in literatures on authoritarianism, civil-military relations, security-sector politics, revolutions and counterrevolutions, police studies, and political violence. But it also tries to bridge academic work with the knowledge produced by activists, journalists, rights lawyers, former detainees, workers, and dissidents. I was not interested in writing a detached institutional history of the security sector. The central question is political: how did a fragmented apparatus, historically structured to guard against coups, become a unified machine oriented toward preventing another popular uprising?
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
HH: Much of my earlier work as a journalist, photographer, blogger, and researcher focused on social movements from below: labor strikes, street protests, student activism, torture campaigns, and the revolutionary wave that culminated in 2011. I spent years documenting resistance to the state. This book turns the camera in the other direction. It studies the institutions that crushed that resistance.
At the same time, it is not a departure from my previous work in a political sense. My interest in labor, policing, torture, military capitalism, and counterrevolution has always been connected. The book brings these strands together in a longer historical argument. It treats repression not as an excess or deviation, but as a governing logic. It also departs from narratives that treat the post-2013 order as merely Mubarakism with more brutality. I argue instead that Sisi built something qualitatively different: a state in which the coercive apparatus is no longer just defending the regime, but increasingly dominates the state itself.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
HH: I hope the book reaches several audiences. First, Egyptians and others in the region who lived through the revolutionary wave and its defeat, and who are still trying to understand what happened. Second, scholars and students working on authoritarianism, revolutions, security studies, and Middle East politics. Third, journalists, policymakers, and human rights workers who deal with Egypt but often lack a structural understanding of its coercive institutions.
I would like the book to help shift the conversation away from personality-driven explanations. Sisi is important, but the problem is not just Sisi. The problem is a repressive apparatus with deep historical roots, vast economic interests, foreign backing, and a colonial relationship to the population. I also hope the book contributes to future debates on accountability and demilitarization. Any democratic project in Egypt that does not confront the security sector will fail. That is the hard lesson of the revolution and its defeat.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
HH: I am contributing a chapter on Egypt to an edited volume on Islamism and the Left in the Middle East, as well as another chapter on Egypt for a volume on the culture of the Right in the region. I am also continuing my research on the Egyptian military, police, intelligence services, and the political economy of repression. In parallel, I write a weekly newsletter that tracks developments in the Egyptian security sector, military-owned businesses, policing, foreign policy, and local politics. In many ways, it extends the book’s concerns into the present, following them in real time.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 1 to 3)
On the night of 8 October 2000, I left my university campus in downtown Cairo and drove to Giza, where I was to meet for the first time Ahmad Fouad Negm, the legendary leftist colloquial poet whose words had inspired some of the most iconic Egyptian and Arab protest songs since the late 1960s. Negm had heard of me and asked to meet after learning of my role in organising the mass student protests that swept the country with the outbreak of the Second Palestinian Intifada. As I made my way through the crowded streets, I realised I was being followed. Suddenly, two cars cut across the road, and gunmen in plainclothes dragged me from my car, blindfolded me with the Palestinian scarf I was wearing, and shoved me into the backseat of one of their vehicles. They sped off to Lazoghly Square in central Cairo, to thecompound housing the Ministry of Interior and its secret police, the State Security Investigations Service (SS).
For four days, I endured a torture odyssey of beatings, sleep deprivation, and verbal abuse, blindfolded and stripped naked, threatened with rape. The final two nights were spent in a cramped underground cell with detainees labelled ‘Jihadi’ suspects. My SS interrogators believed they could intensify the pressure by locking a Marxist in with ‘Islamist terrorists’, hoping those hours between torture sessions would be unbearable. They would likely have been disappointed: I was treated with kindness. The detainees shared food and tried to make space in the overcrowded cell. As we spoke, their stories emerged, strikingly similar. None belonged to militant groups, but many had relatives who did – or were simply suspected of doing so. SS arrested those relatives, then swept up all the men in their families, subjecting them to torture and indefinite detention without trial. The aim was not intelligence-gathering; the officers knewmost were innocent. It was about sending a message: anyone who dared to resist the state would see not only themselves but their entire families, friends, and colleagues, punished. This was Egypt’s ‘War on Terror’ –backed, armed, financed, and enabled by the West.
It was not my last detention. Over the next decade, as I pursued activism within the socialist movement, I remained a constant target of state violence. My political engagement began in 1996, during my sophomore year, and deepened when I joined the Revolutionary Socialists in 1998. I belonged to a generation that helped rebuild the left on universitycampuses after the collapse of the ‘Third Wave of Egyptian Communism’ and the suppression of the 1977 ‘Bread Uprising’. As a student activist – and later as a journalist, photographer, and labour organiser – I regularly faced the security services, from raids, arrests, and torture to surveillance, intimidation, blacklisting, and smear campaigns. Theseexperiences sharpened my determination to study the enemy and to deconstruct the ‘War on Terror’, whose destructive impact I had witnessed both as a teenager in the 1990s and again in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution’s defeat.
Hosni Mubarak’s ‘War on Terror’ was long hailed as a success by local media and Western officials, providing a key rationale for sustained international support despite his failures in governance. After the suppression of the Arab revolutions (2010–13), counterrevolutionary regimes – including Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s – revived this discourse to legitimise their rule at home and abroad. My interest gradually shifted towards the faceless enablers of this ‘war’ – the army, police, and General Intelligence Service – examining their ideology, interests, and interactions with both each other and the wider population. Together, these institutions form one of the oldest and most powerful repressive apparatuses in the Middle East. Yet for decades, they remained fragmented, often competing even as they safeguarded regime survival. Understanding their internal dynamics is essential to grasping their role before, during, and after the 2011 uprisings.
Counterrevolutions are often assumed to restore the ancien régime, but Egypt’s trajectory under Sisi challenges this notion. While the counterrevolution triumphed, its leader set out to construct an entirely new order – what he called a ‘New Republic’ or ‘Second Republic’. Figures from the Mubarak era may still linger, but their influence has steadily waned as they adapt to new rules in an unfamiliar political landscape. My book does not attempt a full anatomy of this order; instead, it traces its evolution through the lens of repression. I argue that Sisi, for the first time since 1952, succeeded in unifying Egypt’s coercive apparatus and empowering it to dominate the state. The result is a republic without a social contract, devoid of hegemony, locked in an existential war against its own people, and operating more like a colonial occupier than a national government.
During Sisi’s first presidential term, debate persisted over the nature of the post-coup order, with many viewing it as a mere restoration of Mubarak’s regime. Today, few observers or ordinary Egyptians doubt that Sisi’s rule is fundamentally different. While the unprecedented scale of repression is often noted, little scholarship has examined why it has reached such extremes or what dynamics drive it. My book seeks to address these questions while also challenging dominant narratives that retroactively frame the revolution and the actors involved.