It Could Happen Here - Counterrevolution in Egypt

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

In this episode Dana El Kurd talks with Hossam El-Hamalawy, a journalist and socialist from Cairo, who was among the organizers of the 2011 uprising. He has been involved in the labour movement and the fight against police brutality in Egypt for many years, and holds a PhD in political science from Free University of Berlin. Hossam is author of the new book "Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi's New Republic".   Sources: Hossam’s substack - https://barracks.substack.com/ Hossam’s book - https://www.versobooks.com/products/3225-counterrevolution-in-egypt?srsltid=AfmBOoo0NJfxdpH2uIJsXqXLfdSs10LtMgK9hCiKx7TeLHQO4OzTWF-LSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcast. Self-care September is your reminder to slow down, check in with yourself, get off your phone, and maybe ask, why am I like this? I'm Jemisbeg, host of the Psychology of Your 20s podcast and this month we're helping you make sense of the person that you are becoming from setting boundaries and navigating friendships to understanding anxiety confidence relationships and attachment sometimes our biggest decisions without us even realizing it aren't driven by what we truly want but by what will

prevent us from feeling lonely or being alone listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All Zone Media. Hello everyone and welcome to It Could Happen here. My name is Dan Al-Kurd. I'm a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics. And today I'm joined by Hussam al-Hamilawi. Hossam is a journalist and socialist from Cairo,

who was among the organizers of the 2011 protest. He's been involved in the labor movement and the fight against police brutality in Egypt for many years and holds a PhD in political science from the Free University of Berlin. He publishes a weekly newsletter on Egyptian politics, which I'll be linking in the show notes, and is author of the new book, Counter Revolution in Egypt, Cici's New Republic. Hassam, thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Diana, for having me. So let me start off by talking about the beginning of your book. At the beginning of your book, you talk about your own abduction and torture by state security in 2000. And then you were an organizer, as I said, of the 2011 uprising. So how did living through this repression on a personal level shape the way that you studied the repression? And what can a participant see that maybe an outside scholar might miss? There was like a long-running tradition in academia and in journalism,

which fortunately it's being challenged over the past couple of decades at least, whereby this tradition tended to regard the scholar or the journalist as someone who's completely separate from whatever they are studying or reporting gone. They should be, between quotes, neutral, between quotes, objective. Any form of attachment or passion for any cause would be considered a conflict of interest, more or less. But, I mean, a great chunk of my career, and this is also expressed in this book, I've been trying to challenge that. I consider myself a scholar activist, not just a scholar. I was also an activist journalist, not just a journalist.

And in that regards, in answer to your question, my experience when it comes to state repression has definitely shaped not just my intellectual trajectory, but my own personal life. After all, I'm doing this interview with you from Berlin, not from my home in Cairo, which I had to leave in 2015 and, you know, can't go back as long as this regime exists. My repression, which included the repeated arrests, torture, continuous threats to me and my family, exclusion from jobs, and I mean, the list is too long, have planted in me curiosity and also an existential reason to study who's repressing me actually.

I mean, we tend to talk about the state or the security apparatus. And I was very much interested in putting faces and names to these kind of entities. Who's doing what when it comes to repression? Who's doing the monitoring and who's doing the arrest? what's the profile of the officers who conduct these missions? Where do they come from? What's their background? What's their life trajectories?

How do they justify for themselves their actions? What's their worldview? And in so many ways, this curiosity has took me on a very long journey to study this apparatus also with the declared aim of dismantling it one day when we are victorious in the coming revolution. Yeah, so you really opened up kind of the black box of the security apparatus and disentangled, I think, the ways in which maybe outside scholars kind of gloss over or lump different things together.

And everything you're saying really resonates with me as a Palestinian studying Palestine, like this endless suspicion of your own perspective. I'm glad that, as you said, there has been a pushback from, our region and from scholars and activists in other places. But on this question of like actually doing the research, you know, it must have been challenging because this regime wants to obfuscate. It wants to hide its doers. So it must have been challenging to find sources. How did you find that information? What was your methodology for the book? That's a very good question. From the outside, Egypt looks like a very opaque country for very reasonable causes at the end of the day.

This is a repressive regime. It's allergic to the flow of information and freedom of expression in general. Egypt is not a researcher-friendly country at all. Once you mention Egypt in academia, people are always reminded with Giulio Regini, the Italian PhD scholar who was brutally tortured and murdered in Egypt. We don't have freedom of information acts in Egypt that allows us access into the archives of this security apparatus and the military and the other institutions that belong to that sector. But you can always find your way if you decide to become innovative.

And I will just cite a couple of examples. First is that sometimes the best information you can get about an opaque military like the Egyptians is through their sponsors. The Egyptian military is sponsored by the U.S. in the U.S., even when it's, of course, becoming cecified in so many aspects. But still there is a room, freedom of information acts and other laws that allows you access. So if you go down, after we're done with the recording, just go to the U.S. State Department website, check the FOIA section, and go back to 2011 and check Hillary Clinton's emails that have been declassified. Right. The intelligence reports in these emails almost contain the Scap General's meetings minutes, where Hillary is like saying, General Ruey said this, while the other General, like, replied. back saying no, and it's as if she is sitting, you know, I mean, on the same meeting.

But anyways, I mean, they are her proxies and clients, so she must get the information right away. So I managed to get tons of information through actually declassified US documents. The second method, which I also invested some time in, just by the fact that the military are now in the front seat, not in the backseat when it comes to ruling, and I guess we'll touch more on this later. There are tons of mics that are shoved in front of the mouths of the different generals and the different senior officials, as well as CC. And these guys don't have any filters. They haven't received the same sophisticated training, I guess, where militaries in Western, quote-unquote democracies have where they are always in contact with the media.

So the kind of garbage and so many secretive things that you actually can't believe that they are saying, it's unbelievable. So just by browsing through their public statements, they are spilling the beans left and right. The last thing that I will say about the sources, I once heard a story. in the beginning of the 2000s or late 1990s, when I was still a student. And to be honest, I have no idea if this story was, I mean, it did happen or it's just an urban myth. But when I heard it, it resonated with me and it stayed with me for years to come and inspired me.

The story goes like as follows. Following the peace treaty with Israel, when the Egyptians and the Israelis were sitting, discussing joint cooperation projects. So the Israelis would propose some agricultural project, for example, and then they would tell the Egyptians, and we think that Mr.

Muhammad, blah, blah, blah, at this department, at your agricultural ministry, would be the most qualified to lead it. And then they would like suggest others and they would like keep on proposing names. And the Egyptians were shocked

to find out that As the story goes, that the Musad had the entire map of the Egyptian bureaucracy just by monitoring the obituaries. Because you know, obituaries, maybe the Westerners don't know this, but obituaries in the Arab world, you tend to put your entire family tree and brag about all the members, you know, of the family. This engineer and this doctor, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the entire family tree.

And each one, you know, you start posting their CVs, and, you know, their achievements. So actually, when I heard this, it stuck with me that story. And I applied that same methodology on, like, trying to track down police officers who were involved in torture in the years, like in the run up to the 2011 revolution. And I used the same technique in my research. So I managed to map, for example, the new administrative structure of the military intelligence through obituaries, through surfing through the obituaries and, you know, digging up names and

departments and things like that. So yeah, I mean, there is always a way to maneuver. I like how the security apparatus becomes a family business and the military becomes a family business. And I also love the fact that we can use the like the structures of American empire to study its outposts. So yeah, that's that's very clever on your part to, to, to weaponize those sources. Okay, so let's get into the argument of the book. Basically, there's this idea of a counter-revolution, I think maybe for like the layman, also I think in some of the theoretical literature, but just generally speaking, the way that people think of counter-revolutions, we're thinking of a restoration of an old regime. But your main argument

is that Zizi didn't restore Mobadok's Egypt. Mobadok was the president prior to the 2011 uprising. but he built something fundamentally different. You call it a Second Republic. So what makes this order different? And why does that distinction matter for how the world should understand Egypt right now? This indeed was the main argument of the book. My book was sort of an intervention in political debates that have been happening among the Egyptian dissident community. When I started this research, I'm talking here about the end of the country.

2017, because, I mean, my book is, as you said earlier, it's my doctoral actually dissertation, which I did here in Berlin. So at the time, there were still debates about whether this regime is a return to the Mubarak order or is it something new. Now, speaking to you in 2026, any five-year-old in Egypt would definitely, you know, would know that this is something completely different. You don't need to do a PhD about. But at the time, there was still so much unclarity. And my argument was a victorious counter-revolution does not restore the old order, simply because the old order has failed. And by failure here, Dana, I don't mean the kind of failure that you and I would think of, that the old regime was not democratic enough. The old regime did not distribute wealth in an equal fashion. no, in the eyes of the counter-revolutionaries, the old regime failed because it failed to repress the revolution.

So the kind of victorious regimes that come out of such a counter-revolution are usually regimes that try to avoid the mistakes of the past. So the generals, for example, who led the 2013 military coup, they regarded Mubarak as two-linions. as too weak. They completely detested the way that Husni Mubarak, between quotes, allowed those human rights NGOs to operate

in the country. They couldn't believe that Hosni Mubarak allowed again, between quotes, people to denounce him in the press, for example. So this was not a restoration of the old Mubarak

authoritarian formula. I mean, make no mistake. I'm not nostalgic to the Mubarak days. I don't see it as a viable model. But this was not a restoration of that old authoritarian formula. Instead, Cici built a new regime, which, by the way, he's the one who coined the phrase the new republic or the second republic. And I know many people they like to ridicule, you know, this term for very obvious reasons. But it's a lot. But it's it's actually it's quite accurate. He contrasts the first republic which

lost it from 1953 that's one year after the three officers coup when they abolished the monarchy and declared the republic till 2013. This is all of it. It included

three successive regimes Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak. Cici lumped them all together in one lot as the First Republic, and actually I'm arguing that he's right. Even when on the surface, they had different inclinations, different stated goals, different international alliances. But when it comes to the core of how the state machine was organized, actually, they didn't

differ that much. And there was some logic in organizing the security apparatus, which completely changed after 2013. There's no shortcut for saving time, but saving money is simple. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at fellairDirect.com. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. I just remember this low, taunting voice. next to my ear saying shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.

There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can be. say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like,

you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So, So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for-you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsesives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of distance.

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See you between the pages. Let's get into that in particular. It's the fact that Abdon Nalsat and Onward, they pitted different parts of the security operators against each other. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not a scholar of Egypt. But my understanding is that under Mobadok's regime, they really boldly. for example, general intelligence and, you know, things like this. So always kind of historically

fragmenting different parts of the security apparatus so that they are rivals. And of course, the dictator can be the arbiter. What you're saying is in the book, especially is that C.C. unifies them for the first time. And why is that unification the key to kind of understanding not only the type of repression, but the scale? And could it have happened? without the 2011 revolution? There is a vast amount of literature in political science that discuss this term. It's called the dominant perceived threat.

And the arguments usually that revolves around this term is that when autocrats reach power, they usually have a dominant perceived threat. I mean, don't get me wrong, any good autocrat, if they want to stay in power for a long time, they have to sheet themselves from all sorts of dangers. But there is always a dominant one.

And according to that dominant one, they start structuring their security sector or security apparatus. So the argument also goes, and I mean, I support it, and I think it's correct and accurate, that if your dominant perceived threat is that of a military coup, then you tend to fragment your apparatus as you've just clarified. So you create multiple security institutions. And I mean security here in the functional sense,

like the military would be a security institution. They will all have overlapping mandates, hardly any communication or information sharing between them. They are always in a state of competition for resources. And there isn't much horizontal channels of communication. The only channels of communication are vertical. So that, as you also clarified earlier, only the ruler would have the bird's eye view of what's happening beneath them. At the same time, you know, this ruler or this autocrat would definitely take precautions against riots,

against foreign invasions, against, you know, what have you, but if the dominant perceived threat was that of a military coup, they will do as we just explained. So during the First Republic, I mean, how

did the First Republic start? In case your listeners do not know in July 1952, an eclectic group of nationalist army officers led by Colonel Gamal Abdan Nasser. they overthrew the British-backed king, and they declared the republic a year later.

This was a time, Dana, where coups were almost a fashionable thing to do, I mean, across the global south. These were the years of decolonization. At the time, like, the militaries were still regarded in a favorable, actually, kind of lied by the nations that were, still being formed, many of them came from the anti-colonial fights. The military was regarded as a modernizing force professional that can get the country to go forward and catch up with the West and break dependency ties. There was all of these kind of nostalgic, romanticized visions of the military. So Egypt in that case was not really that unique.

it was happening across our region and it was happening across the global south. So the immediate concern of these conspirators was a counter-coup. It makes sense. So this was their dominant perceived threat and that's when the military intelligence colonel Zakaria Mohideen,

who was dubbed Nasr's barrier in reference to Stalin's barrier, he organized this security setup which continued with us all the way up until 2013, whereby he fragmented the security sector. So you had the military, you had the Interior Ministry and its secret police, which changed its name several times,

from the Mabakhv al-Ahm to Mabash of Dahlia to then after the revolution, Al-Watani. And he created the General Intelligence Service in 1954, or our Mukhabarak, as we call it. and by the way, it was modeled along the structure of the CIA from the start. They were very impressed with the CIA. And actually, they enjoyed good relations in order to fight communism. Because, you know, many people actually don't know that initially the free officers.

They didn't really express any left-leaning sympathies, but they were kind of like pushed into it in the following years. So this was the security setup. not in their wildest dreams did they ever imagine that a revolution could happen in Egypt. I mean here a proper, like popular revolution. And this is because our rulers, even when they, you know, came in the post-colonial years, they still maintain this colonial look whereby they despised their people. They saw the Egyptians as human beings without agency.

They regarded the Egyptians as incapable of self-organizing, and that if they are let free or let loose, that they will bring the whole country together. So there always has to be some patriarchal kind of guardianship of the Egyptians. They expected few riots to happen here and there, maybe some strikes here and there, but not in their wildest night. that they thought a revolution could happen. Comes to 2011, and suddenly they are all shocked. And for two and half years, they were panicking about the fact that, you know, the entire regime could have collapsed. So out of this trauma and paranoia comes out the counter-revolutionary regime of Abdul Fattah Sisi,

where the dominant perceived threat now is that of a popular revolution. And this is not, I mean, my own analysis. I mean, again, C.C. does not miss a single occasion where he brings up 2011 and warns of 2011 and talks about, you know, the conspiracies to bring down the state. Even, you know, a few days ago before we record this podcast, he inaugurated the octagon. If the Americans have the Pentagon, we have the octagon. and the octagon is not really to protect, you know, the head of the state and the head of the army and the senior brass from, you know, foreign invasions, God forbid. It's, Cici said it. He said that, you know, we're not going to repeat another 2011, which brought the whole country to a standstill. So now we're moving the brain of the state, you know, somewhere safe.

what ensued was the unification of the security apparatus for the first time since 1952. Don't get me wrong. I mean, they are still like three separate institutions. Friction is bound to happen between them and it does happen every now and then between them. They might have different views, but they are not in competition. They are coordinating. They are sharing information. Sometimes they even share the same structure.

I mean, there are units within the Egyptian army now that officially has the police as part of it. Like Unit AAA, for example. They coordinate and they do joint operations all throughout the Sinai counterinsurgency and in the war on terror between codes in the Nile Valley. And in so many ways, everyone now they understand that the military is the apex ruler. It's on the top. But with it, it's younger siblings. the Makhabarat and the Interior Ministry

are in this kind of unholy alliance trying to protect the state from the conspiracies of the evil Egyptian people at the end of the day. Yeah, I have so many questions. I could talk to you forever, but... Shoot me.

Well, I mean, one of the questions that popped up while you were talking about is because of the emergence from decolonization and because of the wars with Israel, You know, because of all of the history that the military, the Egyptian military has in the country, I mean, I think it's common knowledge and public opinion would back it up to some degree that Egyptian public perception has been very pro-military. And every ruler has come from a military background, as you mentioned. And given that the Egyptian people have now been named the dominant threat, do you think that that is changing public perception of the military apparatus? Let me first just go back to, I mean, even before 2011, whether Egyptians regarded the military favorably or not.

There is definitely, I mean, this factor which exists almost in every country, and you're in America, so you understand this too. The military is always a core pillar of whatever nationalism or wherever nationalist ideology and patriotic ideology that exists in any country. And in the case of Egypt, the military, especially, you know, its role in the 1973 war against Israel, which is always depicted in our school curriculums and in our movies and, you know, whatever culture production, as a smashing victory against the Israelis, which is not, you know, I mean completely accurate, to be fair. So there is definitely this glorification, but here is the thing. You know, those who tell me that, you know, Egyptians love the military and they regard it favorably, I always tell them, you know, when it's conscription time, do you find everyone just running to the conscription centers?

Because they can't really wait, you know, for the moment they put on the uniform and they get humiliated, you know, in some military factory or in some desert. camp or do people try to find whatever excuses and fabricate whatever medical, you know, reasons in order to and buy their way out of the military? You know, I honestly, like from my humble knowledge and from what I saw all throughout my life in Egypt, it's a nightmare. Everyone tries to buy their way out from the military. Now, when the military intervened in the revolution, I'll go back also a little bit. Maybe the military was not running traffic.

Maybe the military was not doing the actual daily policing before 2011. So most of the hatred was directed against the police because they are the ones that, you know, that you see on a daily basis who interact with you on a daily basis. The military, it is true that they were in their camps, but their tentacles were all over society. They had their own social clubs. As an Egyptian man, like, until a certain age, I can't leave the country except with their permission. They have their own economic and business ventures. They have their own special status. So, yeah, you don't see the brass daily, but they are always there somehow.

remotely. After 2011, I mean, they first deployed nationally on the streets following the collapse of the police. And in my book, I actually do go in details to clarify that not everyone welcomed their deployment initially. And with their own acknowledgement, I got statements from the military that talked about, confrontations with the people as soon as they were deployed. But at the same time, there wasn't any other choice at the time in front of the people

except trying to win over the conscripts and win over the military. Confronting the military at the time after a very bloody war of attrition with the police over the previous days would have been suicide. So the famous chant

El Geish with Shaab'id Wadha, or the people and the army are one hand, that came out in that context of us trying to win over the conscripts. An appeal. Exactly. So I know that this slogan then later got co-opted by the military and by the counter-revolution to mean something else. But initially, that's what it's meant. So did the military keep its cloud throughout the revolution?

I belong to the Egyptian revolutionary socialist, which is a revolutionary leftist organization. in the country. We were the only ones to issue an anti-military statement on the 1st of February during the 18 days. No other political organization issued any anti-military statements. And the 1st of February here was kind of like prophetic even. Like this was one day before the Battle of the Camel that was enabled partially also by the military at the time. And initially we were an isolated minority. Most of the public were against us.

But then as the revolution progressed and people started to get disillusioned about the role of SCAF, the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces, they started to remember, oh, it was the Egyptian arrest who were warning us from the early on about this. And several confrontations exploded when it comes to SCAF in the streets, whether it's the Muhammad Mahmoud uprising in November or the Occupy Cabinet, clashes in December 2011. So the thing of the military, like, it goes back and forth, back and forth up and down. I cannot say that it's something constant. With 2013, there were sections of Egyptian society who supported the massacus and supported the army's intervention, but also there were victims of that intervention. And I think SCC lost cloud as he proceeded,

because he's now running the country and governing it solely by coercion, no consent. People can see in front of them how the military turned into a monster that's basically taking over everything in the country. Does that mean when another revolution breaks out that everyone will be anti-military from the start? I don't think so. If there isn't a clear alternative that's telling the people, that another solution is possible other than the military,

I think they will play the same game of like getting rid of the regime and retreating for a few steps, but keeping things as they are. And they are, you know, unfortunately, in some ways in a strengthened position, as you said, because they learned the lesson of the possibility of popular mobilization. I mean, they've moved the capital, there's the octagon, like everything you've mentioned. And I think it's so apt the way that you do. describe the regime acting like a colonial occupier more than a national government because it does, as you mentioned, have this view of its own people as underdeveloped and unworthy of having their

own political agency. There's no shortcut for saving time, but saving money is simple. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellairdirect.com. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're

alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying shut up. Don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through

the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that There was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality,

welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week

we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments,

Nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to pro society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

See you between the pages. So for Egyptians today in Egypt, What does daily life look like under this, you know, unfortunately, more aggressive system? Unfortunately, it's a very miserable situation. When Cece rose to power and took office officially in 2014 as a president, Egypt's foreign debt was roughly $41 billion. Today, it's over $163 billion. dollars. In this year's government budget, we're talking about 63% at least of the government budget

will go for the debt service. 63%. Let me repeat that again. 63% of the government budget is not going to go for education, it's not going to go for health, it's not going to go for whatever. It's going just to pay the interest on the debt. So this means also the following. It means that there is austerity measures on steroids to the extent that people are sharing their memories of the 2000s and 1990s as the good old days. And again, these were the days of the height of our neoliberal transition, which is part of why we had the revolution in the first place. But the situation now, the economic situation is that bad that even the austerity of the 19th, 1990s and the 2000s, they sound like heaven today.

Secondly, when it comes to political repression, the political repression also, it's compared to C.C. Mubarak is a human rights activist, is a human rights defender, you know, compared to what we're seeing today. The unification of the repressive apparatus in Egypt only led to heightened lethal and carcler violence. the regime and this might sound Orwellian but the regime was boosting in the public media that were building the biggest prison on earth and they are listing this as part of their achievements. So how does life look like today? You have three or four generations of Egyptians from let's say 2013 up until today who graduated from university. without ever taking part in a protest, without ever taking part in a political debate,

without ever drafting a statement or distributing a leaflet, without ever taking part in a student union election, without ever taking part in a parliamentary electoral campaign in their neighborhoods. Cici has deserted the political scene in Egypt. He dismantled most of the political organizations in the country. Even apolitical charities, any entity that's independent

from the state got taken over or dismantled by the state apparatus. So you have really a draconian kind of regime that we've never witnessed in our modern history. Even under Nasser, I mean, Nasser usually is always referred to as the reference when it comes to military dictatorships and what have you, but it's not true.

Yeah, I mean, he was a dictator, of course, but he feared the military. He feared a coup. So he had to create a vast array of political institutions in order to counter the military's power. And these political institutions were a vehicle for Egyptians, though with limits, of course, but to mobilize, to conduct, to discuss, to organize,

and there was some space, some kind of political education, which is now non-existent. As I'm talking to you now, the Egyptian national team has returned to Egypt, our football national team, and they have done really a great achievement

at the World Cup, which, you know, it never happened in our history. The government announced that they are preparing like a mass popular welcome for the national team. Alamain, not in Cairo.

So they arrived at the Libyan border, at our border with Libya, like all the way in the desert to be received by the state officials and later they will meet CEC. And, you know, like a few hundred people like showed up in the desert in that scratching, you know, sun heat to wave for them. Because this regime is so crowdphobic, so people phobic that they wouldn't even dream that, you know, they would have this. welcoming Cairo, where the real crowds are. It is to that extent, our football league, for example, which has always been famous and popular in the Arab world, and let alone in Egypt, is being played without fans. It stayed for years and the stadiums were empty. And then they now allowed only 5,000 people to show up. The capacity of the Cairo stadium, for example, is 120,000. And I used to attend matches where it was full.

Now they only allow like, you know, 5,000 fans for each one because they are so crowdphobic. This is the reality we're living under, but I'm also arguing at the end of the book that this is not a sustainable model. Yeah, an incarcerated population. But as you said, at the end of the book, you're saying there are cracks in the regime's internal unity. And I think you also mentioned the parliamentary crisis. So what do you think are the seeds of another 2011?

What would resistance look like this time? What would it need to look like this time? Because, I mean, you and I both agree that coercion alone cannot sustain these types of regimes. You were saying earlier that they have learned their lessons, which on the surface this might be true. But I would argue that they have probably learned the wrong lessons. because there are counter-revolutions across history that, yeah, was violent, was repressive, you know, and there was bloodshed.

But at the same time, these counter-revolutions also, since they were far-sighted, they tried to address some of the problems that led to the outbreak of the revolution in the first place, not because they are Democrats, but they just want to diffuse, you know, any potential problems. Now let's look at Egypt and actually the Arab Spring in general, not just Egypt. There are tons of reasons why the Egyptian and the Arab revolutions broke out in 2011.

But I can, in a reductionist way, you know, I can simplify them into two main problems. One is the issue of political repression and police brutality. The other one is the social question. or the unequal distribution of wealth. These were the two main structural problems that provided the objective conditions to have an uprising in Egypt. And actually the Arab world, I mean, I can generalize here.

Again, knowing that each country had its own specificities, Syria had its own, you know, I mean, conditions and problems, Tunisia had its own, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, these two were the common denominator and the main motor force for these revolutions. Now, let's look at Egypt. The counter-revolution, yes. I mean, it killed the revolutionaries.

It repressed the revolutionaries. But did they provide answers to these two problems? No. Any child in Egypt could answer this. You don't need a PhD scholar to tell you that actually political repression is even much, much, much worse today. Secondly, when it comes to the distribution of wealth, It's even as much the economic condition is, it's unbelievable at this point.

So as long as these two structural problems continue with us, there will always be the objective conditions for another revolt. What's missing here is the subjective conditions, which means is Husam and Dana and X and Y and Z and Muhammad and, you know, and Michael and are we organized? Are we trying to put out new ideas? Are we trying to mobilize even under repression, you know, in these campaigns here and there? That's what's missing. That repression was extremely effective in terms of dismantling the different political organizations

and the independent unions in the country. But part of also why the repression was effective was the fact that there was full, a blank check backing from the regional and the global allies of the regime. The UAE and Saudi Arabia in specific in the region. And globally, you had the US and more importantly the EU. I would actually be arguing that it's the EU that's much more complicit in enabling the CC regime more than America, which goes against the historical trajectory of that regime.

So the regime was confident. The regime could ask, you know, the Gulf allies and the West as long as he was fighting the revolution, as long as he was dismantling the Islamists. And as long as he's killing this boogeyman called the January 2011 revolution. Until C.C. woke up by 2021 with COVID and the war in Ukraine to find out that first our death has seen. spiraled out of control and that the Gulf were not really that keen on keeping, you know, these bailouts to continue. There were even like some leaked reports that Muhammad bin Zayed of the UAE complaining that Cece thinks he's some ATM. I don't know if it's true or not, but, you know, it signaled a different mood. And there was even a famous statement by Cece,

which then was taken down from most of the news websites at the time. But I had screenshoted it and I listened to that speech where he was complaining, saying something along the line of some of our Arab brothers, they think that Egypt is incapable of progress and blah, blah, blah. And he was like lamenting, you know what I mean, the situation. And that's when, you know, the regime started to act in a very unconfident way. released some political prisoners, called for a national dialogue, which I mean, it never really materialized into anything important, but it was just a signal that they were scared. They were scared

because the economic situation was bad, and because that if any form of revolts take place, whether it's local or whether it's on the national level, they don't have that civil society in the Gramshan sense that can act as a buffer to protect them. Hosni Mubarak was an autocrat, it's true, but Husni Mubarak was presiding over very vibrant civil society. And it's that civil society that actually saved the state from a full-fledged revolution in January 2011. There was the Muslim Brotherhood that you can try to negotiate with in exchange for, you know,

suspending Tehrir and will give you a share of the cake. There used to be like left-wing political parties that you can try to negotiate with and promise some parliamentary seats in exchange for diffusing industrial militancy. There was this, there was that,

there was this, there was that. This is what enabled Husni Mubarak to rule Egypt for three decades. But it is exactly that authoritarian formula that CC and the generals regarded as the main reason for 2011. So what we have now is the state presiding over society without any buffers. It's the military that's micromanaging the society on daily basis.

It's the police that's micromanaging society on a daily basis. It's the Mukhabarat who are also doing the same, and there is division of labor between them. They will remain united as long as things are going really well. But once you hit the wall, once a crisis erupts, whether you are a political organization, whether you are the state, whether you are a group of friends, that's when people, you know, start looking at one another and exchange blames or propose very diverse ideas. Some will think we should go left.

Others will say we should go right. And that's when cracks start to happen. I'm not implying that, you know, the divisions are now. deep, but you can start seeing few cracks here and there. And in the background, you started to see also an incremental rise in

industrial actions over the past few years. It's not like the 2006-till-11 strike wave, which once erupted in Mahala, it spread by the domino effect all over, you know, the country. It's very incremental. It has its own problems, but it's, it's, it's,

It's rising. And it's that social movement, which I always bet on for the future. A lot to think about and a lot of historical events come to mind. So as you were talking, I was thinking about the bread into Philadelphia. But like you mentioned, there's not some sort of buffer to absorb in today's Egypt. Another thing I was thinking about as we were talking the entire time was this sci-fi collection, Egypt 100, about what Egypt looks like 100 years. after 2011. I'm going to put that in the show notes if people are interested because it imagines

what, like, moving the capital and doing all these things, like, what will that mean for Egyptians in 100 years? It's a little dystopian, but you are leaving me more hopeful than sci-fi leaves me. Thank you so much for coming on and I really appreciate your time. Thank you, Dan. It's always a pleasure to speak to you. Take care, everybody. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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