How Sisi's Militarized Urbanism Is Remaking Egypt
Sisi's regime has securitized public spaces and built mass surveillance into urban planning in a quest to turn Egypt into the “perfect military camp.”
Counterrevolutions are often assumed to restore the ancien régime, but Egypt’s trajectory under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who seized power in a coup in 2013, 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 era of Hosni Mubarak may still linger, but their influence has steadily waned as they adapt to new rules in an unfamiliar political landscape. Sisi—for the first time since 1952, when the Free Officers movement toppled King Farouk and ended Egypt’s monarchy—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 col…
Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Frederick Deknatel.
 | A guest post by
|