Egypt under Sisi: Anatomy of a military regime

Maged Mandour’s book is a tapestry for a detailed account of the processes of militarization of economic, political, and legal systems in Egypt since 2013.

Maged Mandour traces, in his book Egypt Under el-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge, the process of militarization of the Egyptian state under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He gives a fine-grained explanation of structural economic, legal, and political changes effected since Sisi came to power, following the 2013 coup.

Mandour explores the nature of the military regime with two key arguments.

The first is the academic assumption that the 2011 uprising was a revolutionary situation without a revolutionary outcome. Mandour argues that the uprising actually did have a revolutionary outcome, just not the desired one.

It resulted in an intensification of the militarization of the state without precedent and thus marked an essential break from the military legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The second argument goes, despite the fact that Sisi’s rule became consolidated, the regime is still susceptible to change that the economic pressures might bring and not necessarily political ones.

Drawing on Samuel E Finer’s division of military regimes in 2002, Mandour has dubbed the Sisi regime as a direct military rule, in stark contrast to the dual/indirect structures under Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. The first four chapters cover the essential building blocks of Sisi’s military regime.

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Chapter one traces the political development with the state’s army identity up to the Rabaa massacre in 2013 by reflecting on its ideological discourse of hegemony.

Chapter two is concerning the militarization of the various branches of the state; chapter three provides explanation on this use of violence for public repression. Chapter four discusses the militarization of the economic sphere and of aggressive military capitalism.

In each chapter, Mandour is largely concerned with demonstrating how Sisi’s regime has militarized control over public and economic realms to a degree unsurpassed by any of its predecessor regimes since 1952.

In the final chapter, the author examines the prospects and potentialities of the incumbent regime, and raises the matter of a democractic transition.

Reflections

In the book, most of the theoretical insight comes with the application of Finer’s categorization throughout different chapters.

Mandour’s work presents an analysis of the ideological foundation underlying the rule of the Sisi regime and the legal and economic tools used in the militarization process. This book, on the other hand, falls short of theoretical analysis.

While the argument for why Sisi’s regime falls into Finer’s category of direct military rule is well-made, the second theoretical pillar, Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, is somewhat under-examined and vaguer.

This is where Mandour will concede that a number of the key features of Gramsci’s definition Do not apply to the present Egyptian administrative system, for example depending on non-ruling elites for a reign of terror and the continued existence of non-hegemonic type of society, which makes, therefore the applicability of the Gramscian term under scrutiny.

More controversially, though he recognises this limitation, Mandour concludes that the coup itself brought about elite-driven radical changes without popular participation, a point that could have been better supported with existing literature on authoritarianism and military rule in the Middle East, rather than the idea of passive revolution.

The book from time to time quotes other important scholarly works for instance it borrows from Antonio Gramsci’s definition of the state and Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts about the character of capitalism. The scant quotes go to less introduced and almost untouched terrain still the scanty theoretical discussions can be rationalized by the fact that it is written for the general public.

The major reflective part of the book thus comes in the last chapter where Mandour lays out three possible scenarios of Sisi’s regime. This is part of the future of Egypt and the democratic transition that goes beyond narrating the policies that the state rolls out.

Mandour elaborated on the argument to the effect that a weak regime is expected, considering the vulnerability that the concept of its military capitalism implicates for the control of its economy by the military.

The chapter answers four critical questions. How will this regime wither away? Will it be through its collapse in a wave of mass bloodletting, with disturbing parallels to a Libya-like scenario? Will the regime waste away until it reaches a point where it can no longer carry its own weight and then irreversibly collapses? Or will the regime regenerate itself into a dual military-civilian rule, possibly, in the long run securing its stability?

Reform led from the top down is not very credible as long as Sisi has profoundly militarized the state and given birth to political and economic facts on the ground that may also prove irreversible: vested interests inside the military establishment fighting to maintain the status quo, and an absence of organized opposition further hardened this regime as a political fact that might continue beyond Sisi’s lifetime.

Accordingly, Mandour identifies only two scenarios of plausible change or transformation: an external shock, say a regional war, or internal decay, may be catalyzed under the strain of similar external pressures of 2011 through an uprising.

Two scenarios

Engrossing as this may be, there are certain serious lacunae in Mandour’s analysis.

The two scenarios suggested, although distinct, overlap in the consideration of an underlying external threat to the regime, which, in a way, prods this reform from the top. In both of the above cases, he overlooks the regional security arrangements put in place post-Arab Spring.

He woefully does not analyze the regional transnational tools of surveillance and repression that emerged after 2011 among the Arab countries, which were calculated to sustain authoritarianism and the project of suppressing political Islam.

The analysis is mute on the decreasing utility of protest as a mechanism of change in the Arab world, making another uprising overwrought.

Further, the obstacles to elite-led reform have not factored in the prospect of elite factionalism—a probable state even within the most dictatorship kind of regimes— or the a comeback of Islamists as a viable, organized political actor.

The Islamist comeback is not limited to the question of the Muslim Brothers– it is much broader and includes a wide range of Salafi actors. Even a tentative Islamist comeback would be sufficient to attract in a balancing act.

Elite-led reform could also be accomplished by military elites who want to create a civilian façade, who want to neutralize their military rivals, and who create the conditions for a cosmetic return through the facilitation of the Islamists.

But, sadly, the book’s only shortcoming is that, at this point, it be distinctly left alone, detached from better-supported analysis on authoritarianism and civil-military relations.

The other noted shortcoming arises in the presented methodology of the book. The author highly relies on a rich list of media and primary sources but fails to indicate the method used for data analysis and the criteria for the inclusion and exclusion of those sources in the introduction of the book, thereby greatly lowering the scholarly rigor of the book.

Still, the book by Mandour is very detailed in painting a picture of the anatomy of Sisi’s military regime and offers a ground base for further theoretical research on democratic transitions and possibilities of reform in Egypt.

The book is a must-read for scholars in the Middle East looking for rich case studies on military-civil relations.