Egypt Under El-Sisi

Maged Mandour on a militarized, repressive, mobilized and brittle regime a decade after the coup

Maged Mandour, Egypt Under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge (Bloomsbury/IB Tauris 2024).

It’s been a decade since General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi carried out a military coup in Egypt to overthrow the elected government of Muslim Brotherhood figure Mohammed el-Morsi. A lot of ink was spilled at the time about how this was actually a popular revolution and couldn’t be called a coup. That debate, in all its passion and fury, has long since been settled. It was a coup, and far from restoring democracy it has led to the profound militarization of the Egyptian regime. In his timely new book, Egypt Under El-Sisi, Maged Mandour makes a strong argument for the radical nature of Sisi’s new regime. Far from a restoration of the pre-revolutionary Mubarak regime, Sisi’s regime represents something fundamentally new in Egyptian politics: a fully militarized politics and economy rooted in popular mobilization against internal enemies whether Islamist or democratic.

There’s been a lot of great, important writing on the failure of Egypt’s democratic transition. One of the first book review essays I did on this blog featured tremendous books by Mona el-Ghobashy and Jannis Grimm on how the transition failed:

Mandour’s new book is less focused on the failure of the transition than on the nature of the regime which resulted from “the top-down process of radical change driven by the military elites once they became the uncontested masters of the state.” It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Sisi’s regime to view it as just a restoration of Mubarak’s autocracy. As Mandour dissects in clinical detail, Sisi and the military elite systematically eliminated alternativese to military power across state and societal instituitons, militarizing the economy and the political system alike. The results have been disastrous: keeping Sisi in power, to be sure, and likely insulating his regime from the threat of a new revolution in the short term, at the cost of the evisceration of the economy and the elimination of most of the country’s traditional sources of resilience.

I talked to Mandour about the book on last week’s Middle East Political Science Podcast — listen to it here:

Like Grimm, Mandour argues that the violence of the Rabaa massacre was fundamental and constitutive of the new regime - not a mistake, not a regrettable cost, but a core legitimating mechanism for the new military regime. Mandour doesn’t shy away from how genuinely popular the violence against the Muslim Brotherhood was across a wide swathe of the Egyptian public — including many of the ostensible liberals and secularists who would all too soon find themselves on the same firing line of state violence. Few observers of Egypt today would quibble with the claim that the regime “has zero tolerance of dissent and.. is willing to use unprecedented levels of state violence to silence it.”

But for Mandour, it’s more than that: the genuine mass mobilization against the Muslim Brotherhood and popular embrace of state violence in the regime’s founding moment rendered much of the public complicit. This “societal repression”, as Mandour terms it, continues to be a source of political strength for the regime, the ability to continually mobilize popular support in the name of state violence against internal enemies. In his sobering conclusion, “popular support for the regime exists because of the repression, not in spite of it.”

But it’s also a potential weakness: the most significant political challenges Sisi has faced came with the transfer of the islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi sovereignty — a violation of the neo-Nasserist statist ideological bargain. That’s also why Israel’s push to drive huge numbers of Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai in a new Nakba poses such a profound ideological threat to Sisi, one that even as totalizing a security regime as his can’t afford to ignore.

Mandour argues that Sisi’s militarization of state and societal institutions represents a radical break with past practice. He shows the implications of the absence of a ruling party such as Mubarak’s NDP and the marginalization and co-optation of civilian elites who might contest or push back against military rule. This militarization goes well beyond direct rule by a General: “the regime’s consistent policy has been the complete militarization of the state, the economy, and the public space in a manner that is extremely difficult to reverse.” He traces this militarization across the media, the judiciary, civil society, religious establishments, and more: “the Egyptian state has undergone a process of structural regression in which the classic separation of powers between the executive, judicial and legislative branches has been almost completely eroded.” His relentless presentation of the horrifying parade of political prisoners and repression can only shock and depress everyone who believed in the hope of the January 25, 2011, revolution.

The economic dimension of this militarization is the subject of a critical chapter. Mandour shows not just that the military has moved into critical sectors of the economy, but that this has had profoundly negative effects across a wide range of dimensions. The concentration of economic power has encouraged massive capital intensive showcase projects ripe with opportunities for military skimming, financed by risky short term capital. That bill is now coming due, as the currency collapses and Egyptians suffer.

Mandour does not see an imminent revolution or state collapse. The new regime is too strong, for all its brittleness. That’s nothing to celebrate: the consolidation of a brutally repressive, nationalist, and economically incompetent regime holds out little positive. But this clear-eyed, incisive account of the Sisi regime as it is should be required reading for students of comparative politics and for anyone considering supporting a military coup anywhere in the name of restoring democracy.