Politics of Violence and Fear in MENA 3030839311, 9783030839314

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Politics of Violence and Fear in MENA Helena Reimer-Burgrova

Politics of Violence and Fear in MENA

Helena Reimer-Burgrova

Politics of Violence and Fear in MENA

Helena Reimer-Burgrova Berlin, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-83931-4 ISBN 978-3-030-83932-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83932-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Maram_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a long journey that has had many ups and downs along the way. Its completion would not have been conceivable without a number of people who have stood by me and supported me throughout this process. I am grateful to so many friends and colleagues in and outside of Egypt for their insights, ideas, and active listening to my arguments and encouragement during times of doubt. To list them all would be impossible—if you’re reading this, thank you. Stephan Stetter accompanied me through the many years of my research, which began as PhD programme. His ability to focus on the big picture and to identify and challenge my key arguments was always much appreciated. Thomas Diez provided me with an invaluable source of advice that refined my take on securitisation. I am also grateful to my interview partners in Egypt for their readiness to speak openly about politically sensitive topics. Their openness and courage in the face of a worsening situation is an enduring source of inspiration for me. I am especially indebted to Ahmed Seif al-Islam for his hospitality and sharing his deep knowledge of the Egyptian oppressive system with me. The persecution of his family as well as of the other courageous Egyptians I have met have moved me personally. I am also grateful to the staff of the Newspaper Department of the Berlin State Library for their assistance looking up old Egyptian newspapers. My research benefited from the institutional support provided by the Institute of International Relations in Prague, the Czech Republic. This book would not have been v

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thinkable without Tanager, whose excellent language editing skills made the final stage of writing and preparation an enjoyable experience. My husband Sören deserves a special thank you. His love, encouragement, patience, and understanding for the countless evenings I spent with this project allowed me to keep going and finish this book. Berlin December 2020

Helena Reimer-Burgrova

Contents

1

The Endless State of Exception The TER-Model Studying Security Threats The Structure of the Book References

1 4 8 19 21

2

A Matter of Security The Illusionary Façade of Democracy The Genealogy of the Enemy The Rule of Law in Times of Exception The Feared Security Institutions Security First References

27 29 35 41 50 57 57

3

The Truth Regimes of Truth The Optimised Self The Dangerous Other The Otherness of the Terrorist Enemy Who is the Terrorist? References

63 64 74 78 79 88 92

4

The Exception Egypt’s Agambenian Exception The (Un)desirability of One’s Life

99 100 108 vii

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CONTENTS

The Rule of Petty Sovereigns The Exception 2.0 References

127 135 141

5

The Resistance The Resistance/Power Matrix Activism Meets Law Civil Disobedience The Securitisation Trap References

149 150 158 169 175 182

6

“War on Terror” in Turkey and Syria The History of Autocratic Ordering The Economy of the Truth The Conditions of Exception The Unpredictable Resistance References

191 192 198 206 212 219

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The Authoritarian Persistence The Durability of Securitisation The TER-Model Beyond Egypt Epilogue References

227 228 233 235 236

Index

239

Abbreviations

AI AKP ANHRI BBC CAPMAS CFJ CHP CHRLA CIHRS CPJ CS CSF ECCHR EED EOHR FETO FIDH FJP GDP HRW IMF ISIS LE LGBTQ MENA NDP

Amnesty International Justice and Development Party Arabic Network for Human Rights Information British Broadcasting Corporation Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics Committee for Justice Republican People’s Party Center for Human Rights Legal Aid Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies Committee to Protect Journalists Copenhagen School of Securitisation Central Security Forces European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights European Endowment for Democracy Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights Fethullahist Terrorist Organisation International Federation for Human Rights Freedom and Justice Party Gross Domestic Product Human Rights Watch International Monetary Fund Islamic State in Iraq and Syria Egyptian Pound Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Middle East and North Africa National Democratic Party ix

x

ABBREVIATIONS

NSA OHCHR PKK PS RSF SCAF SCC SDF SJAC SNHR SOHR SSIS TER-model TIMEP UN US/USA VDC WWI YPG

National Security Agency Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN Human Rights) Kurdistan Worker’s Party Paris School of Securitisation Reporters Without Borders Supreme Council of the Armed Forces Supreme Constitutional Court Syrian Democratic Forces Syria Justice and Accountability Centre Syrian Network for Human Rights Syrian Observatory for Human Rights State Security Investigations Service Truth-Exception-Resistance model Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy United Nations United States of America Violations Documentation Center in Syria World War I People’s Protection Units

CHAPTER 1

The Endless State of Exception

They beat him [Mahmoud Gabr] in Sayyeda Zeinab police station… they beat him in his neck, in his private parts and his anus… he was bleeding from behind and from his mouth… when he was soaked in his blood they took him down to the inmates to clean him and change his clothes… he did not do anything… if he had done anything they should have taken him to court… there is a law in this country… there are courts and judges… how could they do that to him… this what they do all the time… police officers walk into any street and just squash whoever they want… like an insect… they believe they are God and that nobody can stop them… who can protect people like us […]. (a witness to Mahmoud Gabr’s death, quoted in al-Nadeem Center 2006: 8)

Mahmoud Gabr was a young man who was tortured to death while in police custody in the Cairan district of Sayyida Zeinab in October 2003. His death was inexplicable to those around him at the time, as there was no obvious reason for it. The strange thing is that Mahmoud didn’t do anything. Even if he did do anything or has to do time in prison, the country has a law and courts and judges. How did they have the heart to do that, they have no feelings? Even those sentenced to death are granted their last wish before they execute them. (neighbours of Mahmoud Gabr, quoted in al-Nadeem Center 2006: 7)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Reimer-Burgrova, Politics of Violence and Fear in MENA, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83932-1_1

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Gabr’s case was neither an exceptional nor a rare example of police brutality in Egypt. The state of emergency, which was in effect for the entire rule of Husni Mubarak (1981–2011), rendered the ordeal of Mahmoud Gabr and thousands of other ordinary citizens possible. Justified by a vaguely defined terrorist threat, the provisions of the state of emergency, as well as the grey zone of extrajudicial counterterrorism practices became an integral part of the governance mechanisms to discipline the ruled society, to silence the voices of dissent and thereby to strengthen the authoritarian form of rule. Although Mubarak’s era came in early 2011 to an end and the state of emergency was shortly lifted in 2012, the exceptional security practice has remained in place. Torture, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings have resisted the regime change and remain a part of the everyday life of millions of Egyptians. In 2013, after the military, led by Abdal Fattah alSisi, deposed President Muhammad Mursi, Egypt experienced a powerful revival of Mubarak’s authoritarian legacy. The new ruling elite resorted to using the “war on terror” as an excuse for oppression, a time-proved strategy to legitimise the position of power and quell dissent. The counterterrorism campaign, launched in the follow-up to the coup in 2013, thus has not differed much from the “war on terror” in the Mubarak era. While at its beginning, its scope was mostly limited to the supporters of the deposed President Muhammad Mursi, most of whom were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the definition of a “terrorist target” soon expanded to include broad ranks of the Egyptian society. Meanwhile, the counterterrorism campaign has become a means to target anyone who opposes al-Sisi’s regime and to discipline the population at large. Egypt’s “war on terror”, explored in great detail in this book, is only one of many examples of similarly designed campaigns against vaguely defined enemies used by ruling elites to legitimise state-sanctioned oppression. Syria, ruled by the iron fist of the al-Assad dynasty for decades, also used loose definitions of “state enemies” to legitimise repressive mechanisms of governance. The threat the Syrian regime associated with Islamists, most notably with the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, was used as a justification for the existence of the state of emergency and related oppression of any dissent for long decades. Israel, with whom Syria never established diplomatic relations and has been technically in a state of war since 1948, has served as a further justification for the alleged need for the exceptional framework.

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Besides arbitrary arrests, forced disappearances, ill-treatment, and torture, the Syrian President, Hafiz al-Assad (1971–2000), did not hesitate to use utmost brutal force against the opposition. In 1982, in one of the deadliest acts by an Arab government in modern history committed against its own citizens, al-Assad’s army cracked down on an uprising led by the Brotherhood in the Syrian city of Hama. Between 10,000 and 20,000 people died (Haugbolle 2008: 265). Most of them were civilians. In 2000, when al-Assad’s son Bashar took power after his father’s death, the hopes vested in him turned out to be premature. Bashar alAssad (2000–) has turned out to be a chip off the old block. In reaction to the 2011 anti-regime demonstrations inspired by similar protest waves in other Arab countries, Bashar al-Assad chose to respond with brutal force. The crackdown on opponents, whom the regime labelled and classified as terrorists, turned into a protracted, bloody civil war in which the state-orchestrated violence has reached an unprecedented and alarming level. Turkey has not reached a scale of violence comparable to Syria in the 2010s, yet its leaders have been faithful to similar principles of securitydriven policy that strengthened their authoritarian power base. Over several decades, a strong nationalist ethos formed the Turkish identity. It is, thus, no surprise that the traditional enemy of the Turkish state has been defined through his alleged inferiority to the imagined Turkish community. Kurds, one of the largest ethnic groups without a state, are the traditional enemy and target of government security policies. The Turkish state, backed by repressive policies and vaguely defined counterterrorism legislation, has persecuted Kurds for decades. While Kurds are easily singled out as a specific category of the state enemy, the category of “terrorist enemy” has provided the Turkish regime with enough flexibility to fit in any opponents to the regime regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or political engagement. For instance, the participants in the Taksim Square protests, which were sparked by the disagreement over the restructuring of Gezi Park into a mosque in 2013, were considered and treated as terrorists (Deutsche Welle 2013; Hurriyet Daily News 2013). The failed coup attempt in July 2016, provided a further excuse to employ counterterrorism techniques against citizens who disagreed with the objectives of the ruling party. The immediately declared state of emergency and counterterrorism legislation was used by the Turkish regime led by the now-President Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan to carry out a wideranged crackdown. Erdo˘gan’s opponents in all sectors military, academia,

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civil servants, journalists, or judiciary were labelled in smear campaigns as terrorists and faced terrorism-related charges. More than 150,000 people were purged from the civil service and academia. Over 500,000 people were investigated and some 30,000 were imprisoned (Turkey Purge 2019). In the atmosphere of fear and insecurity, many opted for involuntary exile. The regional developments in late 2019 indicated a further escalation of state-sanctioned violence. The image of Kurds as a terrorist enemy justified a Turkish military intervention in northern Syria, a historically Kurdish region that reached a considerable amount of autonomy during the Syrian civil war. The sociopolitical consequences have to be yet evaluated. Nonetheless, Turkey’s use of the well-established narrative of counterterrorism to legitimise the use of force against innocent civilians is quite stark. State-orchestrated violence on the pretence of a vaguely defined enemy—often associated loosely with a terrorist enemy—is not a new feature on the list of oppressive political strategies used by many regimes across the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA). The (mis)use of counterterrorism narratives and policies to oppress and to deny governed populaces’ basic human rights and dignity in order to strengthen the power of the ruling establishment is quite common. The “war(s) on terror” in Egypt, Syria, and Turkey—explored in this book—are not the only cases. There are many more. Yet, there is still a deficit in scholarship that comprehensively addresses such political strategies that, justified by security argumentation, target and oppress local populations, reinforce asymmetric configuration of power relations in authoritarian contexts, and consolidate the resilience of existing authoritarian structures and processes. More importantly, to date, no scholars have developed a conceptual framework to systematically analyse relevance of such political strategies for the authoritarian persistence.

The TER-Model This book outlines an innovative, theoretically driven, conceptual model, the truth-exception-resistance model (the TER-model), to capture the inner logics of the authoritarian resilience upheld through continuous manufacturing and managing of the state of exception. Grounded in securitisation theory the TER-model treats the “war on terror” as a political strategy to legitimise state of exception and thus to maintain societal control and strengthen asymmetric distribution of power in favour of

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the authoritarian centres of power. Specifically, I argue that a vaguely defined threat such as a terrorist threat is central to legitimise and maintain a perpetual state of exception and thus also to aid and preserve the authoritarian mode of governance. The TER-model shows how securitisation allows the government, first, to frame and identify individuals, often associated with opposition forces, as a threat to the governed society and, second, to silence these individuals by their exclusion from the governed society. For securitisation empowers security authorities as well as executive organs to act beyond the established norms and thus to expose the excluded individuals to an exceptional treatment sanctioned by the securitisation logics of exception. The state of exception introduced and maintained through securitising political strategies is, as the TER-model suggests and the empirical analysis in this book corroborates, especially in authoritarian contexts, hardly reversible. The underlying securitisation argumentation further reinforces the existing authoritarian structures regardless of personnel changes of top executive members. This is especially valid in empirical cases—including Egypt’s “war on terror” that outlived Husni Mubarak’s ousting—in which the securitising logics has dominated the autocratic mechanisms of reign for several decades and continue to do so despite a regime change. In Egypt, the 2011 revolution nor the 2013 coup led to significant discursive changes that would reshape the well-established securitising argumentation. That said, securitisation of vaguely defined threats, such as the threat of terrorism, is central to legitimise and upheld exceptional ordering and thereby the maintain the asymmetric distribution of power that favours the authoritarian centres of power. The question posed by this book is thus not whether securitisation reinforces authoritarian mode of governance. Instead, the research presented in this book looks into how this form of reinforcement is upheld and maintained over lengthy periods of time. Following this line of argumentation, the TER-model links the authoritarian resilience to securitisation persistence and offers conceptual tools to make sense of and analyse the authoritarian resilience through the lenses of securitisation. Accordingly, in my research I address the following two questions: How are securitisation processes upheld and maintained over lengthy periods of time? What are the sociopolitical implications of such lengthy securitisation cases?

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The TER-model builds on a constructivist approach to security. Specifically, it combines the Copenhagen School and Paris School models of securitisation theory and complements them with Michel Foucault’s post-structuralist insights into modern statecraft and biopolitical optimisation and Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualisation of exception. Given the TER-model’s focus on established, perpetual securitisation cases the model introduces three conceptual blocks: discursive framing of the threat (truth), exceptional ordering (exception), and structures of contestation (resistance). Truth The first block, the truth (see Chapter 3), concentrates on the biopolitical optimisation of the governed society that separates acceptable us from threatening them, i.e. who must be protected, and who can be excluded. The central argument, I raise here, is that securitisation does not only legitimise the exceptional treatment of security targets—terrorists—but addresses and disqualifies also individuals who do not fit into the category of an optimised collective, yet can be hardly associated with a terrorist threat per se. Thus, it allows the government to associate peaceful opposition forces, as well as ordinary citizens with a vaguely defined terrorist threat and treat the identified individuals as security targets. The truth dimension is structured around the following questions: How is the enemy framed in the discourse and excluded from the bandwidth of the optimised society? How do the frames of the enemy (re)configure established knowledge about the optimised society? How does the knowledge about the threat (re)configure and consolidate existing regimes of truth and webs of power relations? What is the relationship between existing regimes of truth and power relations in the given governance context? Exception The exception, the second component of the TER-model (see Chapter 4), focuses on the state of exception sanctioned by the securitisation logics. The exceptional order includes grave forms of oppression legitimised by security arguments and habitual practices by empowered security officials.

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In this regard, I argue that the empowerment of security authorities, that securitisation fosters, motivates security officials to keep the securitisation process going. For it upheld their impunity. The exception dimension is structured around the following conceptual questions: How do the regimes of truth translate into an exceptional security practice? What are the sociopolitical implications of exceptional security measures for the governed society? Who is subjected to exceptional security measures? How do ordinary citizens become, at times, categorised as targets? What is the role of security institutions? What impact does the empowered status of security institutions have on the continuity of the securitisation process? What role does fear of exceptional security practices play in disciplining the society? Resistance The resistance is the last block of the TER-model (see Chapter 5). The TER-model views resistance as an effect of power that might occur at any level of agency, at any moment of securitisation with varying intensity and uncertain results. My key argument in this section focuses on the absence of resistance to the securitisation process. Specifically, I argue that as long as the regimes of truth, i.e. the securitisation narratives about vague threats, remain unchallenged, there is a little chance to alter the hegemonic power constellation fostered by securitisation and thus to undermine the authoritarian mode of governance. The resistance dimension is structured around the following conceptual questions: How does a securitisation process structure options to contest and possibly alter the autocratic mechanisms of power? Do alternative positions to the dominant securitising political strategies emerge, and if so, how? How are the securitising strategies contested? What role does the fear of being subjected to exceptional security practices play in relation to the emergence of resistance? Are the established, dominating regimes of truth are challenged, and if so, how? Since the TER-model places the process of constructing an issue as a threat and the adoption of exceptional measures legitimised by a discursively framed threat at the analytical spotlight, securitisation theory forms

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its foundations. Specifically, securitisation theory exposes the crucial relevance of a threat-framing process to the adoption and persistence of an exceptional ordering. The following section outlines the central arguments of securitisation scholarship represented by the Copenhagen and Paris Schools of security studies. Given the interest in perpetual securitisation processes embedded in the realm of exception, this section focuses on the synthesis of exceptional discourses and routinised security practices. Thereafter, building upon securitisation theory, the chapter introduces Michel Foucault’s governmentality and biopolitical optimisation and Giorgio Agamben’s exception as crucial concepts of the TER-model to make sense of and analyse the sociopolitical ramifications of a perpetual securitisation process for the authoritarian resilience. The individual pillars of the TER-model—truth, exception, and resistance—are discussed in greater detail in individual chapters dedicated to the in-depth analysis of Egypt’s “war on terror”. The counterterrorism campaigns in Syria and Turkey explored in chapter 6 validate the TER-model as a solid conceptual base to make sense of the reinforcing link between the counterterrorism campaigns in both countries and the resilience of the authoritarian rule.

Studying Security Threats More than twenty years after the formulation of securitisation by Ole Wæver (1995) and its further development by Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde in Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), securitisation theory has become one of the most dynamic and contested fields of security studies (Buzan and Hansen 2009). Although Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, widely referred to as the Copenhagen School of security studies (CS), were not the first to link socially constructed problems to matters of security (see e.g. Michel Foucault’s Society must be defended, 2003), they were the first to offer a comprehensive analytical toolbox to examine the discursive framing of security. Based in International Relations studies, the CS reflections on security and security processes combine elements of the English School (Buzan) and post-structuralism (Wæver). This combination “creates a complex and dynamic, yet also vulnerable, theoretical position” (c.a.s.e. collective 2006: 452). As a result, securitisation theory has fostered an intense debate since the 1990s. The discussion has produced different, and often opposite, sets of arguments, views, and positions on how to explain

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the mechanisms of securitisation and how to improve the explanatory capacities of the securitisation concept as such (Buzan and Hansen 2009). As there is no prevailing consensus about what securitisation is, some prefer to speak instead of “various theories of securitisation” (Balzacq et al. 2014: 8). Accordingly, there are numerous ways to classify securitisation research. While some define securitisation/security research by individual “schools of thought” such as the Copenhagen, Paris, and Aberystwyth/Welsh Schools (Wæver 2004), others (Salter and Mutlu 2013) prefer to focus on respective approaches to the security analysis and distinguish between the discursive analytical approach faithful to the CS initial model and a Bourdieusian-inspired political sociology approach. These categorisations are, of course, only points of orientation. By no means should they be understood as neat, rigid categories or unitary schools of thought (Balzacq et al. 2015; c.a.s.e. collective 2006). The variety of definitions notwithstanding, this book classifies securitisation scholarship according to individual schools. It draws from the CS model of securitisation, which is based on the logic of exception (Buzan et al. 1998), and combines it with the emphasis on routinised practices of political and security professionals addressed by the Paris School (e.g. Bigo 2002). Securitisation as a Realm of Exception According to the CS, securitisation is a process in which a securitising actor, such as the Egyptian government, presents something, such as terrorism, as an existential threat through a (series of) speech act(s). On behalf of a threatened referent object, the population, the securitising actor then claims urgency “to tackle this problem” because otherwise “everything else will be irrelevant (because we will not be here or will not be free to deal with it in our own way)” (Buzan et al. 1998: 24). The actor therefore claims it is necessary to act extraordinarily and adopt measures beyond “the normal political rules of game” (Buzan et al. 1998: 24). This can be, for instance, the forced eviction of indigenous inhabitants of Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian ocean, to make way for a US military base (Salter and Mutlu 2013); launching a military operation in Iraq (e.g. O’Reilly 2008; Roe 2008); or a declaration of the state of emergency, as was the case in Egypt in 1981 after the assassination of a state leader.

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In contrast to the state-centred realist views on security, which reduce security to military and national security matters and situate the state as the main referent object, the CS analysis of security builds upon the intersubjectivity of the security process (Balzacq et al. 2015: 3). An issue becomes securitised “only if and when the audience accepts it as such” (Buzan et al. 1998: 25). The approval by an audience, which does not have to necessarily emerge out of “civilized, dominance-free discussion” (Buzan et al. 1998: 25), is then a crucial condition for a successful securitisation. Without it, security is reduced to a self-referential practice centred on the speech acts of securitising actors. Hence, whether something is considered a security issue is not an objective matter nor based solely on claims of securitising actors. Security relies on its successful discursive construction, which necessitates the approval of an audience (Buzan and Hansen 2009). In result, securitisation makes an issue “a security issue–not necessarily because a real existential threat exists but because the issue is presented as a threat” and accepted as such (Buzan et al. 1998: 24). The urgency of the threat is constructed in a way that an adequate response does not bear waiting, nor can it be located within the sphere of normal procedures. Instead, the threat must “be dealt with decisively by top leaders prior to other issues” (Buzan et al. 1998: 29). The policies and measures to address the threat are thus often marked by their speedy adoption, void of political deliberation, which “suspends the possibilities of judicial review or other modalities of public influence upon bureaucratic or executive decisions” (Aradau 2004: 392). The exigency to act requires quick and decisive decisions that contest not only “the viability of deliberation”, but also “support[s] strengthening executive-centred government, and suppress[es] dissent” (Huysmans 2004: 332). The CS securitisation framework links securitisation to an extremity, a disruption, and an illiberal excess. In reference to Carl Schmitt’s position on exception and politics, the CS views security as a realm of exception (Balzacq et al. 2015; Buzan and Hansen 2009). When an issue is successfully securitised, it is moved from normal politics to the realm of security, where exceptional steps are rendered possible. Securitisation thus reinforces the binary distinction between the normal, ordinary issues of the political agenda and the security issues which need to be addressed by means that suspend the normal rules (Buzan et al. 1998: 24–25). In this sense, if securitisation is successful, i.e. the existential threat is identified and the audience is persuaded of the threat’s pertinence, the existing rules

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are broken to address the threat (Buzan et al. 1998: 26; Taureck 2006: 55). Hence, the process of securitisation implies a significant disruption of the sociopolitical reality because it allows for policies and measures that invalidate existing rules. Securitisation as a Routinised Practice Securitisation as a routinised practice is associated with the Paris School of security studies (PS). The PS roots its approach to security in political theory and sociology (c.a.s.e. collective 2006: 446). It draws heavily from Michel Foucault’s analytics of government combined with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Balzacq et al. 2015; Bourbeau 2014) and streams its focus to “security professionals, the governmental rationality of security, and the political structuring effects of security technology and knowledge” (c.a.s.e. collective 2006: 448–49). Didier Bigo (2002), a central figure of the School,1 argues that securitisation is more than a discursive framing of the threat through speech acts. Although the discursive framing of security is important, Bigo maintains that the transformation of security happens through the mundane and routinised bureaucratic practices of security professionals. In this view, securitisation develops through unspectacular channels that involve daily routines, a range of bureaucratic practices, and everyday governmental security technologies such as surveillance, risk management, or prevention (Abrahamsen 2005; Aradau and van Munster 2008; Huysmans 2011; Williams 2003). Accordingly, unlike the CS, the PS does not view security as a realm of exception. The analytical focus on practices, daily routine, and security technologies leads the PS scholars to argue that security is not about exception or survival. Nor is security another realm of politics or politics beyond the normal rules, as the CS argues (Bigo 2008a, 2002; Bigo and Tsoukala 2008: 5). According to the PS, the sharp distinction between politics and exception, as maintained by the CS, cannot account for security processes. For instance, the securitisation of global warming, which is not accompanied by immediate urgency, underlines the PS argumentation. Global warming is securitised, yet the drastic security 1 There are, of course, also other scholars who study securitisation by focusing on the routinised practices of security professionals, including, but not limited to, Jeff Huysmans, Anastassia Tsoukala, and Philippe Bonditti.

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measures known from the counterterrorism context are missing. Instead, frequently referring to routinised practices of security professionals (Bigo 2008b) or assemblage of practices (e.g. Balzacq 2011) which are prioritised in the PS scholarly work, the School views securitisation as a part of a field of (in)security (Bigo 2008b; c.a.s.e. collective 2006), where the internal/external divisions of politics/security “are constantly redefined by those involved in this field” (Balzacq et al. 2015: 12). Securitisation is then less about a sudden, disruptive adoption of exceptional measures than about the continuous actions of the cogs in the wheel. In this sense, securitisation emerges as a result of routinised, mundane, everyday practices of bureaucracies and institutions which create a sense of insecurity and of a constant risk (see e.g. Abrahamsen 2005; Balzacq et al. 2015; Bigo 2002; Olesker 2014). The PS logic of routine and its focus on the everyday practices is particularly useful to examine processes of securitisation which empirically do not display normality/exception dichotomies. Such processes do not necessarily integrate the disruption and exceptional overriding of the existing rules, as the CS model assumes (see e.g. Abrahamsen 2005; Lupovici 2014). Yet, the most recent studies have demonstrated the potential for the integration of both routinised security practices and exceptionalist security discourses (Bourbeau 2014; Bourbeau and Vuori 2015). Seen in this light, the PS emphasis on security practices is highly relevant for securitisations that are located in the realm of exception. Moreover, as the TER-model maintains, a focus on the practices of everyday routines of bureaucracies and institutions, such as profiling, risk assessment, data collection, and so forth, is necessary to understand how securitisations are perpetuated over time. The inquiry into these practices allows investigators “to understand how discourses work in practice” (Bigo 2002: 73). From Copenhagen and Paris to the TER-Model Even though the approaches of both schools occupy different positions on matters of exception and routine, their securitisation models do not necessarily exclude one another (Balzacq et al. 2015; Bourbeau 2014), nor are they methodologically incompatible (Julius 2014). The empirically driven studies (see e.g. Abrahamsen 2005; Julius 2014; Mavelli 2013) frequently integrate insights from both approaches “in order to best tackle specific empirical puzzles” (Balzacq et al. 2015: 14). The approach adopted by

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the TER-model is similar. In line with Bourbeau, who is an advocate of “the coexistence and complementarity of the two logics” (2014: 188) in order to address the matter of securitisation continuity and change (2014: 191), the TER-model combines theoretical and analytical elements of both schools. Specifically, the TER-model views the combination of CS exceptional discourses and PS routinised security practices as necessary to address and analyse perpetual securitisation cases. The conceptualisation of securitisation through the discourses of exceptionality and danger, as proposed by the CS, reflects the social reality of Husni Mubarak’s Egypt. The assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 substantially disrupted Egypt’s existing political order. The incident created a sense of urgency to address the terrorist threat and apprehend the assassins. Immediately after the assassination, the Egyptian authorities declared a state of emergency. From its outset in the early 1980s, securitisation of terrorism moved Egypt’s counterterrorism campaign “beyond the established rules of the game” (Buzan et al. 1998: 23). As the short lapse of time between al-Sadat’s assassination and the declaration of the state of emergency indicates, the assassination created a situation, “in which case an issue is no longer debated as a political question, but dealt with at an accelerated pace and in ways that may violate normal and social rules” (Buzan and Hansen 2009: 214). Adopting the securitising logic if we don’t act now, it will be too late, the security claims by the Egyptian establishment strengthened the sense of urgency. For instance, the claims raised soon after the assassination included powerful references to the Iranian Islamic revolution (1978–1979) as a worstcase scenario and a potent deterrence. Although later the content of the security claims changed, the message remained the same: the violence associated with Egyptian Islamist groups was framed as an extraordinary threat which was to be treated “either as a special kind of politics or as above politics” (Buzan et al. 1998: 23). The sense of urgency that initially catalysed the securitisation process did not, however, disappear over time as the PS routine logic of securitisation would suggest. Instead, it was maintained throughout the following decades. Fighting terrorism was depicted as a matter of al-darura alwataniyya (survival and national duty) and classified as a topic beyond any political discussion (see Chapter 3). Alternative views were sanctioned as disloyal, betraying the nation, and their advocates were often persecuted (see Chapter 4). The perceived necessity to act without delay in order to save the Egyptian population from the immediate threat of terrorism

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became both an underlying imperative of the counterterrorism discourse and raison d’etre of the authoritarian Egyptian state. Accordingly, as Buzan and Hansen (2009: 214) point out, in these kinds of securitisation contexts, political discussions associated with the processes of politicisation, in which the issue is a part of public policy and is discussed, are sidelined and invalidated. Although the drama associated with the framing of the terrorist threat decreased over time, the process of securitisation and the extraordinary security measures to counter the threat continued to be situated within the realm of exception. Hence, contrary to the position of the PS, which locates securitisation processes in the field of insecurity and below extremity, the TER-model adheres to the CS position on exception and accordingly identifies the Egyptian “war on terror” as a case of securitisation situated in the realm of exception. The CS explanatory powers notwithstanding, the CS does not offer many theoretical insights into the dynamics of sustained securitisations (Bourbeau 2014: 191). The intersubjectively communicated persistence of the threat is the only factor the School mentions regarding the sustained processes of securitisation (Buzan et al. 1998: 27–28). Although the framing of the threat is a valid aspect to be considered concerning perpetuated securitisation—especially when we examine vaguely defined threats such as terrorism—it is rather short in its explanation of the persistence of securitisation and related exceptional policies for extended periods of time. The continuous discursive framing of a threat, such as a framing of a terrorist threat, is clearly relevant to the persistence of the securitisation process. Yet, as Egypt’s case shows, securitisation can hardly be sustained and legitimised solely through securitising speech acts of the regime. Here, the Paris School’s emphasis on routine practice is again noteworthy. The PS theoretical and analytical framework is well equipped to explore the persistence of securitisation discourses (Bigo 2002; Bourbeau 2014; Buzan and Wæver 2009). Its focus on everyday security and bureaucratic rationalities of the political and security professionals offers valuable hints as to “why the discourses of securitization continue to be so powerful even when alternatives discourses are well known” (Bigo 2002: 65). Securitisation Meets Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben The combination of CS exceptional discourses and PS routinised security practices is a good starting point for analysis. However, it is not sufficient

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to address the broader sociopolitical context of a perpetual securitisation. To overcome this shortcoming, the TER-model deepens the socialconstructivist approach to security by applying post-structuralist insights to modern statecraft and exceptionalism. Specifically, it adds Michel Foucault’s biopolitical optimisation processes linked to governmentality and Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualisation of exception. Michel Foucault: Governmentality and Biopolitical Optimisation Governmentality as “a research perspective” (Bröckling et al. 2011: 15) challenges our understanding of the state as “an assumed entity and identity” through “[t]he decentering or decomposition of the state into the processes that constitute and stabilize it” (Saar 2011: 39). As such, governmentality is not an entirely new concept to the securitisation scholarship. Since governmentality “goes beyond a narrow focus on the direct exercise of state power” (Joseph 2010: 225), it links securitisation to “a more encompassing rationalization of conduct which includes rules of judgment, legitimate goals, and elaborate procedures for reaching these goals” (Opitz 2011: 104). Governmentality makes the exploration of the everydayness of the state’s intervention in individuals’ lives possible. When applied specifically to security matters, governmentality views the security practices as a part of processes and practices through which a society is governed and optimised (Aradau and van Munster 2008; Bigo 2002). Thus, governmentality, as PS scholars suggest, integrates routinised security practices into the securitisation framework. It facilitates the examination of how security practices (surveillance, arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial decisions, or torture of suspected terrorists) emerge, function, and are rendered meaningful in a respective discursive context (Balzacq et al. 2015; Bröckling et al. 2011; Foucault 2009; Larsen 2011; Opitz 2011). Thus, governmentality enables the theorisation and analysis of security technologies (check-points, statistics, wire-taps, closed-circuit television, body scanners, or laws), which underpin the everyday practices of security and political professionals, embody their mindset, and “organise the interactions among members of the field of insecurity” (Balzacq et al. 2015: 13). Moreover, as Bigo (2008a) suggests in his work, and the TERmodel pursues further, if governmentality is also understood as a form of governance (see e.g. Busse and Stetter 2014), it provides valuable insights into processes of societal inclusion/exclusion. These processes are highly relevant in securitisation contexts. Specifically, governmentality

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adds the notion of an interventionist biopolitical operation centred on the bettering and normalising of life to securitisation (see e.g. Fassin 2011; Krasmann 2011; Larsen 2011; Lemke 2011). The bettering of the life of the governed society then revolves around questions of how to maintain certain societal phenomena such as mortality, criminality, environmental damage, and others “within socially and economically acceptable limits and around an average,” which can “be considered as optimal for a given social functioning” (Foucault 2009: 5). Based on “statistical regularity and classifying procedures which distribute events into particular categories” (Bigo 2008a: 105), the governmentalised state relies on the identification of abnormality, which threatens the betterment of societal life. The governing is not based on “a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited” (Foucault 2009: 5). Instead, it relies on the continuous (re)establishment of what is optimal, i.e. what falls within “a bandwidth of the acceptable that must not be exceeded” (Foucault 2009: 6). For the TER-model, governmentality is not just a research perspective to address processes and security practices through which society is governed. It is understood here to be a specific form of governance. Governmentality also addresses questions about what forms of life are optimal and admissible and what forms of life are not. In this respect, the TER-model views securitisation as a biopolitical process of optimisation that allows for and legitimises the government’s intervention in the life of the governed society. Moreover, it (re)defines desirable and undesirable lives by classifying some lives as dangerous. Using the protection of the desirable forms of life as a justification, it renders the exceptional treatment of those deemed undesirable possible. Accordingly, it makes the existence and evolution of legal black holes, such as secret detention cells, torture chambers, or special prisons sections, feasible. Giorgio Agamben: State of Exception The exceptional framework is an integral part of a successful securitisation process. Arguing that the existing order does not provide an adequate framework to tackle the threat, the securitising actors pursue the adoption of exceptional steps that breach the existing rules (Buzan et al. 1998: 24). In the CS view, the adoption of extraordinary measures signifies a failure to deal with and address the threat within the boundaries of normality (Buzan et al. 1998: 29), i.e. within the boundaries of liberal democratic principles (see e.g. Aradau 2004: 392; Huysmans 2004: 325).

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Whereas such a view is valid in the liberal democratic contexts, it is hardly sustainable in non-democratic settings where the default settings of normality are not based on democratic principles (Vuori 2008: 68f). Moreover, although the idiom of exception is an integral part of a successful securitisation, its sociopolitical ramifications, such as the troublesome empowerment of security institutions, as Egypt’s case shows, are hardly reversible. Remarkably, the eventual normalisation of the exceptional policies has not to date been the subject of a closer study in the mainstream securitisation scholarship. Accordingly, there is no established best practice for approaching exception and extraordinary policies in securitisation studies. Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualisation of exception overcomes the normative burden implied in the definition of normality as a liberal democratic order and exception as its negative inversion, which is analytically useless in contexts of authoritarian governance. It offers valuable insights into the contextual ramifications of the exception. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben draws on Carl Schmitt’s work on exception and distinguishes between two normative orders. In line with Schmitt’s argumentation, the state of exception is, for Agamben (1998: 20f), the threshold between a normal situation and chaos. It is a situation in which the law is suspended, yet there are still rules that exist and govern life in the exception (Schmitt 1979, 1934): 18f). Thus, although the ordinary law is suspended, chaos does not prevail (Ojakangas 2005: 7ff). The paradigm of the concentration camp is central to Agamben’s conceptualisation of exception. For Agamben, the camp is a place of a radical form of exception where the law is wholly suspended (1998: 120). Whoever is inside the camp, be it the confined individuals or the guards, enter “a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the very concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer made any sense” (1998: 170). The camp—the exception—is situated outside the normal situation, normal legality, outside of whatever normality refers to in the given sociopolitical context. It functions as a zone of indistinction which exists outside the lived normality, yet it is a part of the political calculations and optimisation strategies of the government (1998: 120ff). To the TER-model, Agamben’s exception is an expression of sovereign power to kill, which is reintroduced into the governmentalised society through the securitisation process.

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Even though the optimised society is formed and reproduced on the biopolitical notion of fostering life, it does not rule out extraordinary forms of violence towards those classified as a threat to the life and wellbeing of the governed society (Foucault 1978: 136f). In other words, securitisation links the biopolitical care for life with the sovereign logic of taking something away (Genel 2006; Opitz 2008; see also Tagma 2009). As a governmental mechanism to macro-manage and optimise the governed population, securitisation is not only a process through which undesirable, threatening individuals or groups are constructed and identified. But it also allows for the securitising actors to subject designated threats, such as terrorists, homosexuals, immigrants, and infected people, to exceptional forms of violence including ill-treatment in detention, torture during interrogation, and extrajudicial killing. The concepts crafted by both authors—Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben—significantly bolster the explanatory powers of the TERmodel as a model that has capacities to comprehensively address the context of exceptional ordering in political settings that lack democratic principles. On the one hand, governmentality integrates security practices into the securitisation analytical framework. Thereby it facilitates the analytical link between the framing of a threat and everyday activities of security institutions. At the same time, governmentality highlights the importance of the biopolitical optimisation of the governed society. Specifically, it views securitisation as a governmental intervention in the bandwidth of the optimised society that is shaped by mechanisms of exclusion/inclusion on behalf of security. Thus, it embeds the process of the framing of a threat into the broader setting of political and societal ordering. On the other hand, Giorgio Agamben’s exception conceptualises exceptional ordering as a dimension that is not necessarily an inverse image of a liberal democracy. Hence, the TER-model opens the door to analyse sociopolitical ramifications of exceptional security measures, including the reconstruction of societal oppression resulting from exceptional order, in non-democratic contexts. Provided its preoccupation with non-democratic political orders, the TER-model contributes to the securitisation scholarship. Specifically, it moves away from the Western-centred perspectives dedicated to the liberal democracies that dominate the scholarly debate. Although securitisation scholarship more recently has started to include contexts beyond Europe and the Western world (Balzacq et al. 2015; Mabon and Kapur 2019), securitisation’s practical application outside the scope of

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Western/liberal democracies is still sparse (see e.g. Bilgin 2011; Julius 2014; Vuori 2011). In this respect, this book seeks to contribute to the growing, yet still marginal, body of securitisation scholarship, which applies the securitisation theory beyond the Western/European context.

The Structure of the Book This book is divided into six additional chapters. Chapter 2 acquaints the reader with the central features of Egypt’s autocracy and security politics. The chapter discusses the role of the National Democratic Party (NDP)—the regime’s party—the lack of genuine political liberalisation, as well as forms of public alignment. Given the focus of this book, the chapter also reviews the genealogy of Egypt’s state enemies, traces the discursive framing of enemies as far as the early days of modern Egyptian statehood, and points out at the relevance of such enemy narratives for the authoritarian resilience. The second part of this chapter offers insights into the security dimensions of Egypt’s political arena. It addresses the key developments and decisions relevant to the “war on terror” in Egypt. Moreover, it reviews the state of emergency, its legal implications, as well as the reinforcement of power/knowledge structures in favour of the dominant political elite. Finally, the chapter maps the field of Egyptian security institutions, their relations, and power struggles that shaped and continue to shape the politics of security in the country. Chapter 3 addresses truth, the first dimension of the TER-model, and contextualises the securitisation of the terrorist threat in Egypt into a broader sociopolitical framework. Based on an extensive analysis of the Egyptian daily al-Ahram, it presents the central attributes associated with the terrorist enemy in Egypt’s discursive framing. For the TER-model, the framing processes are potent tools of biopolitical optimisation of governed societies. Therefore, the chapter pays special attention to subjects framed as threats, i.e. security targets—a novel unit of security analysis that the TER-model introduces into the conceptual framework. Specifically, it shows that the framing of the security targets is closely intertwined with the optimisation of the self, the Egyptian society in this book’s case, that must be protected. In this regard, the chapter demonstrates that the securitisation process does not only define the enemy, the security target whose life is conceived of as undesirable. But it also (re)configures the

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ideal self, the biopolitically optimised citizen, whose life is deemed to be protected. Chapter 4 focuses on the second edge of the TER-model, the exception. The state of emergency and related practices of the security apparatus are addressed here in detail. Specifically, the reader learns about the meaning and implications of the extraordinary security measures for those who were deemed a security threat to the Egyptian society and thus fall into the category of security targets. The chapter further elaborates on the security practices of the security institutions, most notably arbitrary arrests, forced disappearances, torture, as well as extrajudicial killing, and link these closely to questions such as the proliferation of fear and relative absence of resistance to the existing sociopolitical order. This chapter also addresses the diffusion of the norm of exception among individual security officials, petty sovereigns, and the immense empowerment they gain in the securitisation context. As such, it exposes the role of the security officials as unaccountable gatekeepers of the Agambenian zones of indistinction and central actors who contribute to the persistence of securitisation logics. Chapter 5 is dedicated to resistance, the third component of the TERmodel. Based on the theoretical assumption that a lack of resistance in the context of the securitisation process is a minimal prerequisite of a successful securitisation, this chapter explores whether resistance emerged, who questioned and challenged the securitisation process, and how and why the effects of resistance failed to challenge the continuity of the state of emergency. It then guides the reader through the governmental strategies to reduce the possibility of resistance as well as the strategies of the dissent to challenge the existence of the exceptional framework. This chapter demonstrates that the elaboration of resistance is an essential task for any securitisation study since it adds a relevant angle to the sociopolitical ramifications of the securitisation process. On the one hand, it exposes the immense empowerment of securitising actors and security authorities guaranteed by the securitisation process. On the other, it emphasises the constrained possibilities individuals have, especially in authoritarian contexts, to challenge a dominant securitisation discourse. Chapter 6 addresses the regional relevance of the TER-model. Provided the book’s interest in the reinforcement of authoritarianism through security arguments, the chapter discusses the cases of Syria and Turkey. Syria represents an extreme case of exception that has resulted in a massive deployment of systematic torture and a large number of innocent

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people dead. Turkey evinces considerably less excess of sovereign violence than Syria or Egypt. Yet, the vague threat of terrorism has served Recep Erdo˘gan’s regime as a pretence to reinforce authoritarian principles and silence the opposition. Like in Egypt, there has been a strong tendency to normalise the exception through its integration into ordinary legislation. The two cases, despite their different grades of extremity, showcase that the underlying objective of securitising ruling elites is to reinforce the autocratic mechanisms and thus to boost their positions of power. Chapter 7 outlines the underlying scholarly contributions made by this book to the field of research dedicated to securitisation scholarship as well as to modern Egypt and suggests points for further scholarly exploration. Note on Transliteration In this book, in order not to confuse readers unfamiliar with Arabic and for the sake of simplicity, the diacritical marks are omitted, and the preceding definite articles are not assimilated. The letters “ayn and hamza, which are often confused in the transliteration, share an identical sign”. Arabic words and terms are italicised unless they refer to the names of persons or geographical locations. For Egyptianised words and terms, the book follows a transliteration style that attempts to capture the closest local pronunciation. For instance, Gamal is preferred over Jamal and ahwa over qahwa. For those words, which have become widely used in English, the English plural ending -s is used if necessary. For example, fatwas are preferred instead of the Arabic correct plural futawa. The book also does not accurately transcribe names of persons if there is an existing form of the name in English written texts. For instance, the book writes Muhammad el-Baradei instead of Muhammad al-Barada’i. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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CHAPTER 2

A Matter of Security

Located at the crossroads of two continents in the heart of the Middle East, Egypt has always played an important role in regional affairs. It controls the Suez Canal that connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, is the most populous Arab country, and is home to the authoritative centre of Islamic jurisprudence, al-Azhar University. Egypt has cultivated aspirations to become the leader of the Arab world since its independence in 1952. A short-lived union with Syria and Yemen, the United Arab Republic (1958–1961), which was politically dominated by Egypt, and subsequently lost wars with Israel (1967, 1973) have, however, undermined these ambitions. The vision of pan-Arab leadership has since shrunk to a mere rhetorical level. The strong nationalist sentiment nurtured by the ambitious regional politics pioneered by the Egyptian President, Gamal Abdal Nasser (1956–1970), has, however, prevailed to this day. On the domestic front, costly nationalist projects, generous welfare programmes, and a lack of structural reforms laid the foundations of the current poor economic situation and lack of democratic governance. When Husni Mubarak took power in 1981, Egypt was experiencing difficulties on many levels. Domestic and regional resentment sprouted as a result of the signing of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Arab countries cut off their diplomatic ties and crucial financial support of Egypt in solidarity with the Palestinians. Egypt became dependent on the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Reimer-Burgrova, Politics of Violence and Fear in MENA, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83932-1_2

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financial and military aid of the United States. Driven by strong pan-Arab nationalist sentiment, the domestic opposition, which includes both the leftist and Islamist currents, mobilised against Egypt’s leadership. Some Islamist1 groups, including assassins of Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar alSadat, turned militant. The armed forces were not fond of the peace with Israel either. Al-Sadat’s assassination clearly showed there was a legitimate concern that militant Islamists had infiltrated the military. Mubarak’s regime also was faced with an ailing economy. Al-Sadat’s policy of infitah (openness), which liberalised the centrally planned economy to address the state’s immense debt, deepened structural problems such as poverty and corruption (Ayubi 1991). Moreover, due to prevalent clientelism and corruption, only a small fraction of Egyptians profited from the economic liberalisation. The rest suffered. In the early 1980s, almost one-fifth of the Egyptian population (18.2% of urban and 16.1% of rural population at the time) lived below the poverty line and were thus unable to meet a given standard of living (The World Bank 2002: 8).2 As a side effect of the infitah policies, the state largely abandoned its role as a welfare provider. Non-state actors thus assumed some of the state’s tasks; specifically, Islamist actors dominated the key fields of public health and education. One revolution, one coup, and forty years later, Egypt’s economy in 2020 is still struggling. According to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), Egypt’s auditing agency, the national poverty line reached 32.5% in 2017/2018. That was an increase almost by four percent compared to 2016 (CAPMAS 2019).3 Facing a steep rise of the public debt, which made almost 100% of GDP in the fiscal year 2015/2016, in 2016, Egypt agreed to float its currency, the Egyptian Pound (LE), in order to clinch $12 billion provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Noll 2017). The rolled-out austerity measures, subsidies cuts, a massive devaluation of the Egyptian Pound, and related price hikes up to 30% that followed hit especially hard those clustered just 1 In order to avoid misunderstanding, in this book an “Islamist” refers to an activist

who advocates for, either peacefully or violently, the reordering of government and society in accordance with his or his movement’s interpretation of Islam. 2 The stated data follow the analysis of el-Laithy and Osman, quoted in the World Bank report. 3 The national poverty line is a flexible line. It is based on a calculation that stems from an annual survey.

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above the poverty line. The severe economic crisis, much felt in the lowerincome societal strata, was, however, not met by an adequate increase in wages. On the contrary, due to a high inflation rate, the average Egyptian household’s expenditure skyrocketed to 51,000 LE in 2017/2018 compared to 36,000 LE in 2015 (CAPMAS 2019). In 2020, Husni Mubarak and his era already belong to history.4 Yet, the authoritarian legacy of his reign has outlived the 2011 uprising that led to his ousting. A decade after the 2011 revolution, Egypt remains an autocratic, repressive state run by semi-military structures that rely on the counterterrorism narrative to enforce and legitimise their rule. The security—or what the successor regime of Abdal Fattah al-Sisi made of it—stands for the government’s top priority. Since the resilience of authoritarian structures is at the heart of this book, this chapter outlines the major factors of autocratic leadership in modern Egypt. This said, this chapter specifically addresses matters of security and counterterrorism.

The Illusionary Façade of Democracy Egypt gained its independence from Great Britain in 1952 and has never since been a democratic country. Though on many occasions by Egyptian presidents and other top politicians have claimed otherwise, the country has always been governed in an authoritarian manner. Neither Husni Mubarak’s era (1981–2011) nor Abdal Fattah al-Sisi’s reign (de facto since 2013–) are exceptions to this rule. Husni Mubarak depicted himself as an advocate of democracy and, in the early phases of his presidency, even called for a limited number of presidential terms. Ousted at the beginning of his sixth term, Mubarak did not bring about a genuine political liberalisation or the rule of law during his time in power. By regional parameters, Mubarak’s autocratic style was not as all-encompassing as, for instance, regimes in Saudi Arabia, Syria, or present-day Egypt ruled by his successor al-Sisi. Mubarak’s regime allowed for some political freedoms and rights. Yet, the deliberate use of repression to silence dissent formed its essential backbone. The regime notoriously disregarded the basic principles of democratic rule, rigged

4 Husni Mubarak died on February 25, 2020 at the age of 91. In 2017, Mubarak was acquitted from charges related to the killing of protestors in a wave of protests that eventually led to his ousting in February of 2011.

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elections, disrespected the rule of law, persecuted opposition, and violated human rights to secure its own survival. Given these contextual conditions, political pluralism was largely reduced to a feigned multiparty system that did not live up standards known from democratically ruled countries. Installed in the late 1970s by al-Sadat, the strictly regulated multipartyism did not pose a challenge to the authoritarian style of governance. The officially acknowledged opposition parties and other political associations, including the independent members of parliament, never reached the capacity to shape the way society was governed (Shehata 2010: 51ff). Even though participation in parliamentarian life in Egypt provided the opposition parties with an opportunity to embarrass the government and to disagree with the periodical extensions of the state of emergency, they had “little chance of making serious inroads at the government’s expense” (Springborg 1989: 192). Transformed from sites of dissent into institutionalised, closely monitored entities, the readiness of oppositional party parliamentarians to assume radical positions vis-à-vis the regime abated. Overstepping the rules bore the risk of exclusion from the legal opposition at the party level and the loss of income and increased risk of persecution on a more individual level. As the weakest element of the Egyptian dissent, the legally recognised opposition parties assumed the role of a tolerated but largely impotent opposition (Albrecht 2005: 383f). The National Democratic Party (NDP) profited greatly from the absence of genuine political pluralism (Gohar 2008: 172f). Established in 1978 as a part of the effort to create a regulated multiparty system, the NDP controlled the parliamentary life in the country. Throughout the entirety of Mubarak’s era, the NDP maintained a majority in the parliament. This empowered the party to issue and approve legislation aligned with the regime’s platform. The comfortable NDP-majority also secured smooth authorisations for extensions of the state of emergency, which the parliament regularly reviewed and approved. On some occasions, the NDP took advantage of its dominant position and scheduled the parliamentary sessions to review the extension of the state of emergency without prior notice. It thereby prevented the opposition parliamentarians from preparing counterarguments or mobilising the Egyptian public (Albrecht 2005; el-Mahdi and Marfleet 2009). The NDP was, however, more than a mere political party. Given its dominant position, the party members controlled the state’s capital distribution (Gohar 2008; Wickham 2002). The party was in a unique position

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to build and maintain a wide clientelist network of individuals and groups loyal to the regime. Through the elaborate distribution of Bourdieuean societal, cultural, and symbolic capital, the NDP was able to align diverse segments of the society. The NDP brought together army officials, religious representatives, journalists, as well as the officially acknowledged political opposition. The distribution of wealth among the privileged few secured the inner cohesion of the ruling elite and guaranteed the loyalty of any actors necessary to maintain the sociopolitical status quo. Not surprisingly, the NDP became to be frequently referred to as “a shell organisation – a network of appointed agents and officials”, which maintained “complex relations of patronage which reach[ed] from the president down to the village level” (Marfleet 2009: 25). Presided over by the president himself, the NDP’s strength relied on not only its advantageous access to wealth but also its very vague ideological position. Besides the obligatory reference to the 1952 revolution and formal identification with former Egyptian presidents, the party lacked distinct ideological lines. Their absence, however, provided the party with the capacity to adjust its positions as needed—without compromising ideological tenets. Accordingly, the membership base did not rely on the party’s ideology. The NDP membership functioned as a threshold to the privileged access to the state’s rent and its share rather than an identification with a distinct ideological stance (Albrecht 2005: 380ff). Access to the party was strictly controlled to curb the political aspirations of the prominent security representatives. The police and military officials were banned from joining any political party, including the NDP. Only retired officers were permitted to enter the political scene officially as political party members. In line with Rachid Ouaissa’s definition of the state-class (2005),5 the ruling elite was not defined by the governmental structures nor by the division between three branches of government. Rather, it was a heterogeneous network of individuals and cliques that included individuals who occupied diverse positions in the leading political institutions such as the presidential office, important ministries (e.g. Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Defense), province administration, the bureaucratic apparatus, media, businessmen circles, as well as within military ranks. A close connection to the NDP was the common denominator among 5 The theoretical concept of Staatsklasse was initially introduced by Hartmut Elsenhans. Ouaissa, however, significantly extended the original formulation of the concept.

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the ruling elite. Either as party members or a part of the NDP clientelist network, the NDP formed a backbone of a privileged class within the public sector and the core of the ruling elite. The structural domination of the NDP and the existing state oppressive mechanisms, which were further reinforced by the state of emergency combined with massive cooptation, secured the Egyptian political elite as an Ouaissian state-class with overwhelming political and societal domination. Despite its strong roots in the political life in Egypt, the NDP did not survive the 2011 uprising. Three days into the uprising, during the so-called Day of Anger, its headquarters, located at one of the arterial roads to the Tahrir Square from the Qasr al-Nil Bridge, were set on fire. In April 2011, to appease the revolutionary crowds, the interim military rulers supported the decision of an administrative court to dissolve the party and transfer its funds to the state. Four years later, its burnt-out headquarters were demolished completely, and the NDP was relegated to history. The NDP’s end should be, however, not mistaken for the dead-end of political careers of its former members. The election ban on the former NDP members was lifted only a few months after the party had been officially prohibited. Many former NDP members and close associates, so-called feloul (remnants) in a reference to the old regime further pursued their political careers in newly established parties and associations without restrictions. For instance, a former NDP secretarygeneral Hossam Badrawy established al-Ittihad party. Another former NDP secretary-general Mohamed Ragab, along with other high-ranking NDP figures, joined The Egyptian Citizens Party. Ahmad Shafiq, a longserving Minister of Aviation (2002–2011) and the last Prime Minister (2011) to serve under Husni Mubarak, ran in the 2012 presidential elections, which he lost in a close race to the Brotherhood’s nominee Muhammad Mursi. In the follow-up to Mubarak’s ousting, the vibrant political activities were by far not limited to feloul. Between 2011 and 2013, dozens of new political parties across the entire political spectrum emerged. Paradoxically, the thriving multipartyism turned out to be a curse rather than a blessing for Egypt’s democratic future. Despite the boom of parties that Egypt witnessed at the time, at least for the years to come, plurality did not aid the democratic cause. The quantity of newly established parties and politically active movements overran their quality. As a result, liberal forces did not unite and stand up against the powerful revival of the authoritarian state.

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Secular, leftist circles—leading forces behind the 2011 uprising— founded a number of new parties and associations. Their organisational shortcomings, missing fundamental political know-how including effective strategies to run elections, a lack of a viable ideological message, and often also their reluctance to cooperate with each other, however, did not allow them to reach out and mobilise masses beyond the vocal but relatively small revolutionary crowd. The preoccupation with the steep rise of Islamist political forces exhausted their resources, narrowed down their agenda to a competition with the Islamists, all while turning a blind eye to the strengthening of the military and security institutions that occurred in the background. In this respect, between 2011 and 2013, the field of security institutions remained largely uncontested, maintaining their traditional, long nourished distrust and hostility towards Islamists (el-Sherif 2014). For the liberal, leftist groups, the switch from organising demonstrations to a political game ruled by pragmatism, compromises, and experience did not work out. Accordingly, a decade later, there is no such a political party of a significant size to represent the once revolutionary, secular left. Compared to the secular leftists, the Islamists were, due to their organisational base, better off at the outset. Hence, they gained more visibility in the transition phase between 2011 and 2013. The newly established Islamist parties profited from decades of organised clandestine political and societal activities. Thus, the mobilisation of their electorate was achieved more easily. The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the official party of the Muslim Brotherhood, was by far the most successful. Founded in April 2011, the party soon became the most powerful party in the country. In the 2011–2012 parliamentary elections, the first parliamentary elections after Mubarak’s ousting, the Muslim Brotherhood won a near majority of the seats (47.2%). Subsequently, the party’s candidate Muhammad Mursi won in the 2012 presidential elections. With this, the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition movement under Husni Mubarak, gained control over the executive branch. The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political star Mursi was restrained by public distrust towards the group that had been building up for decades as well as the lack of the leadership competence to alter its unfavourable public image. When sworn into the presidency in June 2012, Muhammad Mursi promised to be a president for all Egyptians. Yet, his cabinet failed to offer an inclusive political project, a necessary

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step in overcoming the general animosity and distrust the Egyptian nonIslamist political forces felt towards the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead, the cabinet’s decisions and policies reinforced the impression of political opportunism and partisanship. For instance, the presidential decree in November 2012, one of the milestones that dramatically decreased the Brotherhood’s popularity, granted Mursi absolute executive power to rule Egypt through executive orders that could not be opposed or revoked by any other authority (Sabry 2012). The decree enraged a wide spectrum of the political scene, including liberals, leftists, secularists, and Christians, resulting in massive protests and violent clashes between proMursi and anti-Mursi camps (Kirkpatrick 2012). Although Mursi soon revoked his decision, large segments of the Egyptian society had already been alienated. Other decisions made by Mursi, such as the appointment of a former al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya member as a governor of Luxor raised concerns among Egypt’s populace. Luxor is the site of a 1997 terrorist attack by the very same al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya that killed over 60 tourists (Chick 2013). Mursi’s call upon Egyptians to join Islamist fighters in Syria against Bashar al-Asad’s forces added to the concerns of many Egyptians about the future of the country. The more the Islamist political forces flourished, the more the popular anxiety of an Islamist takeover—tapping from the deeply rooted securitisation narrative—was fed. Against the rising popular discontent, the inability to establish a workable relationship with the security institutions, and a silent mutiny of the state bureaucracy, the FJP quickly became an isolated political force vulnerable to any confrontation (el-Sherif 2014). Thus, although the Muslim Brotherhood was governing, it was not ruling. When the massive anti-Brotherhood demonstrations erupted at the end of June in 2013, Mursi, as Trager (2015) observed, “controlled practically nothing on the ground, and he was reduced to being a president in name only.” By mid2013, the Islamist heyday was over. The military, with broad support from the Egyptian public, deposed Muhammad Mursi and took power. The 2013 coup ended the period of relative political freedom and replaced it with persecution, legal bans, and criminalisation of organisations that backed the Islamist political parties as terrorist associations. The decision by non-Islamist political forces to support the 2013 coup, including the brutal repressions of anti-coup protesters, further antagonised and fragmented an already weak platform of secular liberals. Although post-2013 multipartyism was not defined by the rule of one regime’s party, as had

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been the case under Husni Mubarak, political pluralism did not become a reality either. The repeatedly postponed parliamentary elections, the rule of the executive through controversial decrees, periods of state of emergency, and significant changes to the electoral law further weakened the position of all political parties in Egypt. In 2015, electoral changes in which individual candidates were prioritised over party lists resulted in a weak parliament in which independent candidates won a majority of the seats. The electoral reform thus opened the parliament doors wide for former military or security officers, wealthy individuals, prominent local bosses, and former NDP members (Hassan 2019; Mohamed 2015). As a result, the legislative body was composed of individuals disconnected in the absence of unifying ideology further strengthened the position of the executive, in general, and the president, in particular. To further strengthen the position of the president, in 2018, Egypt adopted the Law on the Treatment of Senior Military Commanders (2018/161) that addressed the political ambitions of former military men. Specifically, the Law empowered the president to strip any senior military official of his right to run for a political office by calling him back to the duty (CIHRS 2018; Mandour 2018). Thus, compared to Mubarak’s era Egypt, after the 2013 coup has been increasingly defined through the rule of a strongman backed by above-law operating security institutions and unconstrained by a weak parliament.

The Genealogy of the Enemy Throughout decades, the essence of the autocratic operation of the modern Egyptian state has been intimately bound to an existential, imminent threat. In the absence of legitimacy that would have been derived from the genuine principles of fair and democratic representation, Egypt’s leaders turned to alternative options to legitimise the authoritarian means of governance. The narrative of an enemy threatening Egypt’s well-being has been one of the most powerful resources to legitimise illiberal policies, justify law circumvention and draconian measures, and solidify the asymmetric power/knowledge nexus in favour of the ruling elite through the strict control and repression of the dissent. The existence of the perceived threat, nurtured by an ongoing securitisation rhetorics, functioned not only as a source of legitimacy to all Egyptian regimes but also as a key mechanism that significantly

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contributed to the resilience and continuity of authoritarian schemes in Egypt over decades. Regardless of who occupied the presidential office— ranging from Gamal Abdal Nasser, Anwar al-Sadat, Husni Mubarak, and most recently to Abdal Fattah al-Sisi—there was always an image of an enemy from whom Egypt had to be protected and whom the regime had to fight and counter. Although the image of the enemy did change respective of actual circumstances, the key principle of the enemy narrative as a legitimising factor of an autocratic regime remained the same. When Gamal Abdal Nasser took power in 1954 after the removal of his rival, his position as the new leader of Egypt was far from stable. The transition period between Nasser and his predecessor Muhammad Naguib was dominated by uncertainty. Public protests in support of the ex-President, unclarities about the loyalty of army ranks, and public mobilisation through the Muslim Brotherhood, a well-organised Islamist social group established in 1928, all followed Naguib’s ousting. Nasser quickly picked up the Islamist movement as the central enemy figure to legitimise the takeover of power by force and to stabilise the authoritarian trajectory taken by the young nation-state. The 1954 failed assassination attempt by a Brotherhood member played into Nasser’s hands. It provided Nasser with a pretence to brutally crackdown on the movement, blaming it for undermining the development of the nation-state. Up to 20,000 Brotherhood members were sent to concentration camps in the desert. Only a fraction of the detainees, 1,050 in total, were eventually officially brought to court. Out of these, six Brotherhood leaders received capital punishment, while the rest were given long prison sentences (Kandil 2014: 40). The enemy image associated with the Brotherhood and substantiated in the utmost state’s hostility towards the movement’s members rooted the Islamist enemy deeply in the Egyptian security discourse and collective memory. Not only was this knowledge coded into regimes of truth and regularly mobilised by ruling elites to legitimise illiberal, autocratic decisions and policies, it has also formed the backbone of the antagonistic relationship between the Egyptian state and the Islamist camp ever since. Marked by the deep distrust which overwhelmed the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the ruling elite, Nasser’s securitisation of the movement made it fairly difficult for the next generations of Egyptians to overcome the mutual hostility and challenge the established

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asymmetric power/knowledge relations that tend to view the Brotherhood as an enemy rather than as a possible partner (see also Kandil 2014). The Muslim Brotherhood was not the sole enemy of the young Egyptian state. Israel, established in 1948, was a top target on Nasser’s enemy list. Nasser’s hostile attitude towards Israel, wherein the neighbour was depicted as an enemy of all Arabs, contributed to his fame as a widely acknowledged pan-Arab leader. Nasser’s leading role in the fight against the neighbouring state, which culminated in the 1967 war with Israel, served two objectives: to position Egypt as the Arab country ready to take the pan-Arab lead; and to derail attention from ill-advised domestic policies and lack of sustainable economic progress while a massive authoritarian state with very powerful security institutions was being built. Both the Muslim Brotherhood as well as Israel were used as scapegoats to legitimise Nasser’s rule and to solidify the nascent authoritarian state. The enemy narratives legitimised not only Nasser’s tight grip over Egypt but also required Egyptians to make concessions in the field of political rights and liberties in order to achieve higher goals, including the aspired defeat of Israel. In this respect, Nasser laid the foundation of a strong authoritarian state whose survival has been since based on the trade of severe restrictions of freedom and liberties for fair, democratic sociopolitical development. Nasser’s Vice-President and successor, Anwar al-Sadat (1970–1981), resorted to the proven tactics of an external enemy to keep the authoritarian status quo. Yet, the economic and political circumstances significantly altered the catalogue of Egypt’s enemies. The disastrous economic situation, the military defeat by Israel in 1967 and 1973„ as well as the failure to create a greater pan-Arab state, forced al-Sadat to depart from Nasser’s political legacy. Embarking on economic liberalisation and détente approach towards Israel that eventually culminated in the EgyptIsrael peace treaty (1979), al-Sadat profoundly revised the repertoire of Egypt’s enemies. Most significantly, the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty officially excluded Israel from the list of enemies. The narrative about the Israeli threat to Egypt could no longer be employed by the governing elite to legitimise its rule—be it in domestic policies or foreign-political decisions. This, however, did not invalidate the widespread popular animosity towards Israel that has prevailed until current days. In this regard, the

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peace, which was sustained in the form of rather cold diplomatic relations between both countries over decades, made the Egyptian elite vulnerable to public anger as well as a subject to expressions of disapproval from elites in other Arab countries. The popular and regional discontent over the rapprochement with Israel, which has intensified against the backdrop of regular crises in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, has pressured all Egyptian leaders since al-Sadat to carefully review the public anger and balance the accumulated discontent when necessary. The domestic list of enemies was reshuffled, too. While al-Sadat opted for a softer approach vis-à-vis Islamists and released dozens of imprisoned members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the enemy void was promptly filled with representatives of leftist currents supportive of Nasser’s socialist economic policies. The shake-up on the domestic list of enemy figures that led to an intense securitisation of leftist circles could have been anticipated. In 1970, when al-Sadat came to power, Egypt experienced a massive economic crisis. Almost two decades of planned economy featuring the nationalisation of much of the industrial and commercial sectors, a lack of necessary long-term infrastructural development, as well as lavish spending on the army combined with unreasonable expenditures on large projects without revenues to patch the debts, left the economy in ruins. Al-Sadat disembarked from the socialist, anti-capitalist vision of the economy and adopted a neoliberal perspective. To legitimise the fundamental turn and suppress the leftist dissent, al-Sadat’s regime framed the supporters of the former regime, the Nasserists, as a central threat to Egypt. This way, the prime target of the regime’s securitisation was located within the leftist political spectrum of society. Over time, al-Sadat grew increasingly suspicious of any critical voices, including Islamists. Shortly before his death at the hands of militant Islamists, he revised his soft approach on Islamists. In September 1981, al-Sadat ordered sweeping arrests of hundreds of leading Egyptian personalities and his critics from among the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic associations, the Coptic Church, and leftist organisations. Al-Sadat’s reign showed that a profound revision of enemies is possible. While the figure of an Islamist remained a latent but tolerated threat, the leftists supportive of the Nasserist policies emerged as a new threat. Through the peace treaty, Israel as an existential threat was invalidated completely. The revision of enemies notwithstanding, the principle behind the enemy narrative, however, remained the same: to legitimise the authoritarian rule and silence those who opposed the ruling elite.

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In the wake of al-Sadat’s assassination by militant members of al-Jihad, accompanied by an unsuccessful attempt to ignite an anti-government uprising in Upper Egypt, the Islamist enemy once again came into the spotlight. For Husni Mubarak (1981–2011), al-Sadat’s successor, the Islamist represented the major enemy from the very beginning of his presidential career. The narrative of a violent Islamist, who jeopardises Egypt’s development, was further nurtured by a violent conflict between radicalised Islamist militants and the state that evolved since the 1981 assassination and culminated in a bloody confrontation in the 1990s. As the following chapters show in detail, Mubarak’s regime was not concerned with the actual readiness of individual groups to commit acts of violence and targeted both militant and peaceful Islamist representatives alike. Over the next three decades, Mubarak’s regime virtually reduced the enemy list to the Islamist. Despite the expectations of many, Mubarak did not revoke peace with Israel. Hence, he did not allow for Israel to be reinstated as an enemy, either. The threat associated with the leftists dissipated during the 1980s, too. Although the leftist circles were closely monitored, they did not represent a major threat to the regime anymore. The reduced approach to the enemy lists did, however, not necessarily imply that the absolute number of the targeted persons would have been reduced, too. In the early aftermath of al-Sadat’s death, the regime concentrated on hunting and punishing perpetrators directly linked to the assassination plot. Towards the end of the 1980s, the militant Islamist was a universally sanctioned picture of an Egyptian enemy. During this time, the regime did not only widen the scope of targeted Islamists but also increasingly framed the Islamists as terrorists and referred to its security campaign as a “war on terror”. The paradigm switch that put an Islamist on a par with a terrorist significantly boosted the authoritarian foundations of the state, for it allowed the regime to target any opponent who fit the vague definition of a terrorist regardless of their attachment to the Islamist camp (see Chapters 3 and 4). The shift from defining enemies primarily through their political ideologies to the vague, all-encompassing concept of a terrorist, discussed in this book, is of immense relevance for the understanding of autocracy and the related oppression of the Egyptian society in Mubarak’s Egypt and beyond. The paradigm shift towards an elusive figure of a terrorist facilitated a flexible integration of the regime’s other opponents beyond

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Islamist militants to the category of enemy. This way, any Islamist, regardless of their position on violence, could be framed as a terrorist. The shift, however, also offered the opportunity to break free of the enemy defined through a particular ideology. Thus, although the Islamist was and still is a central target, it became easier to flexibly qualify and target nonIslamist dissent and label those as terrorists, too. The extent of which has been visible, for instance, in the persecution of human rights activists and groups as terrorist organisations or supportive of terrorist activities (see Chapters 3 and 4). The narrative of the Islamist enemy is a well-established element of the autocratic working of the Egyptian state. It would be, however, misleading to view it as purely a product of the modern Egyptian state. The sentiment surrounding the Islamist enemy narrative cannot be separated from the anti-colonial movement of the late nineteenth century and diverse visions of the nation-state model that the movement formulated against the backdrop of the anti-colonial struggle. Unlike other Arab countries in the region, the idea of a modern Egyptian state was linked to a strong nationalist sentiment that emerged as early as the late nineteenth century and evolved over seventy years as a result of the British supremacy over Egypt (1882–1952) (Cleveland 2000: 102f; Farah 2009: 64). The 1919 revolution led against the British rule catalysed the emergence of a self-conscious, nationalist, anti-British movement. The initial success of the movement for independence notwithstanding, Egypt eventually gained only nominal independence in 1922; the United Kingdom maintained its control for the next three decades until the more successful revolution in 1952 (Little 1958: 134ff). The failure to gain independence as well as the post-WWI developments, but also the disintegration of the Ottoman empire, the establishment of a secular Turkish state, and the 1924 abolishment of the caliphate, moulded the ideological cleavage within the nationalist movement between the modernists and conservatives that still prevails in Egyptian political discourse. The modernist current of the nationalist movement, led by al-Wafd, “believed in the evolution of Egypt along Western lines” (Little 1958: 152). Accordingly, it promoted the idea of a secular (Western) nationstate that was and continues to be supported by the educated middle and upper class. The conservative nationalists mobilised mainly the lower and rural ranks of the society. Led by the Muslim Brotherhood, a group established in 1928, the conservative nationalists relied on the teachings

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of Muslim reformists such as Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din alAfghani and opposed the Western-style nation-state. They understood a nation in terms of the Islamic umma (the Muslim community) wherein a caliphate was a relevant form of a state to unite the umma (Farah 2009; Little 1958). United by the struggle against the common enemy, the British administration, the supporters of both state visions did not confront each other head-on until the British withdrawal from Egypt in the aftermath of the 1952 revolution. The new Egyptian leadership, which was soon increasingly dominated by Gamal Abdal Nasser, eventually opted for the secular vision of nation-state while suppressing the alternative—the Islamic caliphate—and its supporters, represented by the Muslim Brotherhood. The conflict between the modernist and conservative nationalist state forms has not faded away over time. On the contrary, it remains a significant factor that decisively shapes the Egyptian political and societal landscape. At times parts of the national conservatives radicalised their views. All of Nasser’s successors, al-Sadat, Mubarak, and al-Sisi, faced militant Islamists that took up arms to enforce their vision of the Islamic state. The 1990s was an especially dark period for Egypt. Al-Jihad and al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, two major Islamist militant groups in Egypt, led an open insurgency against the state. During this period, hundreds of Egyptians died, and thousands were injured in numerous terrorist attacks. Egypt’s economy, largely dependent on revenue from tourism, suffered. At the peak of the counterterrorism campaign, political liberalisation and human rights standards were sidelined. As this book discusses in detail, Mubarak’s regime heavily relied on repression as a major strategy to counter the armed, as well as, peaceful Islamist opposition. As the most recent developments in Egypt have shown, this pattern did not change much after the 2011 revolution.

The Rule of Law in Times of Exception In 1981, in an immediate response to al-Sadat’s assassination and an attempted coup by Islamist militants, Egypt declared a state of emergency. What was originally presented as an interim provision became a permanent condition of the Egyptian everyday reality for decades to follow. Throughout the entire reign of Mubarak, the parliament regularly approved presidential decrees to renew the state of emergency. Thus, while the declaration of the state of emergency was, in the beginning,

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primarily driven by a major disruption in the Egyptian political landscape and the efforts to punish the militant group behind it, this reason could hardly sustain an argument for renewing the state of emergency and thus upholding the system of oppressive security mechanisms for such a long period of time. Mubarak’s regime continued the legacy of Nasser and alSadat and adopted the state of emergency as a central means to counter the dissent and strengthen the authoritarian rule. In 1967, against the backdrop of a defeat in the war against Israel, Nasser’s Egypt declared the state of emergency as a temporary measure to address the immediate political crisis that the lost war brought about. Three years later, in 1970, when al-Sadat assumed power, the state of emergency was still in place. Regardless of the personnel change in the presidential office, the state of emergency was upheld and primarily used to persecute communists and other leftist-orientated activists, perceived back then as major enemies. Although al-Sadat eventually lifted the state of emergency in 1980, Egyptians lived with its absence for only a few months, until al-Sadat’s assassination in 1981. In this respect, when the new President Husni Mubarak reimposed the state of emergency, it was not a new condition for sociopolitical life in Egypt. Legislation that addresses exceptional situations and defines the rules while exceptional situations prevail is nothing exceptional. The state of emergency is meant to deal with emergency situations, such as natural disasters, humanitarian catastrophes, terrorist attacks, or pandemics, and provide options for the government to remedy the situation as fast as possible. Likewise, the existence of an emergency law which regulates the state of emergency is not an issue per se. In fact, most countries do have an emergency law. Nonetheless, not every country sustains a state of emergency for lengthy periods of time, nor do the political elites abuse the exceptional law provisions to reach political ends. In Egypt, the state of emergency is regulated by the provisions of the 1958 Emergency Law (1958/162) (henceforth, the Law). When the state of emergency is in effect, the Law suspends rights and freedoms otherwise guaranteed to Egyptians and grants sweeping powers to the state’s executive. Provided the semi-presidential political system, the president is the head of the executive, and as per the provisions in this Law, he becomes the most powerful man in the country. The Law authorises the president to bypass the parliament and rule per their own decrees (Art. 3); to set broad restrictions on the freedom of assembly and residence (Art. 3/1); to arrest and detain suspected persons or those who present

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a danger to security and the public order without the need to abide by procedural law (Art. 3/1); to legalise censorship (Art. 3/2); and to seize property (Art. 3/4). In practice, in Mubarak’s Egypt, Article 3 in particular formed the legal backbone of the counterterrorism campaign, along with the persecution of the political dissent (see e.g. Gohar 2008: 184; Kienle 2001: 90f). The article criminalised public gatherings and legitimised their violent dispersals. As Kienle (2001: 90f) notes, gatherings in private spaces, such as on the premises of political party offices or professional syndicates, were possible. Yet, they were not necessarily immune to the intervention of security forces. As a matter of rule, such assemblies were often blocked or violently dispersed. Article 3 also hindered freedom of expression and facilitated the harassment and arbitrary arrests of regime critics (see e.g. Shehata 2010: 80). The Emergency Law also led to a broad infringement into the judiciary, too. Husni Mubarak, in his capacity as president, was, for instance, entitled to establish exceptional courts. The Emergency State Security Courts—a de facto parallel judiciary system—designated to hear cases of crimes that were committed in violation of the president’s decrees and to appoint civilian and/or military justices were the result (Art. 7).6 The president or his representative was also authorised to refer any case which would have been otherwise dealt with in a common law context to these exceptional courts (Art. 9). The supremacy of the executive over the judiciary power was sealed in Article 12: the contestations of court verdicts were impermissible, and the verdicts’ validation was a subject of the presidential ratification. Until 2014, there was no clause in the Law that would limit the duration of the state of emergency. Husni Mubarak, unrestricted by any time clause, issued regularly presidential decrees to extend the state of emergency in one to four years intervals. The last decree signed by Mubarak came in 2010, which renewed the state of emergency until 2012. The 2011 revolution and its demand to immediately terminate the state of emergency notwithstanding, the emergency rule was kept in force as originally stipulated by Mubarak’s decree. 31 May 2012 was a milestone

6 Historically, there was double system of state security courts. The permanent state security courts associated with the State Security Investigation Service (SSIS) were as the SSIS abolished shortly after the 2011 revolution. The Emergency State Security Courts are directly related to the Emergency Law as they have the jurisdiction over issues associated with the state of emergency.

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for Egypt: the state of emergency was lifted for the first time in thirty years. The period without the state of emergency, however, did not last long. After a few short periods of state of emergency in January and August to November 2013 and lengthier periods limited to the Northern Sinai region, in April 2017, al-Sisi’s regime declared a nationwide state of emergency in reaction to deadly terrorist attacks on Coptic churches that continues to prevail today.7 Although the time clause added by the 2014 Constitution (Art. 154) limits the permitted period of a state of emergency to three months with a maximum extension of three more months, al-Sisi’s regime has found ways to circumvent the constitution: after the 6-month period, to either declare per a presidential decree a new state of emergency and treat the consecutive state of emergency as a new emergency situation; or to divide the extensions with short time breaks in between (Youness 2019). The latter became a common practice that enabled thirteen renewals of the state of emergency between April 2017 and October 2020. As this book discusses in detail, in Egypt, the state of emergency has formed a double-edged sword of security policy: it has buttressed counterterrorism campaigns, but it has also been a bottom line of governmental strategies to counter and silence dissent. Over the years, Mubarak’s, as well as al-Sisi’s, regimes introduced additional legislation that further bolstered both objectives and extended the legal operation of the exceptional mode. The Anti-Terror Law (1992/97), a major milestone of Mubarak’s counterterrorism campaign, introduced a series of key amendments to the Egyptian Penal Code and to the Law Regulating the State and Supreme State Security Courts. Most importantly, the Anti-Terror Law— after eleven years of an ongoing counterterrorism campaign and countless criminal cases that emerged as a direct outcome of the campaign—introduced the term irhab (terrorism) to the Egyptian legal practice. For the first time in Egypt’s legal history, the criminal act of terrorism was defined (Art. 86). Its definition reads as follows: use of force, violence, threatening, or frightening, to which a felon resorts in execution of an individual or collective criminal scheme, with the aim of disturbing public order, or exposing the safety and security of society to danger, if this is liable to harm the persons, or throw horror among 7 The last renewal of the state of emergency was approved in October 2020.

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them, expose their life, freedom or security to danger, damage the environment, causes detriments to communications, transport, property and funds, buildings, public and private properties, occupying or taking possession of them, preventing or obstructing the work of public authorities, worship houses, or educational institutions, or interrupting the application of the constitution, laws, or statuses. (The Criminal Code of Egypt, Art. 86)

Such a catch-all definition of terrorism embedded in the Anti-Terror Law invited a broad interpretation of what was and was not terrorism. As many have pointed out (Atia 2011; Kienle 2001), the 1992 AntiTerror Law made it possible to classify virtually any activity as an act supporting terrorism. In this regard, the Law offered the regime legal options to criminalise non-violent political opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and qualify the participation in the peaceful dissent as a terrorism-related crime (AI 2000; HRW 2001). Accordingly, the ill-defined conceptualisation of terrorism facilitated waves of massive crackdowns, “with some 47,000 detained between 1992 and 1997” (Naguib 2009: 112). Moreover, supported by the Code of Military Justice (1966/25), the 1992 Anti-Terror Law incorporated military tribunals into the counterterrorism strategy (Kienle 2001: 94f). Military courts, notorious for their lack of due process and originally authorised to hear cases governing the armed forces, were now empowered to try civilians under terrorismrelated charges (Atia 2011: 9f). Based on their rather predictable verdicts, the regime routinely referred individuals, especially members of the Muslim Brotherhood, en masse to these courts. Egyptian activists and lawyers disputed that the Law authorised the executive to refer only categories of crimes, not individuals, to military courts—a point which was eventually acknowledged by the Constitutional Court in 2013. However, their criticism did not alter the established practice. In 1995, for instance, a military tribunal heard eighty-one high-ranking Brotherhood members, including professors, parliamentarians, and businessmen, accused of having financially supported families of terrorists and militants active abroad (Rutherford 2008: 87; Wickham 2002: 214f). Convicted of non-violent offences, the defendants received up to five years of imprisonment (HRW 2007). According to estimates, under Husni Mubarak, there were over 12,000 civilians tried by the military courts (Aziz 2016).

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The military courts weakened the political opposition. Especially prior to elections to the parliament, student unions, and professional associations, the imprisonment of leading opposition activists paralysed their election strategies and mobilisation capacities (Albrecht 2005: 385f; Reza 2007: 543f). Crime conviction had a long-term effect, too. Egyptians convicted of a crime were legally barred from active political life, including from running in an election for several years after their release. This way, the regime neutralised some of the most charismatic Brotherhood members, including Khairat al-Shatir (HRW 2008; Wickham 2002: 216). Although the Muslim Brotherhood constituted the bulk of cases presented to military courts, during the last decade of Mubarak’s reign, military courts also served as loyal intermediates to tame emerging centres of popular discontent, such as representatives of the labour movement or of the blogger scene (HRW 2010; Stork 2012). Over time, in a trend that outlived Husni Mubarak, the exceptional powers granted to the ruling elite and justified by the ongoing counterterrorism campaign became a new norm in Egyptian everyday reality. The normalisation of exceptional powers also included several reworkings of the Egyptian Constitution. In 2007, rationalised by the omnipresent terrorist threat, the government incorporated several key exceptional powers, which were otherwise granted to the security organs only under the provisions of a state of emergency, into the constitution. For the sake of fighting terrorism, the amended Article 179 of the Constitution virtually denounced Articles 41, 44, and 45, dedicated to the protection of personal freedom and liberties. Article 179, specifically, granted the security authorities sweeping search and arrest powers, including the annulment of a court order, should they be undertaking a counterterrorism action (Brown et al. 2007; Gohar 2008). In combination with the vague definition of terrorism in the 1992 Anti-Terror Law, the amended constitution permitted unrestricted surveillance and arrests of anyone who, based on a sovereign decision of security officials, was assessed to be a threat to the public security. All of which became permissible without a state of emergency. When the 2011 Arab spring reached Egypt, the controversial legislation that granted exceptional powers to the ruling elite, along with the security authorities, was among the top topics brought up by protesting Egyptians. The shock wave the protests caused was, however, not strong enough to disrupt the autocratic workings of the state machinery. The fact that the state of emergency came to an end a year after Mubarak’s

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fall, in May 2012, when its duration expired as stipulated by Mubarak’s decree, is testimony to this. In the meantime, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), a self-appointed interim military administration that oversaw the transition to a civilian government since Mubarak’s ousting in February 2011 until the election of Muhammad Mursi as a new president in June 2012, upheld and further deepened much of Mubarak’s exception legacy. The SCAF relied heavily on military courts. In the span of a few months, during which the military was in power, military tribunals tried around 12,000 civilians—roughly the same amount as Mubarak’s regime over three decades (Aziz 2016). The military officials were also granted the right to arrest civilians and, thus, to try those individuals in front of military tribunals. For some human rights activists, this decision meant a de facto reintroduction of the state of emergency through the back door (Awad 2012). While under Husni Mubarak, the exception was largely administrated by the Ministry of Interior. Since the 2011 uprising, the Ministry of Defense began to take over this role. It is thus no surprise that the Egyptian military played a key role in Muhammad Mursi’s ousting in early July 2013 and became a powerful revival of the exceptional order. The military-backed regime that came to power after Mursi’s removal mastered the exceptional framework to unprecedented qualities at an unforeseen speed. Within few years and in the absence of a legislative body—the parliament was dissolved in mid-2012 and began to operate again in early 2016 after long-postponed parliamentary elections—the executive integrated the exception into the ordinary framework through a series of harsh, counterterrorism-justified laws. The normalisation of exception took such an extent that for many observers, it simply did not matter whether the country is ruled under the state of emergency or not because there is de facto no difference. Out of more than 340 presidential decrees issued in the absence of the parliament, the Protest Law (2013/107) and the Anti-Terror Law (2015/94) became central legislation buttressing the legal transformation.8 8 In the period between the 2013 coup and the first session of the newly elected parliament, Adly Mansour (2013–2014), the interim President, and Abdal Fattah al-Sisi, the Egyptian President since 2014, issued more than 340 presidential decrees. Although presidential decrees are required to be approved by a parliament, the parliament has to discuss and vote on the decrees within the first 15-day period of its existence. Thus, there was not enough time to review all decrees and the legislation made by the president was as a matter of fact approved.

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The Protest Law (2013/107), which was adopted immediately after a three-month period of state of emergency in November 2013 expired, immediately became a tool to push out political activism and dissent from the public space and thereby allow the regime to (re)gain control over the public sphere. The 2013 Protest Law (Art. 2) criminalised gatherings of a public nature with more than ten people in a public space without prior approval from the Ministry of Interior. The approval of the Ministry of Interior was, however, virtually unattainable for any protests and demonstrations critical of the regime. Unapproved protests, sit-ins, and road blockades staged by the Muslim Brotherhood as well as public protests organised by liberal circles were thus automatically classified as criminal acts. Since the Law (Art. 13) entitled security forces to use excessive and lethal force to disperse unauthorised public assemblies and foresees several years of imprisonment for participation in such gatherings, it reduced the readiness of many to voice their criticism in public areas. The Law’s strict enforcement further reinforced the deterrence effect. Dozens of liberal activists who peacefully protested against the Law’s adoption were immediately arrested and imprisoned for several years (AI 2013; HRW 2013). The second piece of the exceptional legislation, the Anti-Terror Law (2015/94), maintained the overly vague definition of terrorism originally introduced into the Criminal Code in the 1990s. It stipulated harsh punishments for any actual or planned complicity in terrorism activities defined as: any use of force, violence, threat, or intimidation domestically or abroad for the purpose of disturbing public order, or endangering the safety, interests, or security of the community. (The Anti-Terror Law 2015/94, Art. 2)

The broad, unspecific definition of terrorist activities described by terms that lack a firm legal grounding such as “public order” or “interests of the community” left room for a wide interpretation and unrestricted law enforcement. In a similar vein, the Law on Terrorist Entities (2015/8) offered the state authorities the flexibility they desired in designating any group as a terrorist entity. Its vague wording made it possible for the authorities to arbitrarily label any unwanted group of opponents such as the April 6 Youth Movement, Kefaya, or Ultras as terrorists and punish them with penalties up to life in prison or death (see Articles 12, 21, 28, and 29 of the Anti-Terror Law 2015/94). Even minor offences,

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such as blocking roads, obstructing traffic, and possession of unlicensed firearms have been, in the context of the counterterrorism legislation, easily qualified as acts that destabilise public order and, thus, the transgressors might eventually face as harsh punishments as violent militants (TIMEP 2019a). The 2015 Anti-Terror Law also bolstered the entrenched impunity of the security authorities directly, as it de facto legalised the act of extrajudicial killing: Enforcers of the provisions of this Law shall not be held criminally accountable if they use force to perform their duties or protect themselves from imminent danger to lives or properties, when the use of this right is necessary and adequate to avert the risk. (The Anti-Terror Law 2015/94, Art. 8)

In practice, as long as security officials use lethal force in a context of countering terrorism, the Law guarantees their impunity. The 2015 AntiTerror Law also strengthened the state’s monopoly on information and its distribution in the field of national security. It criminalised the coverage of national security topics, including terrorism and counterterrorism in Egypt that contradict the official accounts of the Egyptian government. Authors of narrations that contradict official statements might face the accusations of “false reporting” and be subjected to financial fines beyond the means of an average Egyptian (between 200,000 and 500,000 LE; Art. 35) and/or imprisonment. In result, after the Law was adopted, there were, for instance, no independent sources covering and verifying the official narratives praising the army for its heroic actions in the fight against terrorism in the northern Sinai, a region which was a base to the most lethal Egyptian terrorist group with affiliations to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Access to the northern Sinai has been strictly controlled. Journalists have been banned from entry. The media coverage of the “war on terror” in Sinai and beyond was thus reduced to repeating official statements which made the official accounts the dominant source of information about the counterterrorism campaign (Burgrova 2016). Although the most recent terrorism-related laws are exceptional in their content, they are not interim in nature. Instead, they became permanent elements of the ordinary legal framework. In this respect, the firm integration of the exception into the ordinary framework nullified the

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presumed temporariness of the exception. Moreover, it blurred the frontiers between the exception and normality instituted otherwise through the condition of the state of emergency. The terrorism-related laws have clearly not been exclusive to security targets, members and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, but have been applied to anyone who has defied the sociopolitical order dominated by the security institutions and authoritarian mechanisms of governance. The exception became a new normal.

The Feared Security Institutions In Egypt, the field of security institutions is heterogeneous and has been ingrained with persistent struggles between and within individual centres of power. When it comes to the domestic counterterrorism campaign, however, the major fault line has always run, between the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Defense. The initial cooperation between these two centres of power in hunting al-Sadat’s assassins notwithstanding and the fact that military officers presided over the military tribunals that dealt with political dissent, it was the Ministry of Interior with its subordinate agencies, the State Security Investigation Service (SSIS) and Central Security Forces (CSF) who dominated the counterterrorism campaign in Mubarak’s era (Reza 2007; Sirrs 2010). In the early outset of the counterterrorism campaign, in 1982, Husni Mubarak authorised by a decree the Minister of Interior to enact exceptional measures as stipulated in the 1958 Emergency Law. By implication, the Minister of Interior, along with the subordinate security apparatus, became the highest authority in the country (al-Nadeem Center 2006). In practice, the decree made the Minister, his aides, and subordinate institutions responsible for the execution of exceptional security measures and gave them far-reaching rights to control and shape the everyday life of Egyptians (EOHR 2008a, b). Mubarak’s decisions to endow the Ministry of Interior, including its agencies—the SSIS and the CSF—to lead counterterrorism was a political calculus based on wider contextual circumstances. As such, it was a deliberate step to neutralise the tension within the military ranks (see also Sassoon 2016: 117). Since al-Sadat’s assassins were military officers, there was a justified concern that the military had been infiltrated by Islamist militants and could not be trusted. This fact severely impaired the bond between the political elite and the army. Al-Sadat’s decision to

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make peace with Israel in 1979 and Mubarak’s conclusion to continue the legacy further burdened the strained relationship. The prospect of peace with Israel, hailed internationally but largely unpopular domestically, antagonised Egyptian masses, including the military. The army’s key mission, which was dependent on the permanent vision of a potential conflict with Israel, was voided overnight. The deal affected the 700,000 active soldiers trained to combat Israel, confronting them with unsettling idleness (Burgrova 2013). The counterterrorism campaign, in this regard, offered a means to reconfigure budget allocations and relocate responsibilities of individual security institutions in favour of the Ministry of Interior. Moreover, as some argued, the priority given to the Ministry of Interior in the fight against terrorism was a way to spare military commanders from police work and thus to avoid their possible alignment with the opposition forces through their work in domestic security. In response, the army withdrew from explicit political exposure and its direct intervention in politics remained a remote possibility (Ayubi 1991: 244). For three decades, the military did not significantly engage in counterterrorism activities nor other domestic security issues until the 2011 revolution. Securing the military’s loyalty came, however, at the expense of a large co-optation scheme secured through a massive redistribution of the state rent. In the span of a few years, the military transformed into a large economic enterprise that included everything from food production companies, oil stations, water facilities, and construction firms to seaside hotel resorts and beyond. Provided the exclusive access to the state rent, dumping prices combined with the lack of military budget oversight, and the cheap labour secured by the conscripts the military’s economic business flourished. The military’s economic might reached such an extent that, towards the end of Mubarak’s era, diverse sources placed it at anywhere from 8 to 40% of the Egyptian GDP (Abul-Magd 2011; Sennot 2012; Stier 2011).9 Thus, although the military virtually abandoned the political scene, it became increasingly intermingled with people’s daily lives through its extensive economic activities; especially those that targeted public welfare such as diverse infrastructure projects (see e.g. 9 The wide scope of the estimates is because military incomes and budget are not a subject to any civilian oversight. The prevailing secrecy around the military issues also leads to the fact that the Egyptian public is little aware of the size and scope of the military commercial activities.

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Sayigh 2012). Despite, or perhaps exactly because of, the army’s absence in the securitisation process, the military was able to build its public image as a supporter and protector of societal interests. Unlike the Ministry of Interior, the army was not burdened with the negative image of human rights abuses, which were related to the counterterrorism campaign. The 2011 revolution manifested the firm bond between the society and the army built over decades. The infamous chant of the 2011 Tahrir crowds, “al-gaysh wa al-sha’b yad wahda” (the army and the folk are united), underscored the military’s popularity and sharply contrasted with the overt hatred the protesters turned against the Ministry of Interior. The Ministry of Interior has always been a major political actor that actively shaped Egypt’s political discourse. Ministers of interior ranked among the most powerful and feared men in Egypt. In 1982, when Husni Mubarak authorised the Ministry of Interior to lead the counterterrorism campaign, not only he confirmed its leading role in shaping domestic security, but also boosted the institutional expansion of the Ministry. Over time, the Ministry of Interior grew to include an impressive bureaucracy apparatus of more than 1.5 million people, including 300,000 paid informants (Ashour 2012: 6). The State Security Investigations Service (the SSIS)—in Arabic, officially titled Gihaz Mabahith Amn al-Dawla, abbreviated to Amn al-Dawla, and also known just as mukhabarat (secret police)—its main intelligence department and one of the most feared divisions of the security apparatus, profited the most from the Ministry’s lead position in security matters. The SSIS notorious for intimidation, brutal torture, indefinite incarceration, and widespread human rights abuses spearheaded the domestic counterterrorism campaign and became the most powerful police force with an estimated 100,000 employees (Ashour 2012: 6). In its everyday security operations, the SSIS relied on the Central Security Forces (CSF), another major subordinate institution to the Ministry of Interior. The CSF, comprised of black-clothed, ill-equipped, and poorly trained conscripts, formed paramilitary forces ready to violently suppress dissent at any demonstration, sit-in, strike, or arrest campaigns. Viewed by the early Mubarak’s establishment as a prospective counterbalance to the military corps, the CSF ranks grew significantly. Between 1981 and 1992, the CSF ranks tripled from 100,000 to 300,000 men (HRW 1992: 31). Its capacity to counterbalance the army, however, remained questionable. Subjected to poor conditions and maltreatment during the compulsory service, the discipline and loyalty of the CSF conscripts was a

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major issue (see e.g. Adam 2012). The CSF mutiny in 1986, which was suppressed only by military intervention, highlights the structural deficits (Springborg 1989: 101f). Backed by the 1958 Emergency Law and later by the Anti-Terror Law (1992/97), the SSIS operated in a largely unrestricted mode. The officers routinely apprehended individuals they deemed dangerous to public security and order—even on the basis of a mere suspicion— without needing warrants for search and seizure (Reza 2007: 537f). The unlimited authority to infringe and monitor people’s lives, which was facilitated by the absent need for a judicial authorisation, encouraged the security officials to gather immense volumes of data on thousands of Egyptians, their private lives, contacts, and families (personal interview with Ahmed Seif al-Islam 2013). From habitual eavesdropping on phone conversations, reading personal correspondence, and the recruited mukhbireen (civilian informants), all the way up to the interrogation and torture of suspected individuals and/or their relatives, the SSIS “came to control almost every aspect of Egypt’s public life” (Tadros 2012: 22). The extensive and systematic surveillance techniques, largely justified by the fight of terrorism, were so pervasive that, as Ghonim (2012: 2) notes, privacy became “almost meaningless to this quintessentially Machiavellian organization [SSIS]”. The agency’s meticulous focus on data collection bordering with an obsession is underscored by a comment from a former SSIS head Fuad Allam, who was in charge of counterterrorism campaigns under several Egyptian governments: if someone passed by me and simply said “al-salam ‘alaykum” I would write a memo and file it. This is the correct method to safeguard our future. (Allam quoted in Sassoon 2016: 146)

The SSIS preserved the collected data in personal files where the information could be updated or used against a monitored suspect or simply against anyone who displeased the security official (Ghonim 2012: 2). The few documents from the SSIS archives that survived the hasty shredding in the early aftermath of the 2011 revolution clearly suggest the extent as well as the attention to detail put into the collected data. The documents found in the SSIS offices contained, among others, lists of informants, names of judges who rigged the elections, transcripts of private conversations between spouses, photos from private parties, as well

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as detailed surveillance accounts on activists. Moreover, they also showed that the SSIS monitored the inner circle of political and societal elites, including the Egyptian Grand Mufti10 (see e.g. Stack and MacFarquhar 2011). The security officials were also authorised to issue a security clearance, which was a necessary precondition of any public servant to start or advance his career and professional self-realisation (Fahmy 2012). A security report, which suggested that the person in question might have been associated with any form of dissent, meant significant career problems. In this respect, Ahmed Seif al-Islam, a veteran human rights defender, for instance, claimed that this form of threat—that the SSIS would have used the positive security clearance—paralysed the Egyptian judiciary to challenge illegal practices of security apparatus including torture. Ahmed Seif al-Islam also attributed this form of fear to the idleness of the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) in matters of exceptional powers, including the abolishment of the contested Article 3 of the Emergency Law (personal interview with Ahmed Seif al-Islam 2013). The immense empowerment of the SSIS by the counterterrorism context made the agency susceptible to committing abuse. The booklet Ashan ma tandarbesh ‘ala ifak… (So you don’t get your neck beaten …) written by former officer Omar al-Afifi (2008) captures the gravity of habitual power abuse. Besides the extensive use of torture, which is discussed in detail in Chapter 4, al-Afifi mentions the routine abuse of detention orders issued under the provisions of the Emergency Law to arbitrarily arrest anyone a security official deemed necessary. The common practice, as human rights lawyers Ahmad Seif al-Islam, Hafiz Abu Seada, Ayman Okail confirmed to me in detail (personal interviews with Seif alIslam, Abu Seada, and Okail 2013), was for SSIS officials to be given blank detention orders signed by the Minister of Interior (see also al-Afifi 2008). It was then up to individual security officers to fill in the name of a wanted person. Thereby, the individual SSIS officials were in position to detain anyone they wished and place him in the SSIS secret detention cells, often despite an obvious lack of any substantial evidence. The unlimited power to restrict one’s freedom, combined with the tendency to reinterpret collected information and skew evidence, placed the security officials in position of petty sovereigns, as it was upon their decision 10 The Grand Mufti is the highest official of religious legal figure in Egypt, who is the head of Dar al-Ifta’—a state-run institution issuing fatwas (religious rulings).

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whether one was perceived and treated as a threat to the national security or not (see Chapter 4). Thus, although legally speaking, only the minister of interior was authorised to decide on detention without a juridical review, in practice, the decision was decentralised and disseminated among individual security officials. This ensemble of petty sovereigns bore the ultimate authority to decide on exception. It is without a doubt that Mubarak’s counterterrorism campaign considerably bolstered the position of the security institutions. The combination of the extensive exceptional rights and vast impunity placed the security officials, in general, and the SSIS, in particular, virtually above the law. In this regard, it was in the interest of the security agencies to maintain the securitisation status quo and thus also the exceptional security policies, which formed the basis of their empowerment and operation in impunity. The end of Mubarak’s era notwithstanding, this fundamental interest of the security officials along with the abusive practices have not changed. Shortly after Mubarak’s ousting, the interim leadership dissolved the hated SSIS and arrested the last SSIS head in an effort to meet the protestors’ demands. These steps were, however, only cosmetic measures that had barely any meaningful impact on the structural problem of power abuse, torture, and extrajudicial killing routinised by the security corps. The National Security Agency(NSA) overtook the SSIS core functions, maintains the same abusive practices and torture methods, and enjoys the same impunity (Ashour 2012). The 2010s was the decade of the Egyptian military. While in the Mubarak years, the army played a less salient political role, Egypt has witnessed the powerful comeback of the military to the political foreground since 2011. The army presented itself as a central actor, decisively shaping post-uprising developments and determining the future political trajectory. It was the military’s position that eventually forced Husni Mubarak and his in-group to step down; it was the army, represented by the SCAF, who assumed power and de facto imposed an interim military regime; it was again the army, who worked together with other antiBrotherhood state authorities and social movements to oust Muhammad Mursi, paving the way for its commander-in-chief, Abdal Fattah al-Sisi, then Minister of Defense in Mursi’s cabinet, to become Egypt’s new leader. A series of controversial legislation, adopted in recent years, expanded already extensive powers of the military and thereby reconfirmed its exclusive status. As for now, the military is protected from any form of civilian

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oversight or prosecution. Its personnel is subjected only to the military jurisdiction, including issues related to the military’s economic activities, that are evaluated as “security relevant” (Noll 2017). Provided the fact that military tribunals are a part of the military establishment, their enforcement justice in such cases against men from its own ranks is questionable. The 2019 Constitutional Amendments designated the army a guardian of democracy, the state, and people’s rights and freedom (Art. 200 of the Constitution) and thus de facto authorised the military men to intervene should those vaguely defined value-based entities be jeopardised (TIMEP 2019b). Although the military had played this role before, for example in the ousting of Mubarak and Mursi, these amendments gave it a constitutional cover. Interestingly enough, an intervention can happen without the president first being consulted. It is the commander-in-chief, the Minister of Defense himself, who is responsible for the decision (Hassan 2019). The military also became considerably involved in the domestic counterterrorism campaign. It has been in charge of an extensive security operation in the northern Sinai to address Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, a group of militant Islamist extremists, that later pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) (see e.g. Burgrova 2016). Alongside increased political activity, the military also secured its role as a primary gatekeeper of the Egyptian economy. Through a carefully established partnership with President al-Sisi, the military reconfirmed the complete autonomy of its budget and existing economic empire (Hassan 2019). Through the influential Ministry of Military Production, the army further expanded its economic activities playing a key role in various industries from food supply, energy, to large infrastructure projects such as the expansion of the Suez Canal or the building of the new capital city. The economic activities also serve the military as a means of societal control. In 2016, for instance, the army took over the newly adopted programme of smart cards, which are used to subsidise food. By implication, it has been up to the military men to decide who receives the cards and thus also the subsidised food and who does not (Noll 2017). As in the past, for many Egyptians suffering from the economic crisis, the military appeared to be a saviour that provided public services. Although currently, Egypt is defined as a country ruled by a civilian government, the increased political role of the military boosted by its economic might is undeniable. The control the army exercises over the country’s wealth and politics would be, in this respect, difficult to challenge at any given point in future.

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Security First Security logics have always dominated the state order in Egypt. No matter which president is running the country, security is always a top topic used to justify the existence of exceptional measures and advance the oppression of innocent civilians. The state of emergency, introduced regularly over decades as a remedy to fight terrorism, has been an essential tool in the security-driven state administration. Not only have the ruling political elite profited from the state of emergency, so too have security institutions. The massive empowerment of Egypt’s security institutions transformed security officials into petty sovereigns who, as it is discussed in detail in Chapter 4, were in position to decide about the lives of others. This empowerment was immense. The 2011 revolution notwithstanding, the security authorities have upheld their protected status, maintained the brutality in their everyday security practice, and remained feared and powerful actors. No later than in 2011, it became clear that the exception would not disappear with a regime shake-up or the disbandment of an abusive security institution. Normalised through an everyday security practice and legitimised by an ongoing, never-ending fight of terrorism, it has become a constant variable of the sociopolitical reality in Egypt. As the following chapters explore in detail, it requires much more than the removal of few prominent individuals, superficial legal changes, and empty promises to achieve the effective reconfiguration of power/knowledge relations and thus catalyse profound sociopolitical transformation.

References Abul-Magd, Zeinab. 2011. The army and the economy in Egypt. al-Jadaliyya, December 23. Available at http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3732/ the-army-and-the-economy-in-egypt. Accessed August 19, 2015. Adam, Mohamad. 2012. Brute force: Inside the Central Security Forces. The Egypt Independent, November 11. Available at http://www.egy ptindependent.com/news/brute-force-inside-central-security-forces. Accessed November 13, 2012. AI. 2000. Egypt: Muzzling Civil Society. Amnesty International. Available at https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/140000/mde120 212000en.pdf. Accessed September 7, 2016. ———. 2013. Egypt: New protest law gives security forces free rein. Amnesty International. Available at https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/11/

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World/Middle-East/2013/0619/Latest-blow-to-Egypt-s-tourism-Luxor-sgovernor. Accessed November 9, 2020. CIHRS. 2018. An authoritarian pact: Law on the Treatment of Senior Military Commanders. The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. Available at https://cihrs.org/egypt-president-grants-immunity-for-military-comman ders-in-exchange-for-lifelong-hold-on-power/?lang=en. Accessed February 1, 2020. Cleveland, William L. 2000. A history of the modern Middle East, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Westview Press. el-Mahdi, Rabab, and Philip Marfleet. 2009. Introduction. In Egypt. The moment of change, ed. Rabab el-Mahdi and Philip Marfleet, 1–13. London, New York: Zed Books Ltd. el-Sherif, Ashraf. 2014. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s failures: Part 1 of a series on political Islam in Egypt. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Available at http://carnegieendowment.org/files/muslim_bro therhood_failures.pdf. Accessed November 9, 2020. EOHR. 2008a. Egypt and the impact of 27 years of emergency on human rights. The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights. Available at http://en.eohr.org/2008/05/28/%E2%80%9Cegypt-and-the-impact-of27-years-of-emergency-on-human-rights%E2%80%9D/. Accessed November 25, 2014. ———. 2008b. Egypt under Emergency Law … Where to? The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. Available at http://en.eohr.org/2008/06/30/ egypt-under-emergency-law-%E2%80%A6-where-to/. Accessed August 19, 2015. Fahmy, Hazem. 2012. An initial perspective on “the winter of discontent”: The root causes of the Egyptian revolution. Social Research 79 (2): 349–376. Farah, Nadia R. 2009. Egypt’s political economy: Power relations in development. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Ghonim, Wael. 2012. Revolution 2.0. The power of the people is greater than the people in power - a memoir. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Gohar, Nihad. 2008. Mapping participation in Egypt. In Political participation in the Middle East, ed. Ellen Lust-Okar and Saloua Zerhouni, 171–191. Boulder, London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Hassan, Bahey E. 2019. New political struggles for Egypt’s military. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Available at https://carnegiee ndowment.org/sada/79096. Accessed February 1, 2020. HRW. 1992. Behind closed doors: Torture and detention in Egypt. The Human Rights Watch. Available at https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/ Egypt927.pdf. Accessed September 7, 2016.

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———. 2001. Egypt: Human rights background. The Human Rights Watch. Available at https://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/mena/egypt-bck1001.htm. Accessed September 7, 2016. ———. 2007. Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood detainees face military tribunals. The Human Rights Watch. Available at https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/ 02/14/egypt-muslim-brotherhood-detainees-face-military-tribunals. Accessed September 7, 2016. ———. 2008. Egypt: Military court convicts opposition leaders: Ruling shows government contempt for democratic rights. The Human Rights Watch. Available at https://www.hrw.org/news/2008/04/15/egypt-military-court-con victs-opposition-leaders. Accessed September 7, 2016. ———. 2010. Egypt: Free blogger in military court trial: Student wrote about corruption in military academy. The Human Rights Watch. Available at https://www.hrw.org/news/2010/03/01/egypt-free-bloggermilitary-court-trial. Accessed September 7, 2016. ———. 2013. Egypt: Deeply restrictive new assembly law: Will enable further crackdown, stifle electoral campaigning. The Human Rights Watch. Available at https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/11/26/egypt-deeply-restrictivenew-assembly-law. Accessed September 7, 2016. Kandil, Hazem. 2014. Soldiers, spies, and statesmen: Egypt’s road to revolt. London, New York: Verso. Kienle, Eberhard. 2001. A grand delusion: Democracy and economic reform in Egypt. London, New York: I. B. Tauris. Kirkpatrick, David D. 2012. Blood is shed as Egyptian President’s backers and rivals battle in Cairo. The New York Times, December 5. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/world/middleeast/islami sts-and-secular-protesters-clash-violently-in-cairo.html. Accessed November 9, 2020. Little, Tom. 1958. Egypt. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Mandour, Maged. 2018. The military’s immunity in Egypt. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Available at https://carnegieendo wment.org/sada/76904. Accessed February 1, 2020. Marfleet, Philip. 2009. State and society. In Egypt. The moment of change, ed. Rabab el-Mahdi and Philip Marfleet, 14–33. London, New York: Zed Books Ltd. Mohamed, Ali. 2015. Q&A: What changes have been made to Egypt’s electoral laws? Atlantic Council. Available at https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ menasource/q-a-what-changes-have-been-made-to-egypt-s-electoral-laws/. Accessed January 10, 2020. Naguib, Sameh. 2009. Islamism(s) old and new. In Egypt. The moment of change, ed. Rabab el-Mahdi and Philip Marfleet, 103–119. London, New York: Zed Books Ltd.

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Noll, Jessica. 2017. Egypt’s armed forces cement economic power: Military business expansion impedes structural reforms. German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Available at https://www.swp-berlin.org/fileadmin/con tents/products/comments/2017C05_nll.pdf. Accessed November 6, 2020. Ouaissa, Rachid. 2005. Staatsklasse als Entscheidungsakteur in den Ländern der Dritten Welt: Struktur, Entwicklung und Aufbau der Staatsklasse am Beispiel Algerien. Schriftenreihe von Stipendiatinnen und Stipendiaten der FriedrichEbert-Stiftung 28. Münster: LIT Verlag. Reza, Sadiq. 2007. Endless emergency. The case of Egypt. New Criminal Law Review 10 (4): 532–553. Rutherford, Bruce K. 2008. Egypt after Mubarak. Liberalism, Islam, and democracy in the Arab world. Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Sabry, Bassem. 2012. Absolut power: Morsi decree stuns Egyptians. al-Monitor, November 22. Available at http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/ 2012/al-monitor/morsi-decree-constitution-power.html#ixzz4BZ702XNi. Accessed November 9, 2020. Sassoon, Joseph. 2016. Anatomy of authoritarianism in the Arab republics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sayigh, Yezid. 2012. Above the state: The officers’ republic in Egypt. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Available at http://carnegieendowment. org/2012/08/01/above-state-officers-republic-in-egypt/d4l2. Accessed August 19, 2015. Sennot, Charles M. 2012. Inside the Egyptian military’s brutal hold on power. Public Broadcasting Service, December 24. Available at http://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/revolution-in-cairo-foreign-aff airs-defense/inside-the-egyptian-militarys-brutal-hold-on-power/. Accessed August 19, 2015. Shehata, Dina. 2010. Islamists and secularists in Egypt: Opposition, conflict, and cooperation. Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics 17. Abingdon, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Sirrs, Owen L. 2010. A history of the Egyptian intelligence service. A history of the mukhabarat, 1910–2009. New York: Routledge. Springborg, Robert. 1989. Mubarak’s Egypt: Fragmentation of the political order. Boulder, London: Westview Press. Stack, Liam, and Neil MacFarquhar. 2011. Egyptians get view of extent of spying. The New York Times, March 9. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/ 2011/03/10/world/middleeast/10cairo.html?hp. Accessed July 16, 2015. Stier, Ken. 2011. Egypt’s military-industrial complex. The Time, February 9. Available at http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,204696 3,00.html. Accessed August 19, 2015.

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Stork, Joe. 2012. Egypt. Human rights in transition. Social Research 79 (2): 463–486. Tadros, Mariz. 2012. The Muslim brotherhood in contemporary Egypt: Democracy redefined or confined? Durham Modern Middle East and Islamic World Series 25. Oxon, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. The Anti-Terror Law (2015/94). Available at https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/ wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Egypt_Anti-Terror_Law_Translation.pdf. Accessed November 12, 2020. The Criminal Code of Egypt (as of 1992). Available at https://sherloc.unodc.org/ cld/document/egy/1937/criminal_code_of_egypt_english.html. Accessed November 11, 2020. The Emergency Law (1958/162) (in Arabic). Available at https://www.alk arama.org/sites/default/files/2016-12/Law%20162%20of%201958%20Emer gency%20Law%20%28AR%29.pdf. Accessed November 12, 2020. The Law on Terrorist Entities (2015/8). Available at https://www.alkarama. org/en/documents/law-no-8-2015-terrorist-entities. Accessed November 12, 2020. The Protest Law (2013/107). Available at https://www.refworld.org/docid/551 a5f2a4.html. Accessed November 12, 2020. The World Bank. 2002. Arab Republic of Egypt. Poverty reduction in Egypt: Diagnosis and strategy. Available at http://documents.worldbank.org/cur ated/en/611841468770090531/pdf/multi0page.pdf. Accessed November 6, 2020. TIMEP. 2019a. The Terrorist entities law. The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. Available at https://timep.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/ Terrorist-Entities-Law-Brief.pdf. Accessed November 12, 2020. ———. 2019b. 2019 Constitutional amendments. The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. Available at https://timep.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/ 2019-Constitutional-Amendments-4-17-2019-1.pdf. Accessed November 12, 2020. Trager, Eric. 2015. Egypt two years after Morsi: Part I: Testimony submitted to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Available at http://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA13/201 50520/103497/HHRG-114-FA13-Wstate-TragerE-20150520.pdf. Accessed November 9, 2019. Wickham, Carrie R. 2002. Mobilizing Islam: Religion, activism, and political change in Egypt. New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. Youness, Ahmed. 2019. Egypt renews state of emergency for 10th time. alMonitor, Available at https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/ 10/egypt-sisi-renew-state-of-emergency-constitution.html#ixzz6dV6F6GcJ. Accessed November 11, 2020.

CHAPTER 3

The Truth

Counterterrorism campaigns led against broadly defined terrorist targets, which are often connoted with a vague Islamist threat and coined as “wars on terror”, are a part of contemporary social reality. The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent global “war on terror” skyrocketed the scholarly interest in the matters of terrorism. That said, although terrorism is globally acknowledged as a threat, its meaning and definitions vary significantly in individual politico-societal contexts. In the Egyptian context, the classification of the militant Islamist organisations, such as al-Jihad and al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, especially at the peak of their violent campaign against the government during the 1990s; or more recently of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, the self-proclaimed Sinai branch of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as terrorist organisations is widely accepted. Yet, any informed observer of Egyptian domestic affairs knows that the government’s category of terrorist targets vastly exceeds militant Islamists or official members of the above-named groups who openly advocate violence. In the course of the Egyptian “war on terror” that has dominated Egypt’s security discourse for more than four decades at the time of writing, thousands of Egyptians who could have been hardly associated with militancy or violence, such as members of the political, non-violent opposition including the Muslim Brotherhood, social movements, journalists, human rights activists, as well as ordinary citizens were classified as security targets and treated as terrorist suspects. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Reimer-Burgrova, Politics of Violence and Fear in MENA, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83932-1_3

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To address such a qualitative disparity on the side of terrorist suspects, this chapter takes a step back and deconstructs the framing of terrorism in Egypt since Husni Mubarak took power in 1981. Guided by the TERmodel’s truth component (see Chapter 1), this chapter views the framing of the terrorist threat as a securitisation process through which desirable, docile forms of life are included while undesirable forms are excluded. The detailed inquiry into the construction of the terrorist threat reveals that the division between the protected society and the terrorist enemy was flexible and open to interpretation by the state authorities. Specifically, the division, which was based on volatile national and religious collective identities, made it possible to associate a large array of Egyptian opposition figures and ordinary citizens with an unspecified terrorist threat. It further legitimised this process as a necessary precaution to uphold the safety and well-being of the Egyptian society.

Regimes of Truth Many securitisation studies focus more on the effect of the threat’s framing and less on the process of framing itself. The TER-model concentrates on the latter. The examination of how an issue is constructed as a threat shifts the analytical attention to the means of how a constructed threat becomes embedded into existing regimes of truth that reinforce asymmetric configuration of power/knowledge relations and thus likely strengthen the authoritarian form of governance. In the securitisation context, the knowledge about the threat is, first, proliferated in the discourse and, then, if it acquires enough intensity, the threat’s framing is embedded into regimes of truth. This transition is especially valid for lengthy securitisation cases and, as such, it is an important factor in securitisation persistence. The discursive knowledge about the threat, which is incorporated into the regimes of truth, becomes a part of the “general politics” of truth that shapes the meanings of security embodied in the discourse. This way, it influences how security is understood and discussed, and suggests who does or does not have the authority to decide on security matters (Bevir 1999: 66; see also Bigo 2002: 69f). As Foucault (2002: 131) points out, the regimes of truth “enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true” by setting the “rules according to which true and false

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are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true” (2002: 132). Hence, the regimes of truth give us a sense of what normality is in a respective social context. In the security context, the regimes of truth (re)configure the true/false dichotomy for which security risks, conduct, forms of life or security measures are acceptable, and which are not, and thus inform our everyday conduct, guiding the everyday decisions, processes, and societal interactions (Bröckling et al. 2011: 12f; Tagma 2009: 409f). The codification of securitisation knowledge into regimes of truth impacts securitisation persistence. Regimes of truth shape the understanding of social reality in such a way that our everyday conduct likely reinforces and upholds the existing securitisation process. The knowledge produced by securitisation and codified as “truth” in the discourse becomes part of the “everyday explanation of the political and social world” (Bigo 2002: 69). For instance, although securitising actors themselves must not necessarily be genuinely convinced of the danger linked to the perceived threat, which they (re)produce in their securitising claims, the regimes of truth structure their behaviour and underpin their political struggles. This trend is valid for anyone involved in the securitisation process because the regimes of truth reproduce knowledge that is likely to be taken for granted. In Egypt, for instance, the notion of an Islamist terrorist has been so deeply rooted as a “true” representation of the social reality that hardly anyone—except for the target itself—questioned the unprecedented persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood as an alleged terrorist group in the aftermath of the 2013 overthrow of Muhammad Mursi (see Chapter 4). Whether securitisation knowledge is codified as a truth or not depends largely on the existing configuration of power/knowledge relations. On paper, anyone can raise security claims. However, this does not automatically mean that their security statements will be circulated and replicated within the discourse with the same intensity as statements of other actors. Structural modes of dominance, which locate subjects in diverse positions within the discourse, set conditions for an uneven distribution of security claims (Buzan et al. 1998: 31ff). Divergence in social capital and access to the discourse granted to individual subjects or groups of subjects expresses the inequality (Abrahamsen 2005: 58). Put simply, some actors are in more privileged positions to utter and circulate their security statements while others are not.

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This does not, however, imply that an individual or a group of individuals can control the security meaning in the discourse (Bigo 2002). The framing of the terrorist threat has not been a one-man-show solely directed by Egypt’s political elite. Securitisation is an intersubjective process and, as such, cannot be effectively controlled by a single actor or a group of actors. Securitisation exceeds the capacities of actors to be fully managed; securitising actors have limited control over the perlocutionary effect of their security utterances (Buzan et al. 1998: 30; Huysmans 2007: 55f). Thereby the meaning of security is ultimately not bound to subjects, but it rests within and between them (Buzan et al. 1998: 31). It is constructed through interactions between various actors and their subjective interpretations, which encounter each other in different fields of human interactions (Huysmans 2007: 55f; Léonard and Kaunert 2011: 58). The emphasis on how a threat is framed highlights the us against them position inherent in securitisation. In this respect, the framing of a threat (re)establishes the binary divisions between us, i.e. what must be protected, and them, i.e. what can be excluded (Buzan and Wæver 2009: 262f; Holm 2003: 277ff). Them is framed as a threat and classified as a dangerous figure, whilst us is idealised and celebrated as the normative flip-side. The hostile other reproduces the identity of self on the basis of its difference from the other. As a result, securitisation claims frequently involve stereotyping and reductionist arguments that tend to overlook the complexity of the issue at stake (Bigo 2002: 80). Furthermore, in times of crises, the appeal of imagined unity and social cohesiveness of the us against them positioning resonates with more intensity within the society and tends to downplay dissenting voices as a betrayal (Huysmans 2004: 333; see also Vuori 2011: 197f). For the TER-model, the us against them position is an expression of fundamental biopolitical dichotomies between the life that deserves protection (the referent object) and the life which threatens the referent object (the security targets). In a governmentalised state, biopolitical dichotomies are the result of ongoing optimisation strategies and processes. In extreme cases, such as successful securitisations are, the hostile other is expelled from the optimised society and possibly treated by exceptional means. The purpose of government is, in this sense, “not just to govern, but to improve the condition of the population, to increase its wealth, its longevity, and its health” (Foucault 2009: 105). Securitisation, in this regard, justifies a governmental intervention in the life of

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the referent object because it allows for the redefinition of which forms of conduct are acceptable, and, critically, which forms of conduct are classified as dangerous. The referent object is thus not, as the securitisation theory suggests, an object to be merely protected. It is also the subject of government intervention as it is optimised and reconfigured through the securitisation process. This argument emphasises the analytical relevance of the dangerous other that is rather overlooked in securitisation scholarship (Vuori 2011). The threat, i.e. the hostile other, renders the protection and optimisation of the referent object meaningful. In reference to the referent object, the dangerous other, coined as a security target by the TERmodel, is framed as a threat to the optimised life of the governmentalised society. The security target is placed beyond the bandwidth of acceptability and thus excluded from the optimised society. This way, the life of security targets becomes devoid of a value attached to the optimised society (see Agamben 1998; Tagma 2009) and might, if the securitisation is successful and the extraordinary security measures are adopted, be subjected to exceptional security measures, such as arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detentions, ill-treatment, torture, and extrajudicial killings (see Chapter 4). In this regard, like referent objects, security targets are subject to governmental intervention, too. The Death of the Pharaoh On October 6, 1981, Egypt commemorated the 1973 war against Israel. An annual open-air military parade was held in Cairo. Anwar al-Sadat, the Egyptian President since 1970, accompanied by Vice-President Husni Mubarak, watched the parade from the grandstand. Shortly after the army jets flew over, an assassination squad emerged from one of the military trucks and opened fire, killing the President and several other guests (Beattie 2000: 275f; Heikal 1983: 242–55). Husni Mubarak escaped, slightly hurt, but considerably shaken. Crying out, “I have killed the pharaoh”, the assassination squad leader lieutenant Khalid al-Islambuli celebrated the mission as an accomplishment. Al-Islambuli and his companions were members of al-Jihad, which was later held responsible for the assassination (Kepel 1995: 233). The incident, which was followed by a failed attempt by al-Islambuli’s accomplices to take over Upper Egypt, significantly shook Egypt’s political landscape and laid the groundwork for the securitisation of Islamist

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militancy over upcoming decades. Given the dramatic context, there was an immediate sense of urgency to toughen the existing security policies towards militant Islamist groups. This exigency materialised in the declaration of the state of emergency only a few hours after the incident, followed by massive waves of arrests (Kepel 1995: 233f; MacManus 1981). The prompt decision by the authorities to enact the state of emergency significantly reduced the usual phase of political mobilisation in support of securitisation, as the drama associated with the assassination provided enough justification to skip this phase and enact the exceptional measures to address the threat directly. In this respect, the danger posed by the militant Islamists, its link to the terrorist threat, as well as the argued need to address the threat through exceptional measures, were established ex-post, after the state of emergency had been declared. Major discursive events that, according to Buzan and Wæver (2009: 267), “trigger vivid imagery and built-in narratives that do not have to be unfolded”. The assassination was this type of event. In this sense, in the early stage of securitisation, the terrorist threat was obvious. Accordingly, the government’s securitising claims did not focus on constructing the terrorist threat, but rather on the rationalisation of the reintroduction of the state of emergency as a necessary measure to deal with the extraordinary situation (al-Ahram 1981a; al-Ahram 1981c). In the very early stage of the securitisation process, security, democracy, state of law, stability, and societal well-being repeatedly appeared in the official argumentation that justified the exceptional security response. As the threat framing concerns, its original image was narrowly associated with the assassins and the militant organisation al-Jihad. It, however, grew loose and increasingly vague and was soon vague enough to incorporate a broad and interpretationopen definition of Islamist militancy and radicalism as its main category. Framed as a terrorist threat, Islamist radicalism became a code for an existential danger to Egypt’s prosperity and stability, and the emergency rule was justified as the only thinkable framework to confront the imminent threat. Al-Sadat’s assassination triggered a securitisation process that echoed the deeply rooted anxieties of Egyptian political elites associated with Islamist radicalism. As such, the incident reactivated what Mavelli calls “already existing discursive sedimentations” (2013: 180) that had been produced prior to the 1980s. In 1981 the Islamist militancy was nothing new in Egypt. The long-lasting conflict between the state and diverse

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Islamists groups had soured the country for several decades. The secularly orientated regime of Gamal Abdal Nasser (1956–1970) maintained an antagonistic relationship with Islamist groups, most notably with the Muslim Brotherhood (see Chapter 2). Accordingly, the regime framed and treated Islamists as an existential security threat (Reza 2007: 535). While the way the Islamists were framed as a threat in the 1950s was not identical to the framing in the 1980s and later, the negative depiction of Islamists remained deeply rooted in the discourse throughout this time period. In this regard, the 1981 assassination executed by Islamist extremists served as a reconfirmation of the already existing discursive truth about the Islamist danger. To any informed observer of Egypt, it is obvious that the securitisation discourse, which (re)produced the vision of an Islamist as a terrorist threat to Egypt’s stability and prosperity, did not perish in the early 1980s when al-Sadat’s assassins were hunted down. The vision of an Islamist terrorist threat persisted and was continuously updated during the entire reign of Husni Mubarak. The government regularly highlighted the need to fight terrorism, repeatedly mobilising on the threat. Regardless of the actual security circumstances prevailing in Egypt, terrorism was always depicted as a distinct, special, and lasting threat that could not be tackled with ordinary measures. As the parliamentary discussions about the renewal of the state emergency regularly stated, an exceptional framework such as the provisions provided by the state of emergency was the only framework that the regime accepted as sufficient enough to address the terrorist threat (see e.g. al-Ahram 2006a). Although the intensity of the securitisation process varied according to current circumstances, such as the need to regularly extend the state of emergency or the need to respond to a terrorist attack, the sense of urgency to counter the terrorism threat was maintained. The arguments that promoted the exceptional framework to counter the terrorist threat in the 1980s did not differ much from those in the 1990s and 2000s. Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of the 2013 coup, the new leaders brought up similar arguments to push for a “war on terror/Muslim Brotherhood” and legitimise the overthrow of the Islamist led-executive. This time, the deeply ingrained “truth” about the Islamist terrorist threat, a narrative largely uncontested by the 2011 uprising, facilitated the rebirth of Mubarak’s securitisation legacy (see Chapter 5). The new political leadership, including its major star, the Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister Abdal Fattah al-Sisi, promptly identified the former ruling

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elite—the Brotherhood members and Mursi’s supporters—as an existential security threat. Needless to mention that, although the poor performance of the Brotherhood-led government increased the unpopularity of the Islamist movement and raised legitimate concerns about the future of the country, it did not hold as a singular rationale for the 2013 coup and the subsequent unprecedented brutal crackdown on the Brotherhood’s members and followers. Securitisation Knowledge As the Egyptian case shows, the process of constructing a threat cannot be reduced to a discursive enunciation of securitising actors (see e.g. Hansen 2000, 2011; Sjöstedt 2011; Wilkinson 2007; Williams 2003). The codification of a threat as “truth” requires a mobilisation of the power/knowledge nexus (c.a.s.e. collective 2006: 457), which links the pre-existing truths, such as the deep legacy of mutual hostilities between the state and Islamists groups in Egypt, expressed in past experiences and narratives, to current threats (Bourbeau 2014: 188; Mavelli 2013: 180). Thus, although speech acts of securitising actors still play a certain role in creating “a scene in which actors and things are brought into a relation that challenges a given way of doing things” (Huysmans 2011: 372–73), the mobilisation of political discourses exceeds the enunciations of securitising actors (see e.g. Balzacq 2005; Bigo and Tsoukala 2008; McDonald 2008). Securitisation develops through unspectacular channels that involve daily routines and a range of bureaucratic practices in the field of security. Analytically speaking, the study of the mobilisation of political discourses cannot exist without integrating the practices of security practitioners into the analytical framework (c.a.s.e. collective 2006: 457f). Egyptian security institutions actively (re)produced the dominant knowledge about the terrorist threat and helped to solidify it as a representation of “truth” in the discourse. The security apparatus reasserted the threat through its everyday counterterrorism activities such as surveillance, arbitrary stop-and-search practices, interrogations, produced evidence, and thus rationalised the exigency of the state of emergency as a preventive measure. Pioneered by the Paris School, the study of security practices thus shifts the attention to the everydayness in the realm of exception (see Chapter 1). Specifically, as the TER-model maintains, the inclusion of security practices to the analytical framework exposes the key role

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they play in upholding securitisation as the status quo. The routine security practices of security practitioners, who include police, military, and mukhabarat, embed “the terms that political actors use to label and frame the issues” with meaning (Bigo 2008: 26). The everyday struggles of security practitioners with security targets, be it terrorists, drug dealers, or immigrants, legitimise security officials’ speech about risk and security and thus shape the state’s security priorities. Moreover, as Bigo (2002: 74) points out, their institutional embodiment within the official security structures secures their exclusive access to “a knowledge beyond the grasp” of security amateurs. As such, their privileged institutional position then also strengthens “the belief that they know what “we” (nonprofessionals, security amateurs) do not know” (2002: 74). Empowered with “the authority of statistics” based on surveillance technologies, such as wire-taps, computerised databases, closed-circuit television population registers, and others, their security expertise is then easily validated as a “true” account of social reality. Provided their everyday activities as security practitioners position them to produce authoritative knowledge about security, they can then “determine what is and what is not a threat or a risk” (2002: 74). Thus, as Bigo’s argument goes further, they are able to designate specific groups as a risk, “even before they have done anything, simply by categorizing them, anticipating profiles of risk from previous trends, and projecting them by generalization upon the potential behavior of each individual pertaining to the risk category” (2002: 81). Though their security expertise is embedded in the discourse and likely validated as “truth”, it does not necessarily imply that it is an adequate account of social reality. Considering that securitisation is far from being an innocent process, this leads to the question of why security officials, along with political representatives (re)produce specific security claims in the discourse that do not necessarily reflect the current state of affairs. The Copenhagen Schoolexplains the motivation of actors to securitise by the need to protect the referent object and the relevance of the threat. The School, however, admits that personal interests of involved actors can play a role insofar that the actors might securitise in order “to defend their own survival” (Buzan et al. 1998: 40). Bigo expands the latter point and argues that the will to securitise, and thus also to (re)produce specific power/knowledge relations, can be driven by an actor’s desire to maintain an empowered role and the fear that they might lose their meaningfulness in the management of society (Bigo 2002: 65). Following Bigo’s

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argumentation, as far it concerns the political elite, its will to securitise, specifically, relates to the desire to reconfirm its unique ability to detect security risks and take decisive steps to protect the society. Securitisation reestablishes its meaningfulness because it allows, especially in non-democratic contexts, to reaffirm its role as “the savior and guarantor of the nation” (Vuori 2011: 197). Like the political elite, the security officials likely benefit from the securitisation process in a similar way. An ongoing securitisation explicitly reconfirms their meaningfulness as those who are in a position to protect the society from threats and security risks. Without security threats, their function becomes devoid of meaning. They become irrelevant. The fear of security officials of losing their meaningfulness is far from abstract. It is often closely linked to the tangible interests of an individual or group of individuals which involve the competition over budgets, promotion, relocation, and retirement benefits in detail (see Bigo 2002: 64; 2008: 12). As Bigo (2002: 65) observes, the will of security practitioners to (re)produce security knowledge and thus to sustain the securitisation process is also related to the empowerment they receive through securitisation. The extraordinary security measures, such as the state of emergency or antiterror legislation, significantly boost their authority, rights, and position in the respective sociopolitical context. As Chapter 4 discusses in detail, the scope of extraordinary measures in Egypt was, for instance, so extensive that the officials were and continue to be virtually granted a status of being above the law. It was thus in the interest of the security officials to (re)produce the security claims and keep the securitisation process going in order to maintain their empowered status and thereby also to avoid accountability for the widespread ill-treatment, torture, and extrajudicial killings of thousands of Egyptians. Besides political elites and security officials, there are, of course, further actors who step in and actively (re)produce security knowledge in the discourse (Bourbeau 2014: 192). The securitisation in Egypt, for instance, integrated discourses on Islam. This would have been hardly possible without the involvement of key religious authorities, such as al-Azhar. Similarly, the media often plays a crucial role in securitisation processes. For without media participation, it is fairly complicated to turn securitising claims into a dominant position on security. In contexts that lack basic principles associated with freedom of speech, the media tends to echo and consolidate the official discourse (O’Reilly 2008; Sjöstedt 2011). Egypt is no exception to this rule. In the early years

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of Mubarak’s reign, the access to the media, unconstrained by the options provided by the Internet, granted the political elite a near monopoly on information. For instance, al-Ahram, a governmental daily, analysed in detail in this book, provided the ruling elite with more than enough space to circulate its security concerns related to the terrorist threat in the public discourse. In fact, the regime was granted such a substantial platform that, as Basyouni Hamada, Professor of Communication knowledgable of the Egyptian media landscape, told me, the number of government texts outweighed the news articles appearing regularly in al-Ahram. Although there was no direct censorship during Mubarak’s reign, Hamada maintained that self-censorship was a firm part of journalistic practice. Through the distribution or denial of benefits and privileges, Mubarak’s regime cooptated most important chief-editors, media managers, prominent journalists, as well as tycoon owners of private press and television stations. Thus, the media ownership and its ideological leanings notwithstanding, there was hardly any content produced that did not follow the unspoken red line. Unacceptable content included, as Hamada recalled in detail to me, criticisms of the president, the government, the Ministry of Interior, and/or of the national security. Accordingly, to produce a content critical of the counterterrorism campaign and/or the state of emergency meant to overstep the red line and to face possible consequences (personal interview with Basyouni Hamada 2013). The 2011 uprising did not overcome the deeply rooted practise of censorship. Although the period that followed the aftermath of the 2011 uprising opened up options for freer expression of diverse opinions, the 2013 coup reversed any progress made in this field. At the outset of the new “war on terror”, launched in the summer of 2013, the postMursi regime initially relied on substantial societal support straddling all societal strata, including journalists, bloggers, and other publicly active persons. Voluntary, self-imposed censorship for the sake of the national security and a definite defeat of the enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood, was thus, at that time, a rule rather than an exception. In 2014, seventeen editors of leading state and private media even issued a joint statement in support of the counterterrorism campaign and vowed “not to criticize the army or the state, and to refrain from publishing material that could incite violence and support terrorism” (Soliman 2014). In a short span of time, the self-imposed voluntary censorship for the sake of national security, however, increasingly transformed into enforced censorship done for the sake of protection from persecution. The Anti-Terror Law (2015/94)

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criminalised publishing of any reports related to the national security that contradicts the official narratives. Provided the fact that “national security” is a highly politicised term open to a broad interpretation in the Egyptian context, it became fairly challenging for the media to navigate through their daily reporting and not to overstep the red lines. As a result, there is now barely any coverage critically reviewing any matters of national security. The mass reporting of the last years shrank to the mere replication of the official narratives. Hence, it reinforces the truth about the terrorist threat endorsed by the current regime.

The Optimised Self The Copenhagen school defines referent objects as “things that are seen to be existentially threatened and that have a legitimate claim to survival” (Buzan et al. 1998: 36). A referent object is thus something construed as jeopardised by the perceived threat. The alleged danger urges securitising actors to act and call for extraordinary moves on behalf of the security and protection of the referent object. The necessity to protect the referent object, then, authorises the securitising actors to act in favour of the jeopardised referent object (Buzan et al. 1998: 35ff). For the TER-model the referent object is more than a mere subject of the government’s protection. It is rendered to a subject of governmental intervention. Legitimised by the declared necessity to protect the society, the governed society is (re)optimised based on a biopolitical exclusion/inclusion scheme. The objective of government becomes, in this sense, “not just to govern, but to improve the condition of the population, to increase its wealth, its longevity, and its health” (Foucault 2009: 105). Accordingly, in Mubarak’s Egypt, the society, its well-being, and development was a central referent object framed as endangered by the terrorist threat. The society was, however, more than an object to be protected from terrorism. It was also a subject to biopolitical optimisation driven by the securitisation process that redefined the optimised bandwidth of the Egyptian society. The counterterrorism campaign framed and constructed optimal, desirable forms of life—the self—that required the government’s protection. Specifically, it (re)produced an archetype of an innocent, cooperative, and moderately religious citizen as an idealised image of the optimised self . The archetype of the optimised citizen was not thus only indicative of who was considered to be a part of the optimised society, of who comprises the

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endangered collective in need of the government’s protection, but it also informed forms of acceptable conduct. Innocence, cooperative stance, and moderate religiosity were three major features that defined the optimised citizen and were, not surprisingly, constructed as the inverse image of the terrorist enemy. Thus, when we explore the optimised self of the Egyptian society, we necessarily also learn about the unacceptability of those who were portrayed as the hostile other. The three aspects associated with the optimised citizen also clearly show that the Egyptian society was more than a mere reference for the political leadership to securitise the terrorist threat. The society was being subjected to optimisation processes through which the imagined foundations of the Egyptian self were (re)configured and (re)produced. Innocence Predictably, the securitisation discourse portrayed Egyptians as victims to the ill-intentions of terrorists. The innocence and irreproachability of the citizens were usually framed in direct contrast to the ill-intentions of the terrorist enemy (al-Ahram 1994d; al-Ahram 2006c). For instance, Hassan al-Alfi,the Minister of Interior (1993–1997), claimed that “[t]errorism trades with the blood of its victims, righteous innocent citizens” (alAhram 1994b: 1). Such statements were frequent. Their steady circulation in the discourse was not an unsurprising outcome of an ongoing counterterrorism campaign that reconfirmed the urgent need to act and address the terrorist threat, and thus protect the entire society of respectable innocent citizens. The widespread glorification of victims of terrorist attacks as shuhada (martyrs) added an extra layer to the innocent attribute of an optimised citizen. Regardless of the sectarian affiliation, both Muslim and Christian victims of terrorist attacks were frequently addressed as martyrs. For instance, in early 1997, Al-Ahram’s article recounted the numbers of victims as martyrs when referencing the violent confrontation between militant Islamists and the government in 1990s. According to the article, martyred Christians in Egypt had reached 110, including the massacre of Christians in Abu Qerqas; and Muslim martyrs numbered 1,040 in recent years (al-Ahram 1997d). The notion of martyrdom reinforced the bare innocence and vulnerability of the optimised citizens. But it was also a common code to integrate the security officials in the picture of innocent citizens.

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Officials killed while on duty were frequently depicted as heroes who did not hesitate to sacrifice their life for the sake of the societal wellbeing and to become martyrs (Sirrs 2013: 240; Starrett 1998: 201f). In 2006, al-Ahram, for instance, published a series of articles that praised the martyrdom of a policeman killed during a counterterrorism operation (al-Ahram 2006c,2006d,2006f). The deceased policeman was portrayed as a committed Egyptian who “gave up his life to redeem the nation”. His readiness to become a martyr was aptly summarised in a headline a few days later: “The hero officer went to die to let us live!” (al-Ahram 2006d: 7). This highlighted the officer’s martyrdom as an honourable, yet expected act, due to his profession, to protect his fellow citizens threatened by terrorism. In another article, the story of the deceased policeman was told with a strong emphasis on his grieving family, portraying him as one of the innocent Egyptians who lost his life to the terrorist enemy (alAhram 2006e). The emphasis on the martyrdom of the security officials persisted in the securitisation discourse until nowadays. In this respect, it is not a coincidence that the largest and most comprehensive counterterrorism campaign that was launched in 2015 in northern Sinai was coined Martyr’s Right. Cooperative Stance Readiness to support counterterrorism efforts also qualified someone as an optimised citizen. Cooperation was framed, primarily, as a willingness to actively participate in the counterterrorism campaign. Cooperation with the security apparatus was hailed as the desirable, if not expected, conduct of an Egyptian citizen (al-Ahram 1981c; see also Starrett 1998: 204ff). A successful counterterrorism campaign was depicted as a collective result that required active engagement with the society. Without the support of the society as a collective, the security apparatus could not succeed in defeating the threat. Vigilance and information delivery embodied the desired form of cooperation. For instance, one of alAhram’s editorials called for “vigilant eyes to protect our country and our stability any time from the bloody violence” (al-Ahram 1983b: 3). Securitisation constructed the desirable citizen as an extension of a surveillance body that was alert to its environment and reported any suspicious individual or activity in its surroundings. Over time, the vigilance of ordinary citizens became increasingly emphasised in the context of collective duty. Al-Ahram’s article, for

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instance, argued that “terrorism is a threat to life for everyone in this society”, called upon a joint action because “terrorism needs to be combated by us, not just by the official or governmental bodies” (al-Ahram 2006b: 12). A similar line of argument appeared in another al-Ahram article, which clearly depicted counterterrorism as a collective duty exceeding the responsibilities of state authorities: [t]he responsibility to combat this cancer [terrorism] is no longer a responsibility limited to the security apparatus, but it has become the responsibility of the whole society and each and every member. […] Everyone in this society has the duty to fight this fanatic thinking and protect others from it. (al-Ahram 1994a: 3)

In this regard, the success or failure of the counterterrorism campaign was equated with the success or failure of each single optimised citizen. Fighting terrorism was not relegated to a pure matter of the state. An optimised citizen was not passive, but an active counterterrorism actor whose contribution to the successful fight against the terrorist threat was evaluated through the measures of collective responsibility. Moderate Religiosity In Egypt, where the system of belief and religious practice increasingly informed the daily life of the society in the last few decades,1 the bandwidth of acceptable religiosity thereby served as important points of sociopolitical references to the Egyptian Muslim majority (Brown and Shanin 2010: 218f). Accordingly, Egypt’s securitisation practice highlighted religiosity as a positive and integral feature of the optimised citizen. Accordingly, the ideal Egyptian was religiously pious but not extremist or fanatic in their belief, insofar as al-ta’ssub (fanaticism) and al-tatarruf (extremism) were attributes associated with the terrorist enemy: We have to discern between religiosity and extremism and terrorism […] the religiosity is a basic element in construing of the Egyptian personality and of the capable healthy society on the development and the progress,

1 This was not always so. Religion played a comparably less significant role in the public discourse in the twentieth century up to 1970s.

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it is the society hold by the value of religion and its ethics tolerant and far away from the violence and terrorism. […] [The Egyptian people] do not know intolerance nor extremism. (al-Ahram 1994c: 7).

The acceptable, optimised form of religiosity delineated the obedience to al-sirat al-mustaqim (the straight path), which pleases God. Following the straight path was in juxtaposition with the terrorist enemy led astray from the path; as an evidence of strong faith not to yield to da’wa (a call to God) of intolerant extremism (see e.g. al-Ahram 1997a). In a repeated appeal to collective action, an optimised citizen was a good Muslim who was not satisfied with the position of a bystander. In reference to proactive behaviour, Egyptians were thus also expected to stand for and actively promote the acceptable, moderate form of religiosity and Islamic thought in order to counter the spread of extremist da’wa and eliminate the terrorist threat. The ideal of religious moderation provided a safe base for aggressive smear campaigns. This sort of socially delegitimisation campaign was usually characterised by a more personal take. Muhammad al-Baradei, an opposition leader during the latter part of Mubarak’s era and a presidential hopeful after the 2011 revolution, faced such an attempt to harm his reputation. The smear campaign questioned the modesty and religiosity of his daughter in great detail, which by implication, harmed his image as a modest Muslim leader (al-Jazeera 2010; Mada Masr 2013). Such campaigns were not unusual. Although they did not criminalise the targets per se, they were powerful in their effect. For they irreversibly tarnished the target’s reputation as a moderate Muslim and thus as a citizen that qualified to be a part of the desirable, optimised society (see also Jebreal 2016).

The Dangerous Other Terrorism is globally acknowledged as a threat. Yet, its meaning and definitions vary significantly in individual politico-societal contexts (see e.g. Calculli, 2019). In Egypt, the classification of the militant Islamist organisations al-Jihad and al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya—especially at the peak of their violent campaign against the government during the 1990s—as terrorist organisations is undisputed. The scope of the counterterrorism measures, however, went beyond the group of militant Islamists who openly advocated violence. It involved thousands of Egyptians who could have been

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hardly associated with militancy or violence, including members of the political, non-violent opposition such as the Muslim Brotherhood, journalists, or human rights activists. Like the militant Islamists, they were classified as security targets that fall under the category of a terrorist threat. The situation did not change much in the post-Mubarak era, either. AlSisi’s regime actively persecuted thousands of Egyptians in the disguise of fighting terrorism. The bulk were peaceful opponents as well as random, politically inactive citizens. In contrast to Mubarak’s era, there has been, however, one significant difference: the counterterrorism campaign after 2013 criminalised the Muslim Brotherhoodas an officially acknowledged terrorist organisation. All Brotherhood activities became illegal. Its members and supporters were turned into potential terrorists and thus also security targets (Fahim 2013).

The Otherness of the Terrorist Enemy In the broader context of Egypt’s modern history, 1981 was significant for the redesignation of the national enemy. In this year, the Islamist largely replaced the leftist enemy (see Chapter 2). The communist, a remnant of al-Sadat’s persecution of leftist groups in the 1970s, was still being portrayed as a security target throughout the early stages of the securitisation process in the 1980s (al-Ahram 1983b; see also 1983a). Yet, the depiction of communists as the dangerous other to the Egyptian society quickly lost the intensity it had had in al-Sadat’s era. Eventually, towards the end of the 1980s, the communist figure lost its previous appeal and completely ceased to appear in relation to the securitisation process. Besides the communist, al-tijar al-mukhaddarat (the drug dealer) was another secondary security target. This vaguely referred to individuals involved in drug distribution. Drugs, framed as a significant threat to the health and upbringing of the youth, were presented as a major threat, which, accordingly, necessitated the exceptional policies enabled by the state of emergency. As early as 1986, the Egyptian Minister of Interior, Zaki Badr, emphasised the need to address drugs with exceptional measures embodied in the Emergency Law: At the moment, the magnitude of the threat [drug smuggling] exceeds the potential to confront it. We cannot resolve this crucial conflict for the

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good of the country and the citizen with the ordinary laws. We are forced to use the Emergency Law. (al-Ahram 1986: 14)

Unlike the communist enemy, the threat associated with drugs appeared alongside the figure of the terrorist enemy in a consistent, yet irregular manner as a severe threat to the Egyptian society, which was integrated into the securitisation of the terrorism threat (see e.g. al-Ahram 2006a; al-Ahram 2010; see also Shehata 2010: 80; Skovgaard-Petersen 1997: 205). The depiction of the drug dealer frequently linked drugs to terrorism. Specifically, the drug issue was portrayed as a dangerous ramification of the underlying threat of terrorism, rather than an autonomous security topic. The framing of the drug issue as a viable threat to the society notwithstanding, the empirical accounts suggest that the drug dealer was constructed as a supportive security target to legitimise the perpetuation of the securitisation process. This assumption underlines a claim raised independently in interviews by human rights activists and lawyers Mohamed Zarei and Hafiz Abu Seada (personal interviews 2013). Both contended that the drug issue was portrayed as a vital security threat in order to facilitate regular parliament’s renewals of the state of emergency. According to Zarei, there was no genuine need to make the drug issue a subject of the Emergency Law provisions, insofar as the ordinary legal framework was sufficient. Moreover, according to Abu Seada, the exceptional courts did not deal with any drug-related charges. In this light, it appears that the framing of drugs as a threat to the society was intended to underpin the magnitude of terrorist threats faced by the Egyptian society. Yet, this framing did not necessarily reflect the existing social reality. While the communist and drug dealer enemy figures were a part of the discourse, the archetype of the terrorist played a more central role in the securitisation process. In a dialectical relation to the optimised society, the terrorist was depicted as a dangerous, unacceptable other to the ideal Egyptian self . His dangerousness and unacceptability were defined and construed as a deviation from the optimum of the governed society. The security targets that personified the terrorist threat were not adequate enough to be part of the optimised society. They became an other in relation to the protected self . Their dangerousness and unacceptability were constructed as a denial of two central identities associated with the optimised self : the national and religious identities. Thus, albeit the overwhelming majority of security targets were both Egyptian and Muslim, the terrorist was framed as someone who did not meet the criteria for being Egyptian and/or Muslim.

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Egyptianess The securitisation process rationalised terrorism as a phenomenon external to the Egyptian society. Accordingly, the terrorist—the Egyptian citizenship of the targeted individuals notwithstanding—was “deEgyptianised”. The process of de-Egyptianisation generally followed two major lines of argumentation. The terrorist’s character, behaviour, and lifestyle were portrayed either as completely external elements to the idealised Egyptian identity, which denied the Egyptian origins of both the security targets and terrorism as a phenomenon; or the terrorist was “de-nationalised” by being depicted as a deviation from the idealised national identity, which implicitly admitted, unlike the other line of argumentation, the Egyptian origins of the terrorist. Both strands of the de-Egyptianising process are illustratively captured in al-Ahram’s article that summarised the parliamentary discussion on the extension of the state of emergency in 1997. Terrorism is, here, portrayed as odd, implicitly barbaric, and unnatural to the national identity, which is its ideal antithesis. There is also no indication that would suggest terrorism is a phenomenon intimately interwoven with the Egyptian sociopolitical reality: Terrorism is an unnatural phenomenon and it is odd to the Egyptian society, because Egypt enjoys unique civilization and culture and Egyptian personality is capable of accommodating all races and anyone who comes to Egypt can become an Egyptian. […] Terrorism is a strange satanic body and it is an attempt to defeat and subvert the Egyptian nature. (al-Ahram 1997c: 13)

At first, terrorism is here portrayed as a foreign phenomenon external to the national identity. Only a few lines later, terrorism is, however, equated to khiyana wataniyya (a national treason). The terrorist was thus, in this case, framed as an Egyptian who, however, betrayed his Egyptian identity, insofar as the treason is, by definition, an act of betrayal and subversion on one’s own nation. Despite the prevalence of the former argumentation line in the securitisation discourse, there was an observable, if implicit, acknowledgement that the security targets were of Egyptian origin. The construction of them as an other in juxtaposition to the ideal Egyptian self required their national identity to be a subject of delegitimising framing strategies. In this respect, it was the image of treason and betrayal which was frequently

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evoked as a powerful symbol to exclude the security targets from the optimised Egyptian nation. The depiction of the ideological base, funds, or strategic planning as being done abroad became a common reference through which the bond of the security targets to the nation was doubted and their activities were problematised as acts of betrayal to the nation (see also Chapter 5). This delegitimising pattern frequently appeared in association with the Egyptian human rights community. Given their acquisition of foreign funding, human rights organisations were frequently discredited as national traitors, labelled as human rights boutiques, foreign agents, tools of terrorists, and/or supporters of terrorism. The acceptance of foreign funding was, in this sense, interpreted as serving foreign interests and providing intelligence to a third party. Their Egyptianess and loyalty to the nation were also frequently questioned as a result of their criticism of human rights abuses viewed as harming Egypt’s reputation (Abdelrahman 2007; Gohar 2008). Similar delegitimisation strategies were also applied, for instance, to Kefaya, a loose opposition movement that was behind an unprecedented societal mobilisation in the mid-2000s. In the public discourse, it was regularly slandered as a foreign, US platform established to subvert Egypt’s stability (Oweidat et al. 2008: 31). As in the Mubarak era, this type of delegitimisation strategy continued to be a powerful tool to contain resistance and discredit vocal opponents in al-Sisi’s regime. Hamzawy (2015) observes that the smear campaigns in al-Sisi’s Egypt are especially aimed at “those who stand out from the masses by denouncing the regime’s unilateral and authoritarian style, and those who refuse to be dragged into the McCarthyism that seeks to justify terrorism and violence”. The vocal critics were delegitimised as disloyal to the national cause. This way, for instance, the human rights groups, especially those who condemned the raids of the sit-ins in August 2013, faced an intense defamation campaign. The hostile discourse targeted most outspoken opponents of the brutal counterterrorism campaign and included offending references, especially to the national identities of the targeted groups and persons. The regime critics were routinely referred to as “traitors supporting terrorism” or “mercenaries selling their services to the highest bidder” (Okail 2013). Accordingly, the public accounts of human rights abuses produced by the human rights organisations were downplayed as unsubstantiated claims that functioned only to tarnish the Egyptian image abroad and serving a foreign agenda. Though many of those organisations and individuals have upheld their work, even if in a

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clandestine manner, the smear campaigns negatively affected their public credibility with the Egyptian public “who see the activists as traitors, foreign agents, or naïve troublemakers” (Okail 2013). The national identity card played well in the case of the demonisation of the Muslim Brotherhood, too. When Tamarod (Rebellion), a popular grassroots anti-Brotherhood movement, emerged in late April 2013, the overall discontent with the Mursi’s government was already widespread. Tamarod was able to capitalise on pre-existing high tensions and was backed by a wide spectrum of the sociopolitical actors including Kefaya, the National Salvation Front, the April 6 Youth Movement, and much of the Egyptian private media. It spearheaded the anti-Brotherhood rhetoric that grew increasingly hostile to the Islamist movement. Tamarod’s popular campaign, which called for the end of Mursi’s rule, depicted the Brotherhood as a treacherous group estranged from the Egyptian nation that aimed to akhwana (“brotherhoodise”) the country. Needless to say that the plans from Mursi’s government to grant exclusive investment rights to the Suez Canal or to sell land to foreign actors were among those policies that directly reinforced the impression of the strong partisanship of Mursi’s cabinet (see e.g. Elmasry 2013; Iskandar 2013). Both cases, the human rights community and the Muslim Brotherhood, illustrate that even though the individuals targeted by the authorities and associated with terrorism were mostly Egyptians, they were still construed as an other in juxtaposition to the Egyptian nation. Both challenged the asymmetric power/knowledge status quo that was equated with a betrayal of one’s own people. In the securitisation context, the Egyptian identity was, however, reserved only for those obedient, optimised individuals. Religiosity In Egypt, religion has always created one of the central fault lines between the idealised Egyptian self and the hostile other. The securitisation context has been no different; the interpretation of Islam matters and has usually formed an important field of securitising power/knowledge contest. Although there are multiple actors who intervene in the public discourse on religion, the securitising power/knowledge struggle is inconceivable without the participation of al-Azhar—an authoritative centre of

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Sunni Islamic learning and jurisprudence based in Cairo.2 As the history of modern Egypt demonstrates, the Egyptian leaders sought al-Azhar’s support whenever it was necessary to get a moral backup for key political decisions, especially whenever those decisions were highly controversial. Among others, al-Azhar approved both Nasserist socialist policies as well as al-Sadat’s accusations of leftist circles for inciting the bread riots in 1977 (Beattie 2000: 225; Heikal 1983: 216). Through fatwas (religious rulings), al-Azhar is positioned to sanction specific governmental policies. Even though its religious rulings are not legally binding, their moral appeal to the Egyptian umma is undeniable. For Mubarak, al-Azhar was an important ally whose expertise was central to ideologically discredit Islamist militants. From the early 1980s, the regime actively sought al-Azhar’s support to legitimise the counterterrorism campaign (Osman 2011: 112). Accordingly, al-Azhar regularly denounced the Islamist groups as having strayed from the right path (Amin 2011: 121f; Skovgaard-Petersen 1997: 225). Azharite ‘ulama’ (Muslim scholars) regularly appeared in the media, condemning the Islamists’ views on Islam as false religious interpretations. In an al-Ahram article published shortly after al-Sadat’s assassination, for instance, the ‘ulama’ expressed concern about the fanatic and extremist interpretations of Islam and urged the government to address this issue before it was too late (al-Ahram 1981b). The alignment with the state policies notwithstanding, al-Azhar’s conservative wing ideologically concurred on multiple viewpoints with radical Islamists. In the early 1990s, the ideological convergence reached such an extent that some argued that the differences between al-Azhar and militant Islamist groups were not so much ideological, but rather that the former did not seek political change (Wickham 2002: 212). In this regard, it is not a coincidence that al-Azhar’s fatwa on Farag Fawda, a prominent secular intellectual and critic of the Islamists, which accused Fawda of blasphemy, inspired al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya to assassinate him in 1992. The situation calmed down in 1996 when the passing of alAzhar’s shaikh Jad al-Haqq (1982–1996) provided a suitable moment for the regime to intervene and reconfigure the al-Azhar’s field of action. The new shaikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy (1996–2010), former Grand Mufti (1986–1996), was a predictable leader known for his loyalty to 2 al-Azhar is not the only body issuing fatwas in Egypt. Besides al-Azhar, there is Dar al-Ifta’.

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the regime and willingness to actively engage in countering Islamist extremism (Kienle 2001: 114; Skovgaard-Petersen 1997: 252f). As Grand Mufti, Tantawi’s loyalty to Mubarak’s regime was already at the forefront when he contradicted al-Azhar’s fatwas on several occasions. Under Tantawy’s leadership, al-Azhar’s relationship with the state normalised, and the institution supported the counterterrorism campaign whenever needed (Arigita 2004). It strongly denounced, for instance, the 1997 terrorist attack on foreign tourists in Luxor and the 9/11 attacks. AlAzhar also remedied its controversial positions in other areas, such as the issues of female circumcision and approved organ donation (Barraclough 1998: 248f). Despite the at times complicated relationship between the state and the religious institution, Al-Azhar’s support of the counterterrorism campaign added an essential religion-derived dimension of the securitisation narrative. Although al-Azhar did not necessarily (re)produce all securitising claims voiced by the regime, its religiously grounded arguments, which nourished the distinction between the “true” and “false” Islam, between an acceptable Muslim and an unacceptable fanatic and terrorist, added new layers to the corpus of knowledge about the terrorist threat in the Egyptian security discourse. Like the national identity, the religious identity of the terrorist was constructed as a deviation from the Egyptian umma. The terrorist was, particularly, frequently framed as a Muslim who was led astray. Based on the severity of his indoctrination, he was yet to be saved or redeemed forever.In this context, the terrorist was commonly depicted as mutatarrif (extremist) and muta’ssib (fanatic) who left the direct path of Islam. He, thus, munharrif (deviant) and followed a “wrong”, unacceptable form of Islam (al-Ahram 1997a). To underpin the gravity of his deviation from the Egyptian umma, the terrorist’s wrongdoing was associated with words tinged with powerful Islamic connotations, including khawarij, fitna (civil strife), and jahiliyya (the age of ignorance), all underlining the hostility of the terrorist to the optimised society. Khawarij —in the English scholarship also referred to as kharijites —is a term which referred originally to a group of Muslims that rejected the leadership of the caliph Ali (656–661). In their radical approach to takfir (the practice of excommunication), this group declared all other Muslims unbelievers and unworthy of being called Muslims (Kenney 2006). The securitisation process evoked these religious-historical connotations by using khawarij to describe the terrorist figure. An extensive essay in the

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police magazine, Majalla amn al-am, likened, for instance, terrorists to a modern era version of the historical khawarij movement describing them as religious fanatics who abandoned the straight path of Islam, despised order, and looked to ignite al-fawda (chaos) and bloodshed (Majalla Amn al-Am 1988). Accordingly, the terrorist was portrayed as someone who rebelled against the righteous Muslim ruler, in this case, Husni Mubarak, and who followed and promoted a “false” concept of Islam. Similarly, fitna—historically associated with Muslim umma’s early schism against the backdrop of the emergence of khawarij and, is classified in al-Quran (2:191) as “worse than killing”—was another religiously loaded association that emphasised the terrorist’s deviation from the Egyptian umma. Like the khawarij label, fitna was constructed as an underlying objective of the terrorist. In the Egyptian context of the vulnerable coexistence of the Muslim majority and the Christian/Coptic minority, fitna referred to al-fitna al-ta’ifiyya (sectarian polarisation) between these two groups which could impair the fragile al-wahda al-wataniyya (national unity). An al-Ahram editorial piece written in reaction to a massacre of Christians by Islamist militants in Abu Qerqas in 1997 underlined the strong discursive interconnection between fitna, terrorism, and national unity: The terrorists wanted to harm the nation in its most precious sanctity – its national unity. […] By the focus of the terrorists on the Christian brothers […] they wanted to send a message to the world that the sectarian strife has roots in Egypt. (al-Ahram 1997d: 1)

Regardless of the irregular appearance of the adjective “ta’ifi” (sectarian), fitna commonly appeared as a signifier for societal strife based on the religious delineation of the Egyptian society, whereas the national unity and its preservation was a code for the peaceful coexistence of Egyptian Muslims and Christians in the absence of fitna. In contrast to both khawarij and fitna, jahiliyya was used as a code that delegitimised the personality of the terrorist in a complex manner. Historically, jahiliyya stands for the age of ignorance prior to the revelation of Islam to the Prophet Muhammad. It is also used to refer to the mental state of ignorance. Constructing the terrorist as a jahiliyya person, thus indicated that the security target was not able to comprehend and adopt the “real and true” Islam. The Majalla amn al-am article listed

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four negative qualities associated with a jahiliyya person that the securitisation process brought affront and used to exclude individuals from the optimised society. First, a jahiliyya person was a tribal person. Their loyalty was with the tribe and shaikh, not with the nation and the government. Second, a jahiliyya individual was associated with a fanatic who did not know the middle way and compromises. Third, although the jahiliyya character prior to Islam was often seen to be courageous and brave, based on its later combination with tribalism, the original courage was interpreted as the character flaw of conflict-seeking. Fourth, based on the combination of these three features, the jahiliyya personality was associated with the emergence of the khawarij phenomena (Majalla Amn al-Am 1988). The use of the above listed, religiously connotated terms underlined the incompatibility of the constructed religious identity of the terrorist in comparison to the Egyptian umma. As the jahiliyya label underscored, the terrorist was excluded from both the umma and the nation. On the one hand, they were classified as unacceptable to the Muslim community, the umma, which transcended jahiliyya and refused khawarij and fitna. On the other, they were expelled from the Egyptian nation, which had overcome the tribal bond and praised the non-violent character of its members. The Islamic religious dimension was often an implicit, but nevertheless underlying association with the terrorism threat. This illustratively captures a commentary of the Minister of Interior, Hassan al-Alfi, in al-Ahram: Each drop of blood that falls on their [terrorists] hands, each shot from the guns, […] their confessions combined with evidence, confirms that they [terrorists] do not defend religion and they are not keen about the faith. (al-Ahram 1994b: 1)

As such, the securitisation process (re)established and (re)strengthened the existing linkage between terrorism and religion, which referred exclusively to Islam in the Egyptian context, in a way that terrorism was equated with Islamist militancy and the terrorist became a synonym of Islamist. Visualisations of the terrorist, which appeared regularly alongside alAhram articles and in al-Ahram cartoons pages, corroborated Islam as an integral element of the terrorist threat in Egypt and portrayed the terrorist

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as an Islamist. The fearsome appearance of the terrorist was communicated through stereotyped and negatively connoted outer symbols of one’s religiosity and devoutness including galabiyya (the gown),3 kufi (hat), and beard without a moustache. Such visual rhetoric painting the terrorist as an Islamist was widely proliferated in the public discourse. This characterisation frequently appeared in Egyptian pop-culture. For instance, in the early 1990s, two popular movies al-Irhab wa-l-Kebab (The terrorism and the kebab, 1992) and al-Irhabi (The terrorist, 1992), depicted terrorism as an issue of Islamist militancy. In a reaffirmation of the securitisation narrative, both movies featured a main character who was a terrorist with the characteristics of an Islamist. This was expressed, on the one hand, through his outer appearance; he wore a galabiyya, a beard, and a hat. On the other hand, the characteristics of an Islamist were underlined through his personality; he was portrayed as a selfish, egoistic person with his own agenda, who cared about his (false) interpretation of religion, and who resorted to violence. In this regard, it is clear that the terrorist enemy, who was (re)produced by the securitisation process during Mubarak’s reign, primarily referred to an Islamist.

Who is the Terrorist? Empirically speaking, there was a great variety of opposition groups and movements that promoted often radical, but not necessarily violent interpretations of Islam, which fall under the category of Islamists in the Egyptian context. As already mentioned, Islamist organisations, such as al-Jihad or al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, that openly endorsed and used violence to achieve a sociopolitical change, were labelled and by large conceived as terrorists (al-Ahram 1997b, 2000a; see also al-Ahram 1991). The category of Islamists, however, included other non-violent Islamist groups, most prominently the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest organised opposition movement. Since Nasser’s crackdown on thes movement in the 1950, the relationship between the state and the Muslim Brotherhood never recovered (see Chapter 2). The mutual distrust and at times open hostility prevented 3 In Egypt, galabiyya is also a traditional garment worn by Sa’idi farmers and villagers, and by people of poorer origins living in the urban areas. In contrast to the traditional galabiyya, the religiously connotated galabiyya is, usually, shorter and does not reach the ankle height.

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any form of meaningful rapprochement. Although there were periods of détente, such al-Sadat’s mild treatment of Islamists in the early 1970s, the Egyptian rulers did not hesitate to replace tacit toleration with brutal repression whenever they felt necessary. Mubarak’s approach was no different. The regime tolerated the movement as a counterweight to the militant Islamists groups in the 1980s and thus largely omitted them from the securitisation discourse at the time. However, from the 1990s onwards, the situation dramatically changed. In the 1980s, although the Muslim Brotherhood was not legally acknowledged, the group was allowed to participate, if in a limited way, in political processes. In return, the Brotherhood was expected to counterbalance the sociopolitical influence of militant Islamist forces. As the Brotherhood was able to concentrate on political campaigns and societal activities without the constant fear of repression, it grew bolder in its criticism of Mubarak’s leadership and started to question its role as a counterweight to the militant Islamists. When the Muslim Brotherhood repeatedly failed to condemn the emergent wave of Islamist violence in the early 1990s, the détente period was replaced by massive repression (Fahmy 1998: 551ff; Osman 2011: 109; Tadros 2012: 5ff). At the same time and against the backdrop of the rising popularity of the Brotherhood, the group began to be increasingly framed, first, as al-tanzim al-mahzur (an unlawful organisation) and later on, directly as a terrorist group (see e.g. al-Ahram 2000b; Wickham 2002: 201). Even though the group repeatedly proclaimed a non-violent approach towards its desired social change (see e.g. Shehata 2010: 56), the Brotherhood was regularly associated with established militant groups and portrayed as their political proxy: They [the MB] assassinated two prime ministers and a finance minister before the [1952] revolution. Then they pretended to back the late President Jamal Abd al-Nasser but attempted to assassinate him in Alexandria. President Sadat did not act against them early in his tenure, having been preoccupied with restoring the occupied territories, and so they killed him. The Muslim Brothers, the Jihad, the Islamic Groups, and the rest of them are all the same. (Interview with Husni Mubarak in Le Monde, November 17, 1995 as quoted in Rutherford 2008: 86–87).

Political showcase processes of the late 1990s with leading Brotherhood members further underscored the group’s alleged alignment with

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terrorist forces. This way, by the 1990s, the Muslim Brotherhood became an inseparable part of security targets who were treated with exceptional security methods (for more, see Chapter 4). Later in the 2010s, the framing of the Brotherhood as a terrorist movement became even more explicit. After the 2013 overthrow of the Brotherhood-dominated government, which ended the Brotherhood’s political heyday, the post-coup establishment adopted an aggressive, hypernationalist securitisation rhetoric to securitise the Islamist terrorist threat and remove its major opponent, the Muslim Brotherhood. The new leadership skipped the usual token of al-tanzim al-mahzur known from the Mubarak’s era. Instead, it directly referred to the group as altanzim ikhwan irhabi or al-ikhwan al-irhabiyya (the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood or the terrorist Brotherhood). Through an explicit terrorism reference, the new leaders discredited its major political opponent whilst legitimising a coup. As an Egyptian political activist noted, “[t]he language of terrorism took the category of enemy to its extreme: it defined the military and the police as legal state agents against the Brotherhood as an illegal non-state actor” (Wahid 2016). Less than six months after the coup, the securitising rhetoric transformed into legal language. The Brotherhood was criminalised as a terrorist organisation. The Islamist was a dominant epitome of the terrorism threat in Egypt under Husni Mubarak. Yet, he was far from the sole security target. In addition to Islamists, large numbers of non-Islamist political opposition, including human rights activists and journalists became security targets, too. Like Islamists, the non-Islamist dissenters were subjected to the exceptional security methods (for more, see Chapter 4). As Moorehead (2005: 34f) mentions, in the Mubarak era, non-Islamist political opposition was rarely explicitly linked with terrorism. This established practice, however, changed in the 2010s, especially after the 2013 coup. Since 2013, it has not been uncommon for non-Islamist dissent to be referred to with the adjective terrorist. Violence was not a determining factor in the process of labelling someone undesirable and dangerous to the majority of society, and to thus render him a security target, as both the Muslim Brotherhood as a major representative of Islamic dissent and non-Islamist opposition, evidence. Instead, as the following chapters discuss in greater detail, the transformation from an optimised citizen to a security target related closely to one’s defiance of the sociopolitical order, which was (re)produced, stabilised, and legitimised by the securitisation process. Securitisation clearly strengthened the dominant position of the political elite, including the position of security institutions.

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Societal Optimisation The framing of an issue as a threat is a complex process. Such a multifaceted endeavour is irreducible to the speech acts of leading politicians; instead, it involves diverse actors and integrates multiple security positions and claims. The time factor, as Egypt shows, plays a role, too. The longer specific frames are being dispersed in the discourse, the more likely they are to eventually become a “truth” taken for granted. This process, which is ultimately bound to specific security knowledge, is not an innocent one per se. As the Egyptian case shows, there is likely a reinforcing relationship between a persistent securitisation narrative and autocratic operation of state power. In Mubarak’s Egypt, the framing of terrorist threat exposed an asymmetric configuration of power relations that the securitisation process further consolidated in favour of the political and security elites. The power imbalance became so extensive that alternative positions on security, let alone the questioning of the official narrative, were dismissed and delegitimised as siding with terrorists. In this sense, the securitisation of a vaguely defined terrorist threat was nothing else than a political strategy to sustain the asymmetric power relations and preserve the political and societal status quo by legitimising the repression of the political opposition. On a more discursive level, the examination of Egypt’s framing of the terrorist enemy clearly points to the optimisation capacity of a securitisation process. The process of constructing the terrorist enemy reconfigured the bandwidth of the optimised, desirable Egyptian society. It provided the state authorities with an opportunity to intervene in the societal body and identify and construct the desirable forms of life which were in need of protection. Simultaneously, they relegated the dangerous forms of life, which must be excluded from the protected majority. The securitisation (re)produced Egyptian society as an idealised self juxtaposed with the dangerous other, represented by the security targets. The Egyptian society was thus not just an object of protection, but also an object which was optimised along with the image of the idealised Egyptian self . The idealised self is, however, only one side of the coin. It is incomplete without its alter ego, the hostile, undesirable other, the security target. Egypt’s securitisation integrated two major identities related to nation and religion, to construct an undesirable, hostile other. The securitisation framed the enemy as non-Egyptian and religiously extreme; the religious extremism was an optional attribute mostly reserved to the

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Islamist dissent. The denial of Egyptianess or the accusation of stray religiosity formed the basis of estrangement and exclusion of the terrorist enemy from the optimised Egyptian society. As such, these two essential frames provided easy options to designate virtually anyone as an undesirable person who could have been then implicitly or more explicitly linked to the terrorist threat. Therefore, although the Islamist was and still is the central epitome of the terrorist threat in Egypt, he was not the only one who has been excluded from the optimised society and subjected to exceptional measures sanctioned by the state of emergency and counterterrorism legislation. The de-Egyptianisation card effectively discredited a wide swath of society, including the human rights community, participants in many social movements, outspoken individuals, and excluded them from the optimised society. In this sense, the securitisation process was clearly more than a mere identification of a threat. It involved interventions in the bandwidth of societal optimum, which allowed for the exclusion of the constructed other from the protected collective. The (re)configuration of the societal optimum occurred at the discursive level. Yet, its effects, which we will investigate in detail in the following chapter, were immediate and profound in the everyday life of those who did not comply with the image of an optimised citizen for their defiance of the sociopolitical ordering.

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Skovgaard-Petersen, Jakob. 1997. Defining Islam for the Egyptian state: Muftis and fatwas of the Dar al-Ifta. Social, economic and political studies of the Middle East and Asia 59. Leiden, New York, Köln: Brill. Soliman, Doaa. 2014. Egyptian media adopt self-censorship. BBC. October 30. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/monitoring/egyptian-media-adopt-selfce nsorship. Accessed August 28, 2016. Starrett, Gregory. 1998. Putting Islam to work: Education, politics, and religious transformation in Egypt. Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies 25. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Tadros, Mariz. 2012. The Muslim Brotherhood in contemporary Egypt: Democracy redefined or confined? Durham Modern Middle East and Islamic World Series 25. Oxon, New York: Routledge, Taylor&Francis Group. Tagma, Halit M. 2009. Homo sacer vs. homo soccer mom: Reading Agamben and Foucault in the war on terror. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 34 (4): 407–435. Vuori, Juha A. 2011. Religion bites: Falungong, securitization/desecuritization in the People’s Republic of China. In Securitization theory: How security problems emerge and dissolve, ed. Thierry Balzacq, 186–211. PRIO New Security Studies. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Wahid. 2016. Fear the everyday state. Available at https://libcom.org/news/feareveryday-state-egypt-revolution-11022016. Accessed August 28, 2016. Wickham, Carrie R. 2002. Mobilizing Islam: Religion, activism, and political change in Egypt. New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. Wilkinson, Claire. 2007. The Copenhagen School on tour in Kyrgyzstan: Is securitization theory useable outside Europe? Security Dialogue 38 (1): 5–25. Williams, Michael C. 2003. Words, images, enemies: Securitization and international politics. International Studies Quarterly 47 (4): 511–531.

CHAPTER 4

The Exception

When Husni Mubarak resigned in February 2011 after weeks of mass protests, Egypt had been ruled in a state of emergency for almost thirty years. The state of emergency, originally introduced as an interim measure to overcome the assassination of the state leader in 1981, soon became much more than an immediate response to the state’s crisis. It turned into a central pillar of the authoritarian regime and a new norm that shaped everyday life in the country. At the time of the 2011 uprising, roughly 60% of the Egyptian population had never experienced life without the state of emergency. Although Mubarak’s departure brought an unexpected hope to many for a better, less oppressive future, the legacy of rule through exception outlived his reign. A few years later, in 2013, Egypt’s political elite resorted once again to the time-proven combination of the state of emergency and controversial counterterrorism laws legitimised through the open-ended “war on terror” logics; a combination that is remarkably powerful in oppressing dissent while maintaining the authoritarian status quo. This chapter, theoretically informed by the second dimension of the TER-model, concentrates on the exception as a central framework that strengthened the resilience of authoritarian structures in Egypt. The focus goes beyond the immediate and visible ruling elites. Mubarak’s ousting and the subsequent revival of the authoritarian state clearly showed that the survival of autocratic mechanisms is independent of the political © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Reimer-Burgrova, Politics of Violence and Fear in MENA, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83932-1_4

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frontrunners. Instead, as the chapter explores, the exception, which was legitimised by a declared necessity to fight terrorism in the early 1980s, was tightly bound to the empowered position of security institutions and their everyday security practice. The lengthy securitisation process transformed the security agents into petty sovereigns. Thus empowered, they arbitrarily decided the fate of any individual by granting them the status of a security threat. This status, as this chapter suggests, is largely irreversible.

Egypt’s Agambenian Exception Securitisation is a process that, if successful, leads to the adoption of security measures which would have hardly been thinkable otherwise (Buzan et al. 1998: 24). Depending on the character of the securitisation and the threat it confronts, unrestricted surveillance, arrests without warrants, indefinite detention, “enhanced” interrogation methods, extraordinary renditions, and extrajudicial killings might be rendered legitimate means to address the threat and to protect the jeopardised life of the population. In Mubarak’s Egypt, the state of emergency was the common legal justification behind the exceptional measures enacted to confront the terrorist threat. It empowered the security officials to adopt and enforce extraordinary security practices to counter the threat and thus embedded the exceptional order into the existing ordinary mode of Egyptian governing. Exceptional security measures as such are an essential part of a successful securitisation. Arguing that the existing order does not provide a sufficient framework to tackle the threat, the securitising actors pursue the adoption of exceptional steps that breach the existing rules (Buzan et al. 1998: 24). In the Copenhagen School’s view, the adoption of extraordinary measures signifies a failure to deal with and address the threat within the boundaries of normality, i.e. within the boundaries of liberal democratic principles (Buzan et al. 1998: 29). Whereas such a view is valid in the liberal democratic contexts, it is hardly sustainable in the non-democratic ones where the default settings of normality are not based on democratic principles (Vuori 2008: 68f). Thus, the normative expectations implied in the definition of normality as a liberal democratic order are analytically useless in authoritarian contexts, including Egypt. Addressing this normative burden, the TER-model moves away from the view that the exception is a negative inversion of the liberal democratic order. Specifically, it turns to Giorgio Agamben’s provocative conceptualisation of exception and defines the exception as an expression of sovereign

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power to kill, which is reintroduced into the governmentalised society through the securitisation process. Even though an optimised society is formed and reproduced on the biopolitical notion of fostering life, it does not rule out extraordinary forms of violence towards those classified as a threat to the life and well-being of the governed society (Foucault 1978: 136f). Securitisation, in this regard, provides a means and legitimisation to reintroduce the extraordinary violence into a biopolitical society.1 It links the biopolitical care for life with the sovereign logic of taking something away (see also Genel 2006; Opitz 2008; Tagma 2009). As a governmental mechanism to macro-manage and optimise the governed population, securitisation is a process through which undesirable, threatening individuals or groups are constructed and identified. Moreover, it also allows to security authorities to subject designated threats, such as terrorists, homosexuals, immigrants, or infected people, to exceptional forms of violence that include but are far from limited to ill-treatment in detention, torture during interrogation, and extrajudicial killing. Inspired by Carl Schmitt’s work on exceptionality, Giorgio Agamben (1998: 20f) defines the state of exception as a threshold between a normal situation and chaos, in which the rules still exist, but the law is suspended (see Schmitt 1979 [1934]: 18f). The exception is epitomised in the zone of indistinction, a place where the law is turned into an empty reference. Therefore, whoever is situated inside the zone—be it the confined individuals or the guards—is in “a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit” (Agamben 1998: 170). Although the law is annulled within the zone of indistinction, it retains its validity outside the zone. In fact, the law, such as the legislation that stipulates the conditions of a state of emergency, is a constitutive element of the zone of indistinction, of the exception. Without the outside legal reference, the exception cannot be established.

1 Not all processes of societal optimisation necessarily expel individuals designated as undesirable to the zones of exception. Such individuals might experience various forms of social exclusion and rejections, such as job discrimination, xenophobic expressions, and so forth. The biopolitically informed processes of inclusion and exclusion thus do not automatically imply that the life of targeted persons would be transformed into a bare life of homo sacer. This transformation occurs through a successful process of securitisation that introduces and makes possible the operation of the zones of indistinction, such as secret detention facilities, as domains of sovereign violence.

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The fact that the law is an empty reference within the zone does not imply that chaos and anarchy prevail. Ojakangas (2005: 77f) rightly points out that the objects, processes, and relations within the zone are ordered by specific rules, to which, however, “the very concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer made any sense” (Agamben 1998: 170). The zone of indistinction is thus neither inside nor outside the legal realm. It is situated in a realm in which sovereign power operates through “para-legal detachment from the law” (Opitz 2011: 106). It thereby invites security practices, such as unauthorised surveillance, torture, or extrajudicial killings of alleged terrorist suspects, legally unfeasible even in authoritarian contexts, yet routinely adopted not only by the Egyptian security apparatus but also by Syrian or Turkish authorities (addressed in more detail in Chapter 6), for which the law is no longer a prime point of reference. Moreover, for Agamben (1998: 137f), the life of those held within the zone of indistinction is reduced to zoë, a bare life of homo sacer2 —a sacred man—stripped of relevance. As a part of a zone of indistinction, the homo sacer lives beyond both human and divine laws and is thus not a subject of ordinary laws that are otherwise valid outside the zone of indistinction. Therefore, the life of a homo sacer may be ended but not sacrificed. Its killing does not constitute a homicide nor a sacrifice (Agamben 1998: 81ff). The former form, ending the life of a homo sacer without committing homicide, is more likely to appear in the context of an exception instituted through a securitisation process. Egyptian security officials routinely killed persons in their custody without committing a homicide, for they did not face criminal charges for such an act (see e.g. HRW 2011 see e.g. HRW 2011a for accounts of deaths in custody). The Legal Black Holes In Mubarak’s Egypt, there were numerous places that were Agambenian zones of indistinction. Secret detention facilities run by the feared SSIS and later by its successor the NSA, military camps of the Central Security Forces (CSF), special sections of the prisons, and police stations all across the country are all examples of places where the law was suspended and 2 Homo sacer, a sacred man, is a figure mentioned in the archaic Roman law. According to Agamben’s interpretation, the homo sacer is a person whose life is located outside both human and divine laws.

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people held within were involuntarily transformed into homines sacri. It is not surprising that these places were also prime locations to incarcerate terrorist suspects, political activists, and anyone else deemed a security threat. The SSIS, the lead institution authorised to run the counterterrorism campaign under Husni Mubarak, pioneered the institutionalisation of zones of indistinction. Its unrecorded, unauthorised, and unacknowledged detention and interrogation facilities formed the backbone of the zones of indistinction. The SSIS facilities, as al-Nadeem Center (2006: 27) described, were “mysterious places where people disappear for days or weeks or months, totally isolated from the outside world, totally isolated from their family, friends and lawyers”. In these facilities, al-Nadeem report continues, people were subjected “to the most criminal forms of torture to confess on themselves or others, to accept working as informers or just to intimidate them and teach them a lesson and show them who is in charge in this country”. Unlike the police stations or recognised prisons, the SSIS detention cells or makeshift cells at CSF camps were illegal under the Egyptian law and did not officially exist (see e.g. HRW 2011a: 4; Stork 2012: 466). The stay in the SSIS custody was not officially recorded, as the SSIS facilities were unauthorised for the detention. Those held there disappeared and virtually ceased to exist as citizens, usually for a period of up to two or three months. During that time, the authorities usually refused to disclose any information about the whereabouts of disappeared individuals. In practice, information often spread informally or was revealed when the person left the zone of indistinction. In most cases, leaving the zone meant being transferred to a prison where a written record of the arrival and case was made (see e.g. HRW 1992; Sherry 1993). The SSIS facilities were legal black holes. Similar to the zones of indistinction described by Agamben, they were located neither inside nor outside the Egyptian legal framework. Their specific location between the licit and illicit, law and chaos, thereby allowed for paralegal security practices. Torture, a routinised imperative of the SSIS daily operation, combined with widespread ill-treatment, contributed to the character of the security compounds, true to Agambenian zones of indistinction.

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Interrogation and torture blended under SSIS supervision. The security officials subjected security suspects—ranging from Islamists to nonIslamist dissenters and later on an increasing number of ordinary Egyptians—to horrendous forms of sovereign violence. A former SSIS detainee and Muslim Brotherhood member Nasr al-Sayed Hassan Nasr recalled: On the eighth day, the interrogations began. The officer, who said his name was Shawkat, told me, ‘This is the biggest citadel in the Middle East for extracting information. You are 35 meters below the ground in a place that nobody except the minister of interior knows about.’ He started by giving me a lecture, saying, ‘Our role is to protect the country from filth like you. You and the Christians are working against the regime.’ They tortured me for seven days before asking me a question; the interrogations began on the eighth day and lasted for around 23 days accompanied by torture. They would interrogate me for up to three sessions in one day and the torture escalated during the interrogation. (Nasr al-Sayed Hassan Nasr quoted in HRW 2011a: 22–23)

The life of individuals held in the SSIS custody became the life of homo sacer. Life was reduced to the bare minimum, zoë, which was devoid of juridical value and deprived of a dignified meaning valid outside the detention facilities. Since the dignified life, bios, lost its meaning in the Egyptian zones of exception, the incarnation under SSIS supervision degraded the life of detainees to purely biological terms. As the human rights defenders Ahmed Seif al-Islam and Hafiz Abu Seada recalled in interviews to me (personal interviews 2013), the fact that the detainees were subjected to ill-treatment and torture only exacerbated the process of their dehumanisation (see also HRW 2011a). The torture to which the detainees were subject—including blindfolding, beating, suspension from bound wrists, genital electrocution, as well as sexual abuse or the threat of sexual abuse (see e.g. al-Afifi 2008; Shehat and Zarei 2001)—reduced the incarcerated individuals to a physical object, “expendable raw material”, whose worthiness and meaningfulness was, as Geertsema (2008: 348) puts it, “without value and thereby redundant”. The inadequate conditions further underscored just how bare the life of incarcerated individuals became: All of them were in another cell. I know the room they were held in; I saw it. It is about three by five meters, with no window, no fan, no air, one bathroom. The ceiling is low: you stand up and the ceiling is exactly

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where your head is. The 25 of them were all stacked together in that one room, very crowded, hot, no air, and of course they would each have to use the toilet in front of the others. Can you imagine, with 25 people? By the time the 25th person is finished with the toilet, the first person has to use it again. (HRW 2007: 38)

The detainees experienced a similar status as those incarnated in the camp described by Agamben. To borrow Agamben’s words (1998: 159), the SSIS detainees lacked “almost all the rights and expectations that we customarily attribute to human existence, and yet were still biologically alive, they came to be situated in a limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in which they were no longer anything but bare life”. The great hopes for a better future notwithstanding, not much has changed in the field of exceptional security practice after the 2011 revolution. The life of incarcerated individuals remains precarious and vulnerable to the whims of security officials who continue to rely on torture as a means of interrogation, intimidation, and a form of power superiority. The incarceration facilities operate further as zones of indistinction where thousands of Egyptians, homines sacri, experience an existence of a living dead exposed to the omnipresent contingency of physical death, be it a result of torture, slow death by deliberate neglect of authorities, or an ordered execution (al-Misri 2015; see e.g. CFJ 2020). The massive crackdown on dissent that followed the 2013 coup overloaded the existing detention facilities, resulting in overcrowded cells and a hasty expansion of prison capacities. In less than three years, the new administration approved 16 new prisons to accommodate skyrocketed numbers of inmates (Abdullah 2016). In just under a year, between July 2013 and May 2014, the authorities detained, charged, or sentenced at least 41,000 individuals, 36,000 of which were confronted by the security authorities “khilal ahdath siyasiyya” (during political incidents) (Wiki Thawra 2014).3 The estimated amount of more than 60,000 political prisoners, including those in pretrial detention, which makes roughly up to two-thirds of the entire prison population, vastly exceeds the population of 5000 to 10,000 political prisoners at the end of Mubarak’s era and is evidence of the unprecedented scale of repression that Egypt has witnessed since 2013 (Mandour 2015). 3 Wiki Thawra is a statistical website affiliated with the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights.

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In addition to the former SSIS detention facilities run since 2011 by the NSA, the prisons, overcrowded with thousands of political prisoners, gained a prominent role in the Egyptian exceptional framework. The prisons became the core site where life is stripped bare and exposed to the contingency of death. The many accounts of political prisoners that leaked out of the incarceration facilities describe the grave conditions; their lives transformed into the bare life of the homines sacri. In a letter titled Graveyard of the living dead, Esra Taweel, a political activist, described her life in prison: We keep waiting for angels to come and save us, but they never come. Prison is a wicked thing; life is losing its meaning, or more accurately, there is no life here. We are like the living dead. (Esra Taweel quoted in al-Jazeera 2015)

An imprisoned student, Sherif, who compared the prison to a grave and viewed himself as being killed already, shares a similar perspective as Taweel: I can’t express what is going on inside me without sadness and grief for what we are in. They now want us to die twice. Once alive on their hands in their prisons, and another time by God’s fate and the end of our life and I see that the second way is better for me now. I don’t want to be alive in my grave. The “prison” for me is like a grave exactly and worse. (Sherif’s letter quoted in al-Nadeem Center 2014: 41)

The overcrowded cells, unbearable heat, lack of ventilation in summer and cold temperatures in winter, lack of proper food, clean water, and adequate medical treatment, as well as deliberate carelessness of the authorities about prisoners’ health, combined with pervasive torture turn the stay in prison to an experience where life and death are equally likely. Neither Sacrifice nor Homicide Over the last four decades, the bare life of the homo sacer was defined through the ubiquitous contingency of death. Like their bare life, so too was their death devoid of any higher meaning. He [an SSIS officer at Laghzouli SSIS headquarters interrogating Dr Mandour] also emphasized in his speech that I am here under his complete

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control and there is no authority in Egypt that can interfere with what may happen to me, particularly since a notification had been sent out that I had escaped during my arrest and they had covered themselves with an arrest warrant notifying police stations, police lookouts, ports and airports… Therefore if I became stubborn – and I will not be able to – it is possible that I will be killed here and my body taken away in a closed police car that no one will stop on the way. (HRW 1991: 3)

Mandour’s testimony underlines the devaluation of life of homines sacri to the point that terminating their life was considered a conceivable option. The life of Egyptian homines sacri was, as Agamben would put it, a “life unworthy of being lived” (1998: 139). Hence its killing was not ascribed any significance. In this sense, the life of Egyptian homines sacri was not only bare in as much as it was reduced to zoë but also because it was subjected to the continuous possibility of physical death. Although the incidences of death—despite rough confinement conditions and the number of detainees numbering in the thousands—were relatively low (al-Afifi 2008: 218ff), such incidents did happen. As the documented cases point out, to kill a homo sacer was not considered a serious crime necessitating a proper investigation and/or an adequate punishment (see HRW 2004: 6ff; Rabia 2011: 122). Accordingly, the incidents of death in the SSIS and police custody were usually rationalised by a variety of explanations, including “resisting arrest, fighting with cellmates, committing suicide, having fatal accidents, and succumbing to pre-existing health conditions” (HRW 2011a: 31). For instance, the death of Abd al-Harith Madani, a prominent young lawyer whose defendants included Islamists, was attributed to an asthma attack. Despite profound doubts about the circumstances of his death, the authorities refused a request for a second autopsy by independent pathologists. Madani’s body was buried in a sealed coffin under the supervision of security officials (HRW 2011a: 69). Should a death in SSIS custody be investigated and brought to court, the common practice was to give a mild, if any, punishment; in fact, the defendants were usually acquitted (al-Nadeem Center 2006: 97ff). During Mubarak’s era, there were only a few cases where the accused security officials were convicted and imprisoned (see HRW 2011a). Instead of punishment, according to a study by the al-Nadeem Center (2006: 97f), some acquitted security officials might have even received

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a career promotion. For instance, Hazem Hammadi, the chief intelligence officer at Madinat Nasr in Cairo, who was acquitted on charges of torturing and killing two Egyptians, was shortly thereafter promoted to the presidential guard (see also Sassoon 2016: 136). Mubarak’s ousting in 2011 notwithstanding, the securitisation logic that legitimised the killing of civilians without due process has persisted. In fact, justified by the “war on terror” narrative, the security forces have killed thousands of civilians since. Most cases, however, have gone unnoticed by the Egyptian public. In media accounts, extrajudicial killings are usually reduced to a short comment which legitimised the killing as an act of self-defence vis-a-vis a terrorist threat. This way, a number of civilians, especially in the context of the “war on terror” in the Northern Sinai, are turned into militants and terrorists post-mortem to legitimise the extrajudicial character of their death (Burgrova 2017).

The (Un)desirability of One’s Life In Agamben’s view, the decision on the value or non-value of one’s life is a signifier of modernity, wherein life becomes a part of political and strategic calculations (1998: 121f, 137). This leads him to claim that bare life, in fact, “now dwells in the biological body of every living being” (1998: 140). This does not mean that we all have been transformed into homines sacri who can be killed but not sacrificed. Instead, Agamben points at the ever-present potential of becoming a homo sacer that concerns every one of us. “Every society […] decides who its ‘sacred men’ will be” (Agamben 1998: 139), yet there is no certainty about who might become homo sacer. As discussed in the previous chapter, the delineation between desirable and undesirable life is liquid and volatile. Thus, whether our life will be deemed unacceptable at a certain point in the future is an uncertain matter. In Egypt, not everyone was designated as a security threat and placed to the zones of indistinction where existence was reduced to a precarious naked life. Even though the life of the Egyptians was and still is at the centre of the political and strategic calculations of an authoritarian regime, the bare form of life was, however, limited to biopolitically excluded individuals. As a result, although virtually anyone can be turned into a homo sacer, not everyone is. At this point, the TER-model parts ways with Agamben’s claim (1998: 83) that the sovereign decision on exception creates the biopolitical body and thus produces homines sacri as an effect of its power operation. This

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perspective overlooks the biopolitical process of optimising the society, insofar as Huysmans (2008: 177) argues it “ignores how this [bare] life only exists and takes on political form through various socioeconomic, technological, scientific, legal, and other mediations”. As Tagma (2009: 427) proposes, the sovereign decision on the (un)desirability of one’s life is not achieved in a contextual vacuum of Schmittian exceptionalism (see also Krasmann 2012: 383). Nor are the exceptional practices of security given by nature or by a transcendent sovereign decision (Bigo 2008a; for a similar argument, see also Bigo 2002; Neal 2010). Sovereign decisions about the life and death or inclusion and exclusion of specific individuals from the optimised society occur “through biopolitical and disciplinary practices delineating normal, desirable, or optimal forms of life from those forms of life viewed as risky, abnormal, undesirable, and suboptimal” (Nadesan 2008: 191). In turn, “the dangerous others” are products of these very same biopolitical optimisation processes that are always underpinned by the regimes of truth shaped by diverse political, cultural, and historical settings. Bare life and zones of indistinction are thus not a given natural fact, but “a juridico-political construction” (Genel 2006: 60). Exceptional practices of security are not apolitical normative constructs, but “are the outcome of political acts by politicians and specialists on threat management” (Bigo 2002: 68). The special laws and exceptional powers, such as anti-terror legislation, do not simply nullify every other law. Instead, as Bigo (2008b) argues, they are just a derogation from normalised legislation and are likely to be limited in their scope of application to the targeted groups.4 By implication, the societal approval of the exceptional framework is then also likely higher as long as “they [the exceptional practices] are not perceived as detrimental to fundamental liberties because the majority of citizens does not recognize themselves in these marginal groups” targeted by the exceptional practices (Bigo 2008a: 104–5). The case of Egypt is no different. While the security targets were, for instance, subjected to the exceptional courts under the Emergency Law provisions, other criminal acts continued to be dealt with by the regular judiciary within the regular legal framework (see e.g. Brown 1997; Moustafa 2008). Thus, contrary to Agamben’s conclusion 4 This does not, however, suggest that the boundaries of the designated target group are not susceptible to a change. As this book shows it is quite common that the scope of application of the emergency provisions extends over the time and include more target groups.

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(1998: 124, 140), this book shares Tagma’s view (2009: 428) that not all forms of life in the contemporary world are bare lives exposed to the possibility of being killed at any time. Only some forms of life, such as those of terrorists, immigrants, infected persons, and others designated through the biopolitical optimisation processes as undesirable or even as a threat to life, might be transformed into bare lives and moved to the spaces of exceptional security practices. Securitisation, in this sense, functions as a biopolitical process that identifies and separates undesirable forms of life from the desirable collective. Like in Egypt, the zones of exception, as well as the existence of homines sacri, were not a result of a random sovereign decision. On the contrary, they were a product of broader societal and political contexts. The sovereign decisions to move some individuals designated as security targets to the detention and prison cells are always embedded in wider cultural, historical, societal, and political settings and related to specific regimes of truth. The sovereign decision of Mubarak’s regime to declare and thereafter regularly renew the state of emergency was informed by the biopolitical process of constructing the terrorist threat. So was the decision of al-Sisi’s regime to uphold the “war on terror” and adopt draconian counterterrorism legislation. Mubarak and al-Sisi’s sovereign decisions on exception were acts that produced the zone of indistinction and transformed the life within into bare life. Besides the grand sovereign decisions, such as the declaration of the state of emergency, the knowledge produced by the securitisation process about the terrorist threat also informs petty sovereign decisions of security officials in their everyday conduct. As such, it is obvious that sovereign decisions on exception cannot be isolated from the practices and knowledge from which they had emerged, for they do not occur in a contextual vacuum. Instead, as the Egyptian case shows, they are informed and guided by the biopolitical operation that aims to optimise the governed society. The zone of indistinction is thus to be understood as a domain of the sovereign power operation, which is nevertheless permeated by biopolitical concern for life. As Foucault (2003: 241) puts it: I wouldn’t say exactly that sovereignty’s old right–to take life or let live– was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it. This is the right, or precisely the opposite right. It is the power to “make” live and “let” die.

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By implication, under biopolitical influence, the modus operandi of the sovereign power acquires new forms and modalities (see also Tagma 2009: 416). Specifically, the biopolitical concern for life redirects the focus of sovereign power operation to bios, the qualified and dignified form of life. In this sense, the destructive effect of sovereign power operation is not defined through its right to kill but the capacity to let die (Nadesan 2008: 191). Thereby, the sovereign right to take life is no longer primarily associated with the physical death of a targeted subject, but rather linked to a form of societal death, which disturbs one’s bios. The physical life per se is thus not necessarily killed, but its politico-societal quality expressed in bios is disturbed and thereby the capacity of the individual to resist is hindered. The abusive record of the security authorities evinces this pattern of sovereign violence. The practice of security officials, although characterised by the brutal, violent treatment of incarcerated individuals, was not necessarily versed with the intent to terminate their physical life, to kill their zoë.Instead, it aimed at the quality of life, bios, defined by Foucault (1978: 145) as “[t]he ‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienations,’ the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be”. In this sense, quality of life instead of physical life is the target of the techniques of sovereign power in the zones of indistinction. By implication, instead of simple, fierce attacks on the flesh of homines sacri—associated with the sovereign right to kill—the objective was, as Rejali (1994: 14) similarly found in his study of clean torture in Iran, “to locate, isolate, and cripple the prisoner’s ‘soul’”. The violation of something as elusive as one’s spirit, however, necessitates a more sophisticated approach to torture. In line with Rejali’s findings (1994), torture in Egypt during the last four decades was elaborate, methodological, and systematised. Contrary to the official claims that routinely claimed torture to be a product of haphazardness and individual failure, the accounts of the police whistle-blowers, corroborated by the extensive records of human rights groups, point to a different reality. In the booklet Ashan ma tandarbesh ‘ala ifak… (So you won’t get beaten on your neck…) meant to provide guidelines for ordinary Egyptians on how to avoid police abuse, Omar al-Afifi (2008), a former police officer, informs Egyptians, among others, about what forms of physical and psychological abuses they can expect to encounter while in the custody of the security forces. Roughly a decade before al-Afifi’s booklet appeared, Hamdi al-Batran,

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another police officer, published a realistic novel Yawmiyyat dabit fi al-rif (Diaries of an officer in the countryside), in which he critically reflected on the use of excessive force, ill-treatment, and torture in the context of counterterrorism practice in Upper Egypt. A third prominent whistleblower, Mahmoud al-Qotri, a former Brigadier General, authored two daunting books about the practices of the Egyptian security apparatus: Itirafat dabit shurta fe mamlaket al-za’ab (The Confessions of a police officer in the Kingdom of Wolves) and Tazweer Dawla (The Forgery of a Country); in which he confirms that torture was a common interrogation method that was systematically used by the security forces: Of course the methodology is no where [sic] documented. Still the methodology is there. It has basics and rules that form its foundation. You should never believe that torture is the result of individuals breaches [sic] by officers of public authority, even if widespread. (Qotri quoted in al-Nadeem Center 2006: 90)

Torture sessions integrated knowledge, methods, and instruments derived from fields such as medicine, psychology, and engineering that exposed the physical body to an elaborate array of attacks. Equipped with scientific knowledge, Mubarak’s officials were in a position to bring tortured individuals to the verge of death without killing them. Some torture sessions were even attended by a doctor, whose responsibilities ranged from determining an individual’s endurance, selecting torture methods, and resuscitation to providing medical treatment after a torture session (Adly 2007: 27; al-Nadeem Center 2005: 4). This is not to say that the security officials genuinely cared for the life of incarnated persons. Their life was of no value, but it was not necessarily designated to be physically terminated. Instead, as argued above, it is one’s spirit, identified by Rejali (1994: 14) as “a point slightly beyond the body […] a finer, more diffuse object, a human life”, that through a sophisticated focus on the physical body was rendered a terrain of sovereign power operation in the hands of Egyptian security officials. This form of sovereign violence targets aspects of an individual beyond his physical composition. Ideally, it leaves no physical traces or few visible traces. Yet, it causes physical and/or mental pain. The psychological trauma it produces impairs the targeted individual for a long time after the physical injuries were healed if not for the rest of their life. This form of modern violence referred to as clean torture (for a study on ‘clean torture’

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see Hilbrand 2015), included the routinised practice of blindfolding, stripping down to underwear, using personal insults, language offensive to devout Muslims, sleep deprivation, and tape-recorded screams. This was often accompanied by diverse threats, including humiliation, torture, and sexual abuse of the targeted person or female family members. A former detainee recalled: They threatened to hurt the most important thing in my life. The officer would call the guards and say, ‘By four o’clock I want you to bring Nasr’s wife and daughters here and strip them in front of him.’ (Nasr al-Sayed Hassan Nasr quoted in HRW 2011a: 29)

In Egypt, clean torture incorporated physical violence. One of the most common methods of this art was al-ta’aliq (the suspension by the arms on a half-opened door). As the arms carry the entire body weight, the suspension causes a lot of pain. According to al-Afifi (2008: 219), a former police officer, no one was able to take it. Despite the immense pain, the suspension leaves no visible marks (Adly 2007: 24). Al-kahraba’ (electrocution), regarded by one SSIS detainee as “a must” (HRW 2007: 4), was another frequent clean torture method used by the Egyptian authorities. Since the electrical wires leave very small burns, it is clinically particularly difficult to verify if electrocution has happened. Moreover, the security officers capitalised on this knowledge and choose to electrocute parts of the body, such as the genitals and the spaces between fingers and toes, where medical detection of torture traces is extremely difficult due to the colouration and character of the skin (for the accounts of this practice see Adly 2007: 24; al-Nadeem Center 2005: 51). As some sources suggest, the visibility of torture marks concerned the security authorities. According to al-Afifi (2008: 219), some torture techniques that leave profound traces on the target’s body, such as al-gild (beating a person with a Sudanese whip), were therefore increasingly abandoned. In other cases, the security officials sought effective remedies post-torture. For instance, al-falaka (whipping person’s bare feet) leaves the feet swollen and red; tortured persons were forced to jump on their feet on the wet ground to remove the evidence. Often, as Aida Seif el-Dawla confirmed to me, their injuries were also medically treated (personal interview 2013). An SSIS detainee, who was held incommunicado and tortured first at the SSIS office in Asyut and later at the CSF military camp outside the city, experienced both practices:

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They beat the top part of my feet. […] Then they let me down. My legs were really swollen. They told me to jump because it would make the swelling go down. I couldn’t jump. They brought the electricity to make me jump. I couldn’t stand up at all. They started to shock me, randomly, all over my body. (HRW 1992: 82)

However, after a week, his feet remained swollen and concerned the officers, who decided to take additional precautionary measures: […] the soldiers massaged my legs […]. The next day a policeman brought hot oil and made the soldiers massage it into my legs. The third day, they brought doctors. There were three doctors at the camp. One doctor said there was no problem but another doctor decided to work on my leg. They took me outside the car and the doctor used crude procedures to lance my leg and remove the pus. (HRW 1992: 83)

In addition to the medical treatment or in the lack of thereof, the officers developed further techniques to mask visible traces of maltreatment and torture. According to Ahmed Seif al-Islam, it was quite common for the authorities to rationalise the traces of torture as old injuries. For that reason, it was a prevalent practice that at least three weeks passed between the last torture session and the first medical examination before the detainee was sent to a prosecutor. The lapse of time provided enough time to heal the immediate injuries, which could have then been proclaimed to be old injuries. Another technique to cover up the maltreatment was, as Seif al-Islam recalled in an interview (personal interview 2013), the institutionalisation of an appeal at the court without the presence of the defendant and, thus also without the ability to directly present the torture marks, which was made possible in the late 1980s. The use of clean torture and efforts to mask torture evidence hint at the awareness of security officials that their conduct had overstepped the law. Moreover, it suggests that they might have faced accountability outside the zones of exception. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the suspension of law within the zones of exception allows for lawless behaviour inside the zones, but not necessarily outside of them. The transition between the outside and inside is thus precarious even for security officials who act as the gatekeepers enjoying the untouchable status. Their position was a product of power and thus was, like any other power relation, subjected to possible change at any point in the future. This said, no

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matter how favourable the power relation matrix might be for the security authorities, the security officials implicated in maltreatment, torture, and extrajudicial killings, cannot be ever completely certain that they will not be held accountable for their deeds in the future. It is no coincidence that those security officials implicated in dire forms of torture and extrajudicial killings were keen to keep their identities protected. Because of the constant blindfold and use of false names by officers, Moorehead (2005: 35) notices that most torture victims never learned the identity of their tormentors. Thus, although the existence of the zones of indistinction and the sovereign violence occurring within was, according to experienced human rights defenders Ahmed Seif al-Islam and Aida elDawla, common knowledge, security officials, as well as those prosecutors and state forensic experts who were complicit in covering up torture and maltreatment over the last four decades, acted as if these facilities do not exist in order to protect themselves while upholding the patina of legality and a functioning law state. “Produced” Evidence The securitisation narrative about the terrorist threat has dominated the security discourse in Egypt for several decades (see Chapter 3). To a large extent, the expertise of the security authorities built up through the everyday counterterrorism practice contributed to securitisation’s persistence. Yet, instead of a reasonable expectation to investigate terrorism cases, the Mubarak regime put considerable pressure on the security institutions to “produce” evidence, deliver cases, and thereby to strengthen the securitisation narrative about the terrorist threat necessary to uphold the exceptional policies and justify the existence of zones of exception and related impunity of the security officials. A former prosecutor observed that: The mabahith (Criminal Investigations) [SSIS] are under huge pressure to produce results. Their promotion relies on the number of cases they manage to resolve so they are constantly focused on how to get cases [solved]. (A former prosecutor quoted in HRW 2011a: 18)

To keep up with the institutional pressure, security officials routinely turned to torture as an easy means to produce “evidence” and build their cases. Torture as such constituted an extremely “efficient” mechanism for

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interrogating, producing cases, and thus also for maintaining and possibly increasing the overall performance of Egypt’s security apparatus (HRW 2011a: 18). Accordingly, the officers aimed to extract all the meaningful information they could, if this as such existed at all. Or, more commonly, they sought to squeeze the targeted person into making up information. This usually happened in the following way, described by a former torture victim: [w]hen you are being tortured, you reach a state that you’ve said all the facts, basically, but the torture doesn’t stop so you reach the conclusion that he [the State Security officer] wants you to say what the interrogator wants to hear, so you start saying what the interrogator wants to hear. So you fall actually into that trap. And sometimes you even elaborate even more than the guy wants to hear. So this extra information that you gave him, this means that he will torture you more to get even more extra information and will torture the others in order to complete the new plot now. (HRW 2007: 45, note 67)

The dubious quality of the extracted content notwithstanding, the information gained from security targets was a desired commodity to the security officials. Produced through diverse methods, the extracted information legitimised the counterterrorism campaign. The information, which was used to map and reconstruct people’s real or assumed names, networks, activities, criminal involvement, and so forth, also reconfirmed the meaningfulness and irreplaceability of the security apparatus as a protective guardian of the society. The implausibility of coerced testimonies and confessions and the failure of the security apparatus to achieve results through legal methods of investigation notwithstanding, torture, as Mohamed Zarei confirmed in an interview to me, developed over the time into the most effective and successful method of criminal investigation (personal interview 2013). The case of al-Tai’fa al-Mansura (the Victorious Sect), an alleged terrorist group, highlights both aspects. In early 2006, twenty-two alleged members of the Victorious Sect were arrested and accused of preparing a terrorist plot, an ordeal intensely followed by the national media. The case was presented to the public as evidence of terrorist activities and the unflagging security risk related to terrorism. In view of the Ministry of Interior, the arrest highlighted the national counterterrorism efforts:

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to abort any move to form terror organizations, proven over the past period to be posing lethal threats, stemming from their spontaneity and randomness—based on deviant extremist ideas which have nothing to do with the true Islam, and in response to the fallout from international and regional events. (A statement of the Egyptian Ministry of Interior quoted in HRW 2007: 15)

Accordingly, media coverage hailed the security apparatus for its vigilance in the fight against terrorism. Moreover, it also disclosed the personal data of the defendants along with the photographs taken of them while in custody which, according to one of the defendants, visually framed them as prototypes of terrorists: We were tortured daily until a photographer came and took pictures of us that were broadcast on Egyptian television on April 19, 2006. Of course, our beards were long and our hair looked like Mongols’ — we truly looked like terrorists… (HRW 2007: 44)

Although the case of the Victorious Sect was presented as a great success of counterterrorism prevention, an extensive Human Rights Watch report asserts that “it appears that SSI may have fabricated the allegations made against at least some and possibly all of them [alleged members of the Victorious Sect]” (HRW 2007: 2). The report also suggested that the Victorious Sect plot was merely the result of coerced testimonies of the involved suspects. As one of the former detainees who was held with the group recounted: The guys would say they’d be tortured so bad, they’d be screaming, ‘Tell me what you want me to say! Tell us what to say and we’ll say it!’ They’d agree to confirm anything State security wanted. (HRW 2007: 4)

The release orders signed by the State Security prosecutors only a few months after the big public disclosure implicitly pointed at the lack of any conceivable evidence to prosecute the case. As Mohamed Zarei, a lawyer acquainted with the case, summarised: The prosecutor could easily have referred the case for prosecution. If they had the smallest suspicion—1/1000th of a suspicion—that these guys were actually guilty of anything, or dangerous, they would have referred the case

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to court or to a military tribunal. Just by the fact that they did not take legal action against these detainees, this shows that the case is fabricated… (Mohamed Zarei quoted in HRW 2007: 51)

The case of the Victorious Sect was taken by media to a broader public discourse regardless of its validity and the fact that the case was never brought to the court. This was one of many instances in which the discursive truth about the looming terrorist threat was (re)produced. Supported by the visual portraits of the suspects widely distributed through the media, it provided tangible evidence for the public of the omnipresence of the terrorist threat. The story, though it was built upon coerced testimonies and fabricated evidence, enhanced the continuity of the counterterrorism campaign. At the same time, it also reconfirmed the meaningfulness and irreplaceability of the security apparatus, since it highlighted the effective performance of security forces in fighting terrorism. As the Victorious Sect case shows, the productivity of the security apparatus does not automatically imply quality. The speed of the investigation, amount of cases, and attractiveness of the story to the media were what mattered most in cases. These were the key criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of an individual security official, department, or institution, and to determine the meaningfulness and irreplaceability of the entire security apparatus (al-Nadeem Center 2006: 91f). Life in Shreds Torture provided more than a way to extract information and enforce testimonies necessary to build cases and produce “evidence” of a vital terrorist threat. It also functioned as a means to wreck the spirit of incarnated individuals. The desecration of one’s spirit is an integral feature and an elaborate aim of modern torture symptomatic to the operation of Egyptian officers. Torture, in this sense, takes aim at the bios, the dignified form of life of incarnated individuals and alters, as Rejali (1994: 76) notes, targeted subjects “into asocial, apolitical, and dependent individuals if it does not deliver a personality in shreds”. In the context of modern torture, bodily harm is simply not enough. The aimed goal is to break the spirit of the targeted individual and thus his capacity to meaningfully act and resist. Adly, based on her clinical experience with torture victims in Egypt, observed:

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Despite the fact that the ways of bodily torture leave great mental wounds in the victim’s soul, this does not suffice for the perpetrators. They thus use other means directed primarily at destroying one’s mental defence and humanity. (Adly 2007: 25)

Ahmed, an alleged member of the Victorious Sect, is one of an endless number of torture victims who, as a direct result of maltreatment by SSIS officers, experienced a mental breakdown. His story illustrates the disruption of one’s bios essential to the modern form of sovereign violence. Ahmed’s inmate and a former SSIS detainee recounted the story: Ahmed said that at that time [after months of torture by the SSIS], he was in ‘a weird state.’ The officer brought him a cup of tea and talked to him, but he couldn’t focus at all on what he was saying and what he was doing then. He said he was just looking at his feet, and pouring the tea on his toes and just playing with his toes, and he didn’t know why he was doing this. This was his mental state at the end. (A former SSIS detainee quoted in HRW 2007: 50)

At first sight, it might appear that the destruction of one’s mental health emerged as a byproduct of information extraction. However, the staff of al-Nadeem Center Aida Seif el-Dawla and Basma Mohammad had other findings. Based on their experience in dealing with torture victims, el-Dawla and Mohammad claimed that there were abundant torture cases carried out by security officers just to terrorise and break the spirit of the targeted individuals without an objective of acquiring data from their victims. This was, for instance, a common practice to which members of political opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood members, were subjected. According to el-Dawla, the security officials frequently apprehended, tortured, and terrorised Muslim Brothers without any attempt to interrogate them or obtain information from them (personal interviews with Aida Seif el-Dawla and Basma Mohammad 2013). The Middle East Watch came to a similar conclusion: The government, for example, knows the active leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood. But when the Brotherhood splits from the government line, as it did on the Madrid peace conference, some of its members are taken in and tortured. There are no investigative purposes for this torture. (An Egyptian lawyer quoted in HRW 1992: 72)

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Based on their experience as human rights lawyers, Hafiz Abu Seada and Mohamed Zarei recounted that torture to threaten and to punish usually came into play when the targeted person had resisted biopolitical optimisation and was thus classified as beyond the tolerable bandwidth of Egypt’s docile society (personal interviews with Hafiz Abu Seada and Mohamed Zarei 2013). The disobedient and defying spirit was to be rendered harmless through violence in the zones of indistinction. In this respect, the existence of the zones of exception and the torture occurring within them played a key role in defining “the limits of acceptable political activity” (HRW 1992: 72). For the security authorities in Egypt, fear was an essential element to keep the exceptional security operations running. The primary form of fear associated with the contingency of the terrorist threat legitimised the exceptional practice. The secondary form of fear associated with their exceptional practice centrally influences the readiness of the populace to question the securitisation process, deters them from engaging with the apparatus and often impairs the capacity of individuals to resist (see Chapter 5). For the latter form of fear, torture was its core instrument. Specifically, fear emerged as an immediate effect of the sovereign violence to which a person was exposed. This form of fear came as a direct effect of physical and mental violence related to the surrendering of the targeted person to the will of the security officers. Fear of further torture or repercussions on relatives, inspired, for instance, by frequent threats of sexual abuse of the female relatives, wrecked the capacity of the targeted person to resist and made him yield to the pressure (see HRW 2011a: 75; Shehat and Zarei 2001). The immediate fear often transformed into a long-term condition that lasted long after the targeted individual left the custody; victims were overcome with “fear and terror [of being] exposed to that painful experience again” (al-Nadeem Center 2005: 42). Chronic fear featured a form of dread of the security officers and their retribution. A sophisticated combination of intimidation methods and continuous ostracisation by security officials after the torture victim was released nurtured this form of fear (see al-Ghumri 1999: 22; Sassoon 2016: 132). The intimidation methods involved, for instance, officers visiting homes or speaking directly to targets in the street. The threats were, however, as Basma Mohammad noted, also often communicated through a third person, such as a neighbour, a friend, or a colleague, or delivered through anonymous phone calls. Although, as Aida Seif el-Dawla observed, the strategy of torture

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to terrorise was only partially successful since, for some, the torture experience re-strengthened the resistance and determination to revenge (personal interviews with Aida Seif el-Dawla and Basma Mohammad 2013). For most torture victims, it was successful; the painful experience left them partially paralysed, with trauma often transforming into feelings of anxiety and attacks of panic, shame, and guilt (see Adly 2007: 32ff or a similar account). Moreover, out of fear of possible retaliation, the torture victims often refused to take any action against the perpetrators. Thus, they strengthened the impunity of the security apparatus. Most torture victims decided to keep silent and did not file legal complaints. This corresponds with the scheme of self-restrained conduct shaped by justified fears to be targeted by the security officials again. This is aptly summarised in a Human Rights Watch report from 2011: One reason why intimidation effectively scares off complainants is because they know how easy it is for officers to detain them on trumped-up charges. They also know how painful detention will be, even if it is only for a few days, because of the likelihood of torture. This is particularly the case when detainees are expected to report a complaint of torture whilst still in the custody of law enforcement officers. (HRW 2011a: 54)

The silence of the torture victims is also related to the social stigmatisation associated with being arrested and tortured. This was especially the case for those who were sexually abused; the social conservatism of Egyptian society casts aside victims of sexual abuse, destroying their image and social status. Therefore, as Basma Mohammad recalled from her praxis at al-Nadeem Center, despite the existence of many cases of sexual abuse by the security officers, no victims were willing to publish their stories because of the fear it would ruin their social standing. Torture victims often fell into the trap of victim-blaming, even from their immediate social surroundings. They encountered, Basma Mohammad continued, condemning reactions from their relatives, neighbours, and colleagues, who ascribed them responsibility for what had happened to them: if you would not have gone there, it would not have happened to you (personal interview with Basma Mohammad 2013). In the Mubarak era, there was also widely accepted knowledge that the sovereign violence was limited to those individuals who were politically active:

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We knew about police brutality, but I think we were hoping that they were doing it for the best of the people and the country. For example, I could understand why they were putting political prisoners in jail. (An anonymous respondent quoted in Salem 2014: 30)

In a similar vein, Aida Seif el-Dawla recounted that when politically active persons were tortured, it was in a certain way “clear” why that happened to them. However, for those who were not involved in any kind of political activities, it was more difficult to make sense of torture for themselves. Those around them did not understand it either. Therefore, the torture victims were often confronted with distrust from their family and neighbours who, in efforts to rationalise the abuse, assumed that “they must have done something wrong”, perhaps related to drugs or prostitution. Through social stigmatisation and the blaming of the torture victim for his grievance, the victim re-experienced his trauma. This was perceived by many, according to Basma Mohammad, as worse than the torture itself. Moreover, the label of having committed an unspecified social deviance was a powerful instrument in the hands of the authorities, for it was virtually impossible to clean one’s name vis-a-vis the official accusation. In this regard, the social stigma was a powerful tool that produced fear and accordingly hampered the capacity of the individual to resist—to file a complaint, to make the case public, or to simply share the trauma with close ones—and thus prevented them from soothing the pain and rehabilitating their own spirit (personal interview with Aida Seif el-Dawla and Basma Mohammad 2013). It is noteworthy to mention that despite the right to file a complaint about being tortured and thus to institute a legal proceeding, the state did not provide an effective remedy to victims for abusive treatment by security officials. Article 126 of the Egyptian Criminal Code reduces the act of torture to practices used for the extraction of information. Thus, if a confession was not the objective, the abuse was in practice not classified as torture (el-Dawla 2009: 129). The Criminal Code also stipulated mild punishments for torture-related charges. Similarly, an unintentional killing—a frequent result of excessive torture—was according to Hafiz Abu Seada punished by prison time from a week up to three years. The lack of political and juridical acknowledgement for victims of torture and ill-treatment, which was further supported by the societal stigma attached to torture victims, meant that most torture cases did not even reach the courts (personal interview with Hafiz Abu Seada 2013). Thus, an

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extensive record of torture cases over three decades of Mubarak’s reign notwithstanding, no SSIS officer was ever convicted of torture charges (HRW 2011b). Sadly, this pattern did not change in the post-Mubarak era. The state authorities continue to turn a blind eye to extensive abuses of the security authorities. Moreover, the state authorities actively pushed for a legal cover of the abusive conduct. In August 2013, the security forces massacred more than 1000 civilians during the dispersal of a pro-Mursi protest. The use of lethal force was extensive. Despite the number of civilian casualties, to date, no security officials have been held responsible for the massacre. Five years later, the Law on the Treatment of Senior Military Commanders (2018/161), adopted in 2018, made it functionally impossible to hold security officials accountable for such crimes. Article 5 of the Law secures legal immunity for the senior officials unless the SCAF states otherwise. The legal immunity applies to the investigation of crimes committed during periods in which the constitution was suspended. That said, senior security officials cannot be held accountable for any crimes committed between 12 February 2011 (suspension of the 1971 Constitution) and 23 January 2012 (the seating of parliament), and between 3 July 2013 (suspension of the 2012 Constitution) and 1 January 2016 (the seating of parliament) (CIHRS 2018). Proliferation of Fear Even though something as abstract as fear is empirically difficult to trace, there was a common knowledge, especially in the last decade of Mubarak’s reign, that “[e]verybody constituted a possible target” (Salem 2014: 30). The stories about police abuses spread informally among people, accompanied by the fear of the security apparatus (see e.g. Ismail 2006: 129ff). The security apparatus and the SSIS in particular became an institution which, in the words of Rabia (2011: 113), “scared Egyptians and planted fear in their hearts and minds” and which used fear to achieve docility of the governed society. This form of fear that produced and proliferated through sovereign techniques of violence clearly bore wider ramifications that went beyond whether to take or not to take legal action against the torture perpetrators. It significantly influenced the will of the governed society to question and defy the existing societal and political order. Ultimately, this fear undermined the societal life and restrained Egyptians from expressing their discontent (Adly 2007: 90; Ghonim 2012: 3).

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This type of fear has been a central theme of the authoritarian structures in Egypt. It was and still is a powerful factor that has paralysed the emergence of meaningful resistance to the existing political order. Fear has debilitated the capacity of the populace to question the existing political order by activating anxieties about likely consequences if one defies. All people see how male and female protesters are dealt with, how whole cities are isolated, their inhabitants disciplined, thousands of their sons detained… and this is the result desired by the decision-makers… formation of general public awareness that every citizen is a potential victim of torture or an arrest… […] The authorities succeeded in terrorizing everyone… They succeeded in plundering citizens’ souls and planting fear in their hearts and indifference to the country, its fate and future. (Adly 2007: 22)

In Mubarak’s Egypt, this fear induced a form of self-constrained conduct as it conveyed the awareness that virtually anyone could be labelled as disobedient for any activity and thus rendered a homo sacer in one of the detention dens (see Ghonim 2012: 3). Especially in the final decade of Mubarak’s reign, the fear of being subjected to arbitrary decisions of the security officers reached such an extent that when walking down the street, the mere presence of security officials on the street made some change direction in order to avoid confrontation (Salem 2014: 31). Fear of arbitrary sovereign violence was not limited to those who had been tortured in SSIS custody. The horrifying stories of homines sacri often discouraged their immediate surroundings from confronting the authorities. This, for instance, illustrates why several people who witnessed the fatal beating of Khalid Said—who on the eve of the 2011 revolution became a symbol of the human rights abuses in Egypt—refused to testify. I [one of the key witnesses, Haitham Misbah] spent days trying to convince people to go and testify, but everyone was too scared. Especially because after the incident, officers from Sidi Gaber police station came to our area and indirectly threatened people not to cause trouble. Everyone was scared that the same thing could happen to them if they reported what had happened. (A key witness to the murder of Khalid Said quoted in HRW 2011a: 53)

Although the 2011 revolution undermined the barrier of fear that had restrained the expression of societal discontent for decades, it occurred

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only for a short period of time. In mid-2013, in the aftermath of Mursi’s ousting, the barrier was re-erected. Observers compared Egypt ruled by al-Sisi to Brezhnev’s Soviet Union (Jebreal 2016). The fear that rapidly proliferated through the arbitrary enforcement of counterterrorism measures paralysed the remnants of the active opposition and effectively annulled the spirits and hopes that many Egyptians had pinned to the outcomes of the 2011 revolution. According to Hamzawy (2015), fear became a central element of al-Sisi’s leadership. His government operates in “a state of pure tyranny, which thrives in a republic of fear and hides behind the banner of Egyptian patriotism, all the while exploiting crimes of terrorism, which are used to justify further oppression, subjection, and disregard of rights and freedoms” (Hamzawy 2015). The vague wording of the newly adopted laws invited wide interpretation by law enforcement authorities. Although Egypt finally introduced a comprehensive Anti-Terror Law in 2015 after more than three decades of a counterterrorism campaign (as discussed in Chapter 2), the distinction between a terrorist and an optimised citizen is not defined by the law but rather by individual decisions of petty sovereigns that take advantage of the vagueness. As a result, a wide swath of Egyptians, including minors, have been labelled and treated as terrorist suspects. As the case of the teenager Khaled Bakara shows, a trivial reason such as possession of a ruler with a Raba’a sign, a symbol associated with supporters of the ex-President Muhammad Mursi, is enough to be classified as a terrorist. The display of Raba’a symbol is, under the Anti-Terror Law, interpreted as explicit support of a terrorist organisation, which is punishable up to five years of imprisonment. Bakara was thus detained and investigated for belonging to a banned terrorist group (al-Jazeera 2014; Kingsley 2013). In another case, the security officials detained and investigated Mahmud Hussein, a teenage student, for more than two years. The trigger of Hussein’s detention and accusation of belonging to a banned terrorist group and attending unauthorised protests was the fact he was wearing a T-Shirt with an inscription “The nation without torture” and a scarf with the logo of the 2011 revolution (AI 2016a, b). As both cases underscore, simply wearing a T-shirt or displaying the Raba’a sign can be considered sufficient criteria for security agents to decide about one’s undesirability and designate a person a terrorist, or at least a supporter of terrorism. In authoritarian regimes, such criteria

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“may bear little resemblance to the law, but relations between state officials and society come to have a predictable rhythm. People understand where the red lines are, and they can choose to stay within them or to step across” (Stacher 2016). Yet, in al-Sisi’s Egypt, there has been little certainty or clarity about what the criteria of (un)desirability might be in other cases. Whether the law has been transgressed or not is a result of genuine sovereign decisions of security officials. Their superior position, which has been supported by the vague legislation that invite abusive conduct, strengthens their role as petty sovereigns. The boosted self-esteem of security agents translates into increased arbitrary use of sovereign violence in their everyday encounters with Egyptians. Over the last seven years, security officials have increasingly resorted to torture, sexual violence, and extrajudicial executions to address anyone they perceived to have contested the legitimacy of the post-coup leadership. In this regard, Amnesty International speaks of repressive measures which target “[a]nyone who dares to speak out is at risk, with counterterrorism being used as an excuse to abduct, interrogate and torture people who challenge the authorities” (AI 2016c). In this context, it is not surprising that the extensive arbitrariness in the use of sovereign violence also increased insecurity among Egyptians about what conduct is desirable and what is not; and thus, it also reinforced the paralysing effect of fear of becoming a homo sacer. Regardless of whether we address Egypt under Mubarak or al-Sisi, fear of torture, arrest, and curse of security authorities was a firm part of the Egyptian authoritarian structures that contributed to the authoritarian resilience of the Egyptian state. At the individual level, fear disciplined Egyptians, as the Egyptian proverb says, “timshi ganb ‘ala al-khait ” (to walk along the wall), to mind their own business and focus on own livelihood (see also Ghonim 2012: 3). At the societal level, it contributed to the optimisation of the population in its entirety since fear proliferation was necessary to (re)confirm the government’s control over society. As much as fear is a powerful emotion that weakened the will of many Egyptians to resist; it is not powerful enough, as Aida el-Dawla noted, to neutralise everyone. There were and still are Egyptians, such as Khalid Said’s family, who overcame their fear of the security authorities and social stigma. The Said family turned their son’s death into one of the largest Egyptian mobilisations against torture and human rights abuses by the security apparatus. Another example is the family of Alaa Abdal Fattah, who tirelessly campaigned against the abuses of the security authorities

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and demanded rights for their arbitrarily detained son and brother. Thus, although fear nurtured and proliferated by the operation of the security apparatus has significantly constrained the field of conduct of Egyptians, it has never completely paralysed people’s capacity to resist (this discussion continues in the next chapter).

The Rule of Petty Sovereigns As discussed earlier in this chapter, the state of emergency and draconian counterterrorism legislation would not have been possible without the sovereign decisions of the political elite. Yet, it is obvious that Egypt’s leaders—be it Husni Mubarak or Abdal Fattah al-Sisi—did not assess whether or not individual persons evaluated by the security officers as possible security threats would be transformed into a homo sacer and subjected to the sovereign violence in the zones of indistinction. In practice, the operation of sovereign power is “decentered in the practices of everyday life”, while at the same time, it is centralised in the political leadership’s decision on exception (Nadesan 2008: 186). Centralised and decentralised simultaneously, the sovereign decision on exception was essential to everyday operations of the security apparatus. Its diffusion among individual security officials encouraged practices and strategies that bolstered the role of security agents as petty sovereigns. The daily decisions on exception are made by officers, plainclothes detectives, and other petty security bureaucrats primarily involved in the process of evaluating and accessing security risks linked to the terrorism threat. By virtue of their position and the empowerment provided by the securitisation process, the security agents were authorised to determine who constitutes a security risk and should be treated exceptionally. Their decisions matter. It was up to them whether an individual is apprehended, detained, tortured, or killed. As Sherif Farag, who was imprisoned in alHadra prison facility, noted in his letter from prison, “[h]ere we began to learn that the officer is the source of life: he can give or can take away, tempt or withhold, carrying life or death, depending on his whims” (al-Nadeem Center 2014: 85–86). Although the sovereign decision on exception was diffused among thousands of security officials, this does imply a haphazard identification of security targets. The decision about whom to single out as fitting the constructed image of a terrorist was an outcome informed by the biopolitical optimisation of the Egyptian society that distinguishes between

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desirable, acceptable people and undesirable, dangerous forms of life (see also Tagma 2009: 428). Thus, it was not a given natural fact formed in an information vacuum nor the result of a transcendent sovereign decision, as Agamben’s position on the state of exception would suggest. The knowledge about the terrorist threat, produced and proliferated in the discourse through the ongoing securitisation process provided a detailed definition of alleged terrorists and, as such, guided the everyday decisions of the security officials about who to suspect, monitor, arrest, and turn into a homo sacer. In Egypt’s counterterrorism context under Mubarak, as discussed in detail in Chapter 3, the figure of the Islamist was the epitome of the terrorist and dominated the security discourse as a central enemy image. The terrorist was portrayed through stereotyped symbols of Islamic religiosity and devoutness, such as a specifically cut beard or conservative Islamic clothes. Such easily distinguishable features served as points of easy orientation for the security officials in their everyday decisions on exception. The outer symbols of religious devoutness were often sufficient for an official to take notice. A human rights researcher recalled that “State Security regularly calls in men with beards, but not just bearded guys, but others perceived to be religious” (quoted in HRW 2007: 64). By implication, if one’s appearance showed patterns of an Islamic appearance, the person was at a higher risk of being monitored, apprehended, and possibly turned into a homo sacer as a suspected Islamist terrorist (see also HRW 1992). As Gamal Eid, an attorney and human rights activist, observed: First, State Security regularly conducts arrests of youth randomly; religious or not. I’ve seen this myself: you’re in a square or on a street and you’ll see the police, with State Security, randomly arresting young men. Not Islamists precisely, but general sweeps of men. Or you see the police carry out the arrests, and then they transfer some people to State Security: they take them all to the police station and conduct ID checks on them. Some are kept in the police station. Others, their record shows they’ve been detained by State Security, they are transferred to State Security… if it turns out one or two of them has a record of being arrested by State Security, or if he has a long beard and looks religious, they will transfer them to State Security. These criminal sweeps occur regularly, all the time. Second, [SSI conducts] sweeps targeting people who are perceived to be religious, for instance, outside a mosque or a place where religious kids hang out. (Gamal Eid quoted in HRW 2007: 62 italics added by the author)

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The religious appearance was so strongly associated with an assumed terrorist threat that some men shaved their beards as a precaution (alNadeem Center 2006: 37). There were, nevertheless, others who wore a beard and other religious symbols to express their deliberate defiance of the existing sociopolitical order (Azzam 1986). In late 2013, the repertoire of visual features associated with the terrorist enemy was extended to include the Raba’a emblem, a four-fingered salute on a yellow background. The symbol is primarily used to express solidarity with the hundreds of pro-Mursi protesters who were killed and injured during forceful dispersals of sit-ins in al-Nahda and Raba’a al-Adawiyya squares in 2013. Yet, it soon overcame this reference. It became a general symbol of opposition used by the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters. Being a resident of an informal housing area also increased the likelihood of being spotted by security officials and taken to the zones of indistinction. Slum areas ranked at the top of the list of areas believed to be centres of fanaticism and safe havens for terrorists (Dorman 2009: 421; Kepel 1995: 238f). This classification, nurtured over decades, gained momentum especially in the early 1990s at the peak of a bloody confrontation between the state and al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya during which al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya’s stronghold in Imbaba, a densely populated informal area of Greater Cairo, was defeated through tough counterterrorism manoeuvres (see e.g. HRW 1995). Even before the Imbaba siege, the slums had been referred to by the media as haphazard areas or manatiq ashwaiyya, abbreviated to ashwaiyyat, a pejorative for a social disorder. The Imbaba siege, however, brought a new layer to its negative discursive image. It linked the slums with the terrorist activity and hence sealed the relegation of ashwaiyyat to a target for specific securitisation and counterterrorism efforts in Egypt. Accordingly, after the Imbaba siege, the ashwaiyyat label became increasingly problematised as a socio-spatial disorder, which reinforced the unacceptability of its inhabitants. The informal areas became viewed as places of “refuge for criminals and uncivilized rural migrants (often Upper Egyptian)” (Dorman 2009: 427) as well as areas of “a Hobbesian locus of lawlessness and extremism, producing a ‘culture of violence’ and an ‘abnormal’ way of life” (Bayat and Denis 2000: 185). The security officials assessed ashwaiyyat and their inhabitants as potential security risks on a regular basis and despite the unsuitability of the informal areas for a police operation due to their chaotic order, lack of street names, and unpaved alleyways unfitting for police cars, were keen to police these

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areas and toughen the security measures within (Bayat and Denis 2000: 198; Ismail 2006: 144). The “identikit” of an assumed terrorist enemy also included abundant references to his presumed behaviour and social background. As in any other authoritarian context, it was well-established knowledge that any kind of oppositional political or societal engagement was routinely assessed as undesirable and a possible security threat (Adly 2007: 22; Salem 2014: 30). Yet, especially from the 1990s on, the conduct which was deemed suspicious and a threat to national security became increasingly irrelevant to the political engagement of an individual. Aida Seif el-Dawla and Basma Mohammed observed that the political detainees were only the tip of the iceberg. Based on the everyday practices, they pointed out that there were thousands of Egyptians, “no-names” as el-Dawla referred to them, who were subjected to the sovereign decisions of security officials and transformed into homines sacri despite their apparent abstention from any political involvement (personal interview with Aida Seif el-Dawla and Basma Mohammad 2013). The report by alNadeem Center (2006: 7) summarises how this norm prevailed through the mid-2000s: In Egypt, torture is not restricted to political dissidents. It is practiced against those suspected of committing crimes, and against many who are not suspects of anything. It is done as a compliment for those in power as a form of intimidation and ‘teaching a lesson’ to others who are of a lesser social status. It is done to hostages taken by the police in exchange for those ‘wanted’. It is used as a disciplinary policy against who [sic] neighborhoods, towns, and villages. It is also done to people who refuse to act as police informers, despite the harassment by policemen.

The suspicious conduct became an inconsistent construct of the securitisation process and hence also a subject of a wide interpretation by security officials in their everyday encounters with Egyptians. Provided the exceptional framework associated with the fight against terrorism, security officials were given a blank check to evaluate virtually any activity, including the defiance of their own authority, as a threat to national security. By implication, the exception allowed for unlimited numbers of Egyptians to be categorised as security targets (see also HRW 2011a: 14f). This pattern has been barely revised since Mubarak’s removal in 2011. The “war on terror”, relaunched in 2013, went clearly beyond targeting

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Islamists designated as terrorists. Soon after the forceful clearance of the pro-Mursi’s sit-ins in August 2013, the military-backed administration began to crack down on a wide spectrum of opponents. Hundreds of people, including prominent political activists and leading figures of the 2011 revolution, such as Alaa Abdal Fattah, Ahmed Douma, Ahmed Maher, Mahinour Elmasry, or Yara Salam, as well as ordinary Egyptians who criticised the government on a variety of issues, have been persecuted and imprisoned along with the Brotherhood’s members and other Islamists (see e.g. HRW 2015). Today, not all of the approximately 60,000 prisoners of consciousness housed in Egyptian prisons are known activists or prominent public persons. In fact, most of the prisoners are “no-names” and hundreds are minors who were tortured and imprisoned by mistake or sentenced to years of imprisonment for minor offences to years of imprisonment. Some are even slated to be executed for fabricated terrorism-crimes (Abdullah 2016). Make yourself at (home) prison (Mohammden and Fouda: undated), a guide to being arrested, investigated, and prison life in Egypt published by the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information dedicated especially to the Egyptian youth underlines the extent of the abusive practices sanctioned by al-Sisi’s regime. Unlimited Exception In the early phases of the “war on terror” in the 1980, the exception was limited in scope. The exceptional measures were used primarily by the SSIS officials to crack down on militant Islamists associated with armed groups such as al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, al-Jihad, or Takfir wa-l-Hijra. These groups were, at the time, the primary target of the security authorities (see e.g. AI 1991; el-Dawla 2009; HRW 1992). Yet, over time, the exception transformed into a liberally applied tool used to discipline anyone the security authorities chose. Analytically speaking, the exception expanded in two interrelated dimensions: institutional and spatial, while it gradually incorporated an increasing number of targets. Especially in the 2000s and the 2010s, the exception advanced past the enclosed security compounds and infiltrated streets and public spaces. There is no doubt that the vague legal definition of terrorism combined with broad powers granted to the security authorities aided the spread of the Agambenian exception. It empowered the security agents to act above the law and target individuals other than credible militants.

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In the early Mubarak era, the Agambenian exception was an exclusive SSIS’ modus operandi. The SSIS, trusted to lead the counterterrorism campaign, was authorised to adopt exceptional measures to hunt down al-Sadat’s assassins and other Islamist militants. Soon, however, the exceptional practice began to include peaceful political opposition, too (for an example, see AI 2002: 11). The impunity, which emerged as a byproduct of the securitisation process and put the security officials virtually above the law, accelerated this evolution. The absent sense of accountability decisively drove the institutional spread of exceptional security practices beyond the SSIS ranks as well as beyond genuine terrorist suspects. Mass arrests of Egyptians who protested the Gulf War in 1991 were an indication of the changing trend. Taking advantage of the ability to arrest arbitrarily, a measure facilitated by the state of emergency, the security officials increasingly began to apprehend and often torture lawyers, human rights activists, journalists, and students en masse. Accordingly, as many human rights groups noticed, over the years, the exception became a routinised practice for growing numbers of ordinary police and informal collaborators active in other areas of security enforcing activities, most notably in criminal investigations (al-Nadeem Center 2006: 6ff). Hence, the targets of security authorities, boosted by the institutionalised impunity, grew to embrace also increasing numbers of ordinary citizens, the “no-names”. In January 2011, the Human Rights Watch (2011a) published an extensive report that captured the institutionalised impunity of the Egyptian security apparatus that had evolved over the years. The report, titled Work on him until he confesses, clearly linked the use of sovereign violence to enforce testimonies as they fit the security agents. All of which became a routinised practice of security officials covered by the non-existent accountability to the law. In this context, Aida Seif el-Dawla and Hafiz Abu Seada noted that the “no-name” citizens represented easy targets for sovereign violence of the abusive state authorities. Poor, socially marginalised, and vulnerable “no-name” citizens generally tend to lack wasta (contacts) that could “protect” them from the exposure to the abusive conduct. Taking advantage of their vulnerability, the security agents often targeted such “no-name” individuals to achieve immediate results, such as linking a crime to a specific individual despite the lack of relevant evidence (see also AI 2007: 6). Subjected to dire forms of sovereign violence, the torture victims were usually ready to confess to anything their tormentors wished. This was, for instance, also the case

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of a bus driver from Alexandria who was arrested and tortured until he confessed to having killed his missing daughter. The confession was later proven to be clearly coerced and false, once his daughter reappeared. The reappearance of his daughter notwithstanding, the bus driver continued to be tortured and held until a criminal court acquitted him two years later (AI 2001: 1f). It would be, however, erroneous to relate the Agambenian exception solely to the counterterrorism campaign and criminal investigations. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the security authorities subjected numerous individuals to sovereign violence without any intention of investigating, extracting information, or coercing a confession (see e.g. AI 2002: 10). Sovereign violence was the bottom line for security officials across the individual units to intimidate ordinary people and thus to strengthen their own status as petty sovereigns with the power to determine the desirability and undesirability of others at any time. Given their position, the security agents thus enjoyed an immense feeling of power from vetting and vetoing the lives of others. Often, as noted in a report by al-Nadeem Center (2006: 11), they interpreted seemingly harmless moves, such as asking a security official to show his ID, requesting him to return a package of his own cigarettes, or calming down an argument between an officer and a civilian, as acts which contested their authority. This then necessitated subjecting the individual to sovereign violence. Ahmed Seif al-Islam remarked that if a targeted person appeared as if he did not fear a security officer, the security officer might then want to prove his complete control over the person’s fate, to demonstrate that he could do anything to the targeted person (personal interview with Ahmed Seif al-Islam 2013). Those few state agents who refused their share of complicity in the abusive conduct were targeted too. For instance, prosecutors who contested the authority of the security officials and investigated torture allegations were subjected to threats and intimidation techniques alike. Ayman Okail told me about a case of a prosecutor whose resisting stance was tamed by intimidation of a security official. The prosecutor in question charged the officer with torturing a detained person. In reaction to the torture charges, the officer, according to Okail, instructed several criminals to burglarise the prosecutor’s flat, leaving the flat completely empty. The burglary was later addressed as a criminal case to a chief prosecutor who inquired about the harmed prosecutor, the officer, as well as the burglars about their involvement. Nobody, however, said anything. In

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the end, the prosecutor lifted the torture charges against the officer, and his flat’s furnishings were subsequently returned (personal interview with Ayman Okail 2013). In a continuous trend that began in the 2000s, in the last decade of Mubarak’s reign, the sovereign violence reached public spaces beyond the walls of security buildings. The zones of indistinction were no longer to be restricted to enclosed SSIS compounds and police stations that could have hidden the immediate sovereign violence. The sovereign violence instead became more and more a part of public spectacle. Strengthened by institutionalised impunity, the security officials increasingly began to beat and torture their targets in public. Beatings and torture took place in the streets, in their neighbourhoods, in front of their relatives, neighbours, and passers-by. The exception became fluid and unpredictable. Wherever a security official appeared, there the exception could be temporarily erected. Wherever there is an uncensored police power there is torture. Wherever there are poor citizens who lack strong connections with important people who might save them from police brutality, there is torture. Wherever there are citizens who cherish their pride and dignity, there is torture. Wherever there is political opposition, there is torture. (al-Nadeem Center 2006: 7)

The security officials became so certain of their empowered status, felt so solid in their immunity from prosecution that they often did not seek to mask the use of sovereign violence anymore. A report published by al-Nadeem Center (2006: 13), for instance, documented a case of a man who, because he failed to show at the police station during his probation term, was dragged by the security officials out of his flat into a street where he was beaten, stripped naked, tied with ropes, and dragged on an asphalt road. After, he was sodomised by a stick. This act of sovereign violence occurred in public in front of the man’s entire community. As in many other cases of abusive conduct, in this case, the officers were not punished and maintained their positions. Towards the end of Mubarak’s era, in June 2010, the exception’s normalisation reached a symbolic tipping point. Two plainclothes officers killed Khalid Said, a young blogger, on the street in Alexandria. Said’s death caused a major public uproar, which was further fed by the initial attempt of the authorities to cover up police culpability by raising false drug charges against the victim (HRW 2011a: 20f). In the public

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campaign that followed, Said’s post-mortem bruised face became a key visual symbol of the impunity of the security apparatus. As a member of Egyptian middle-class, Khaled Said was not necessarily a part of the marginalised society that was routinely subjected to sovereign violence. The death of Khaled Said made me realize that the police could do anything to you, and protection through wasta [connections] was no longer guaranteed. If a policeman told me to get out of my car and dance around naked, I would have to do it. (an anonymous respondent quoted in Salem 2014: 32)

Said’s murder was a wake-up call for the middle-class. More empowered sectors of society began to feel as though they could be next; social class and connections no longer served as a guarantee of protection from the exception and sovereign violence (Salem 2014: 34). When Said’s case became public, it made a splash in the media and incited a wave of resistance. For Wael Ghonim, an Egyptian Google Tech and founder of the Facebook page Kullina Khalid Said (We are all Khalid Said), Said’s murder was momentous: Khaled Said was a young man just like me, and what happened to him could have happened to me. All young Egyptians had long been oppressed, enjoying no rights in our own homeland. […] The first thing I posted on the page [Facebook page Kullina Khalid Sa’id] was direct and blunt. […] ‘Today they killed Khaled. If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me’. (Ghonim 2012: 60)

Said’s death symbolically underscored the omnipresence of the Agambenian exception and made many Egyptians realise that Said’s fate could have encountered virtually anyone anywhere. It exposed how immense the impunity of the security apparatus was; there were no longer significant means, not even wasta, to contest the sovereign decisions of the petty security officials (Hibbard and Layton 2010: 204). The exception had become the new norm.

The Exception 2.0 The 2011 uprising sparked hope that security institutions could be reformed and that the exception as the central modus operandi could end. The protests managed to challenge the abusive operation of security authorities aided by the flawed legislation and hence to undermine the asymmetric configuration of power/knowledge relations. Yet, their

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success was only relative. The uprising failed to link the repressive security mechanisms to the narrative about the terrorist threat and thus to challenge “the truth” which had nurtured and legitimised the existence of the exception. Given the previous decades of sustained anti-Brotherhood campaigning, the reign of the Brotherhood from June 2012 to July 2013 was unsurprisingly short-lived. The Brotherhood was largely given the cold shoulder by the Egyptian public. The Brotherhood’s partisanship, its inability to stabilise the country, and failure to reconcile diverse political forces, combined with the deeply rooted “truth” about the connection between Islamists, Brotherhood, and terrorism, raised concerns about Egypt’s future. This further mobilised many Egyptians against the group, turning them in favour of the military-led coupin July 2013. The overwhelming societal subscription to the securitisation of the Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation, which pervaded all societal strata in the aftermath of the coup, empowered the post-Mursi leadership. Moreover, it paved the way for the powerful revival of the exception. Certain about its position and reinforced by the societal support, the post-coup administration immediately resorted to bold forms of sovereign violence that outstripped the security routines under Husni Mubarak in both quantitative and qualitative respects. Apart from prevalent ill-treatment and torture as well-established methods to interrogate, intimidate, and dehumanise targeted individuals (see e.g. HRW 2015). Aida Seif el-Dawla observed also an increased use of sexual violence and forced disappearances (personal interview with Aida Seif el-Dawla 2013). The new wave of state brutality under Abdal Fattah al-Sisi’s was escalated by the forceful clearance of pro-Mursi sit-ins in al-Nahda and Raba’a al-Adawiyya squares in Cairo on 14 August 2013. The twelve-hour operation carried out by the security forces in broad daylight was an act of unprecedented use of lethal force against civilians in the Egyptian modern history likened to Egypt’s Tiananmen square massacre that claimed the lives of at least 800 protesters (HRW 2014b). The forceful clearance of the sit-ins, where thousands of Mursi’s supporters camped in protest of the military-aided coup for several weeks, altered the two Cairan squares. The squares became Agambenian zones of indistinction open to a public spectacle. The presence of media notwithstanding, the security operation transformed the life of protesters into bare lives, stripped of basic rights, including the right to a safe exit from the site and the right to medical treatment. With the exception

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of a few minutes before opening fire, the security forces besieged the protesters and left “no safe exit until the end of the day, including for injured protesters in need of medical attention and those desperate to escape” (HRW 2014b: 6). Hence, the possibility of being killed by the intervening security forces became an immediate contingency for the protesters as well as for volunteering medics present at both sites. One participant of the sit-in at Raba’a al-Adawiyya later recounted his experience: They [the security forces] immediately fired teargas and live fire. It was so intense, I can’t even describe it; it was not like the other times before [referring to prior mass killings], one or two at a time. It was raining bullets. I smelled the gas and immediately saw people being hit and falling down around me. I have no idea how many people were hit. We didn’t hear any warnings, nothing. It was like hell. (HRW 2014b: 38)

Through the sovereign decisions of intervening security agents, the lives of protesters became precarious, stripped of any meaning, turned into homines sacri. The life of anyone present at the sites thus could have been ended. A testimony of a doctor at Raba’a al-Adawiyya site who refused to leave injured persons at Raba’a hospital underscores the absence of any juridical value attached to the life of homines sacri within the sites: The Special Forces in black spread out and went around. They came to me, and I said, “I have injured with me.” One officer said, “I am ordering you to leave.” I said, “I can’t leave with injured here; take them out yourselves!” He didn’t respond; instead, he took out his pistol and killed the three injured men in front of me, shooting them in the heart. I was hoping he would kill me. I wanted to die. The pain was too much. I was shocked. I felt they were not human beings. I grabbed him and swore. He hit me. I am not sure why he didn’t kill me. (HRW 2014b: 74)

Despite the public exposure of the security operation, there was little outrage over the killing of the protesters. A small segment of the liberal camp strongly condemned the brutality of security forces and called for a proper investigation. Mursi supporters, outraged by the display of state violence, vandalised public buildings across the country, stormed dozens of churches, and violently clashed with the supporters of the new regime. To date, not a single official has been held accountable for the massacre.

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Instead, in mass trials marred by unfair procedures, 75 people were given death sentences, and over 650 people were sentenced with up to 25 years in prison for their participation in the Raba’a sit-in (AI 2019). In 2018, against the backdrop of the fifth anniversary of the military coup, the ruling elite further cemented the entrenched impunity of the security forces and made sure that the accountability for the massacre would not be the subject of an investigation at any point in the future. The parliament approved a law that excluded senior army officers from prosecution for any acts committed in their official capacity between 3 July 2013, and 10 January 2016, unless permitted by the SCAF (Mandour 2018). The efforts to legally uphold the impunity of the security authorities matched the steep rise in the killing of civilians without due process. Within a few years, justified by the ongoing “war on terror” campaign, the Egyptian security forces killed hundreds of civilians. For instance, in 2015, al-Nadeem Center counted and documented 754 cases of extrajudicial killings (Abdalwahab 2016). The resolution of al-Sisi’s regime to wreck the powerful base of the Brotherhood once and for all catalysed the effort, the momentum of the arbitrary lethal practices of the security agencies has continued ever since. The statement of Ahmad alZend, the Minister of Justice (2015–2016) and a former appellate court judge, in which he wished for the death of some of the 400,000 Brotherhood members, illustrates the extent of the regime’s will to remove its opponents: I swear to God, the fire will not be put out in my heart unless at least ten thousand [Brotherhood members] for each [slain officer] are killed. (quoted in Middle East Eye 2016)

To date, thousands of Brotherhood members have been imprisoned, and hundreds have faced capital punishment. In March 2014, for instance, an Egyptian court sentenced 529 Muslim Brothers to death for murdering a police officer (Kirkpatrick 2014). Amnesty International criticised the verdict as “the largest single batch of simultaneous death sentences we’ve seen in recent years, not just in Egypt but anywhere in the world” (AI 2014). The Human Rights Watch (2014a) suggested that “[a]nyone associated with the Muslim Brotherhood knows he’s a target”. The senior members, including Muhammad al-Badie, the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, and the former President Muhammad Mursi, were not spared either. Both received death penalties in other court sessions (HRW

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2014a).5 Even though capital punishment does not necessarily imply an execution,6 the sharp increase in the number of death penalties when compared to Mubarak’s era, however, documents the determination of the post-coup regime to increasingly utilise the sovereign right to kill when addressing political opposition. The restrictive post-2013 situation also marked an increased hostility of the Egyptian authorities towards non-Egyptian journalists, students, university professors, and others who critically questioned the political, societal, and economic status quo in Egypt. When the body of Giulio Regeni, an Italian PhD student whose research focused on informal labour movements in Egypt, was found bearing signs of torture outside Cairo on the desert highway in early 2016, it became clear that foreigners, a category traditionally excluded from the biopolitical optimisation techniques of the Egyptian authorities, were no longer spared the regime’s brutality. Although the Egyptian government denies any involvement in his death, the witness accounts and Egyptian human rights groups suggest that Regeni was apprehended, tortured, and killed by the security forces (Fahim et al. 2016). The Exception: A New Norm The exception has centrally defined the dynamics of the securitisation process in Egypt. Over decades it reinforced the asymmetric configuration of power in favour of political and security elites, granted both agencies extensive rights, and fostered authoritarian governance, whereas it constrained the variety of rights on the side of the political opposition. Meanwhile, the political and security elites upheld the exception to legitimise their position of power and justify their record of abusive and corrupt conduct. The symbiotic relationship between the exception and the authoritarian resilience, which was forged through the ongoing “war

5 Both verdicts were appealed. In 2016, Mursi’s death penalty was overturned. He, however, continued to serve a 20-year prison sentence for a conviction in other trial. In 2019, while attending one of his ongoing trials Mursi collapsed and died. 6 The existing practice exhibits a significant discrepancy between the amount of capital punishments and their actual executions. The death sentence appears to be rather a form of the highest possible legal punishment. It is a legal way to secure an imprisonment of an individual in the entirety of his life. The life sentence, which would be the alternative, refers to, in the Egyptian Criminal Code, to 25 years of imprisonment.

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on terror”, justified and further deepened a system of oppressive mechanisms. It normalised the systematic use of brutal violence and abuse of power to govern the Egyptian society. As a result, thousands of Egyptians, constructed through the securitisation process as dangerous, undesirable individuals, were subjected to systematic oppression and sovereign violence in the horror dens of the Egyptian security compounds. The repeated claim by authorities that the extraordinary measures applied only to a small fraction of the society responsible for terrorist activities did not match the reality. Defined through everyday security practices, the exception was neither static nor limited. Although in the early 1980s, the security authorities limited the counterterrorism campaign to mostly militant Islamists, the frontiers of the Agambenian exception proved to be volatile and expandable over time. Thousands of ordinary Egyptians, along with the peaceful political opposition, ended up in the arbitrary custody of security agents. They were tortured and sometimes killed. It is obvious that the counterterrorism campaign exceeded its proclaimed objective—to crackdown on terrorists. Securitisation, in this regard, stretches beyond its proclaimed goals that focus on countering of imminent threats. It is an instrument of societal control through which the sociopolitical status can be upheld and justified. It is successful because it deepens the existing configuration of power relations and thus bolsters those who are in structurally favourable positions. Egypt’s security authorities belong to those whom the endless “war on terror” treated especially well. The persistent securitisation of a vague terrorist threat created conditions that enabled Egypt’s security officials to increasingly rely on the habitual abuse of power and sovereign violence. Almost four decades of “war on terror” transformed the security agents into petty sovereigns with the authority to decide on exception and thus virtually anyone’s life. Such immense empowerment of security authorities has profound implications on the state’s trajectory and cannot be left unnoticed in an analysis of securitisation processes. Provided their empowerment and protection from accountability, security institutions have a strong stake in maintaining the securitisation status quo and transforming it, as the developments in al-Sisi’s Egypt suggest, into a stable form of legality. The persistent “war on terror”-logics, as a mechanism to reinforce security authorities and authoritarian principles of governance disguised as social protection, justified the abuse of power and upheld impunity. Moreover, as Egypt’s case clearly shows, it increases

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the dependence of security forces on sovereign violence, most notably torture, as an easy means to achieve results, produce cases, and thus to prove the meaningfulness of the fight against terrorism specifically and the irreplaceability of the agencies as guardians of societal security in general. In this respect, it is not a surprising outcome that over time the exception, which began as an underlying counterterrorism measure, led to the institutional expansion of exceptional security practices. Step by step, it became a characteristic for the entire security apparatus, not only the units entrusted with fighting terrorism. This trend has been a continuous process during which the exception, originally argued by Egypt’s executive authorities to be limited in scope, was expanded and introduced as a part of the new Egyptian normality. The 2011 uprising did not reverse the trend. Al-Sisi’s regime upheld the legacy of the three decades of Mubarak’s reign and has done everything to further normalise the exception. It reconfirmed the empowered position of security authorities, including their impunity and lack of accountability. Today, the security authorities are more powerful than ever before. Observing these developments, there is one striking element: the exception is unlikely to retreat. Instead, it has been transformed into a new norm. So is the empowerment of the agencies that partake in the securitisation process.

References Abdalwahab, Anji. 2016. Taqrir lil-Nadim ‘an ‘amayin min hukm al-Sisi. 3254 hala al-qatl wa ta’adib wa takdir wa ihmal tibbi wa ‘unf munatham fi makan ikhtijaz (transl. A report by al-Nadim on two years of al-Sisi’s rule: 3254 cases of death, torture, disturbing medical neglect and organized violence in the places of detention). al-Bedaiah. Available at http://albedaiah.com/news/2016/06/ 08/114640. Accessed August 26, 2016. Abdullah, Albaraa. 2016. Egypt fills its prisons, but don’t worry, it’ll make more. al-Monitor. February 3. Available at http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ originals/2016/02/egypt-authorities-prison-free-speech-sisi.html. Accessed August 25, 2016. Adly, Magda. 2007. al-haqq fi salama al-jisd (transl. The right for bodily integrity=). T’alim Huquq al-Insan 15. Cairo: Markaz al-Qahira li-Dirasat Huquq al-Insan. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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com/indepth/features/2014/02/children-rights-ignored-egypt-crackdown2014215152226400760.html. Accessed August 26, 2016. ———. 2015. Life in an Egyptian prison: In a letter obtained by Al Jazeera. al-Jazeera. August 14. Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/ 08/life-egyptian-prison-150812112621901.html. Accessed August 25, 2016. al-Misri, Karim. 2015. Detainees are being subjected to a very slow death in Egypt’s prisons. Middle East Monitor. August 19. Available at https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20150819-detainees-are-being-sub jected-to-a-very-slow-death-in-egypts-prisons/. Accessed August 25, 2016. al-Nadeem Center. 2005. ‘atba’ did al-ta’dhib (transl. Doctors against torture). al-Nadeem Center for the Management and Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence. Available at https://alnadeem.org/content/%D8%A3%D8%B7% D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%A1-%D8%B6%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA% D8%B9%D8%B0%D9%8A%D8%A8. Accessed December 1, 2016. ———. 2006. Torture in Egypt: A state policy 2003–2006. al-Nadeem Center for the Management and Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence. Available at http://www.alnadeem.org/en/content/torture-egypt-state-pol icy-facts-and-testimonies-2003-%E2%80%93-2006. Accessed December 1, 2016. ———. 2014. Letters from behind bars 2013–2014. al-Nadeem Center for the Management and Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence. Available at http:// www.alnadeem.org/en/content/letters-behind-bars-2013-2014. Accessed January 22, 2017. Azzam, Maha. 1986. The use of discourse in understanding Islamic-oriented protest groups in Egypt 1971–1981. British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (bulletin) 13 (2): 150–158. Bayat, Asef, and Eric Denis. 2000. Who is afraid of ashwaiyyat? Urban change and politics in Egypt. Environment & Urbanization 12 (2): 185–199. Bigo, Didier. 2002. Security and immigration: Toward a critique of the governmentality of unease. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27 (1): 63–92. ———. 2008a. Security: A field left fallow. In Foucault on politics, security and war, eds. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, 93–114. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2008b. Globalized (in)security: The field and the ban-opticon. In Terror, insecurity and liberty: Illiberal practices of liberal regimes after 9/11, eds. Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala, 10–48. Routledge Studies in Liberty and Security. London, New York: Routledge. Brown, Nathan J. 1997. The rule of law in the Arab world: Courts in Egypt and the Gulf . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burgrova, Helena. 2017. Egypt’s failing “war on terror”. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. Available at https://tn.boell.org/sites/default/files/policy-brief-egypt-1-sec urity.pdf. Accessed June 15, 2019.

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CHAPTER 5

The Resistance

In early 2011, the anti-regime demonstrations in Egypt attracted increasing numbers of Egyptians. The protests drew supporters from across the country and attracted international attention. It eventually achieved a previously unthinkable result—the ousting of Mubarak and his in-group. Egyptians celebrated the end of the oppressive regime and the victory of the people. In a country that had suffered under an authoritarian rule with omnipresent corruption, the lack of basic rights and freedoms, ill-guided domestic politics, and abusive conduct of security forces for decades, Mubarak’s resignation became a sign of hope. The relatively peaceful course of the 2011 demonstrations—the protests were not violently suppressed by the military as was the case in other Middle Eastern countries—strengthened social unity and the overall belief in the possibility of opening a new, brighter chapter in the Egyptian history. In the euphoria that followed the departure of Husni Mubarak from power, many hoped for and envisioned a better future in which the rule of law, social justice, and the eradication of corruption would prevail. Nine years later, in 2020, there is not much of the hope of those days left. The authoritarian state reemerged powerfully, leaving barely any space to act freely. At the time of writing, the life of Egyptians is more defined by oppressive mechanisms than at any time before during Husni Mubarak’s era.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Reimer-Burgrova, Politics of Violence and Fear in MENA, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83932-1_5

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Leaving scholarly analyses of the emergence of the 2011 uprising to others, this chapter addresses the revival of the authoritarian state sealed by the 2013 coup. Guided by the third dimension of the TER-model, the resistance, the chapter moves its focus away from the resistance’s effect, Mubarak’s ousting. Instead, it focuses on how the Egyptian dissent, represented in this book primarily by the loosely defined community of human rights defenders, challenged the dominant configuration of power/knowledge relations. Accordingly, the 2011 uprising is interpreted as a successful irritation of the power/knowledge relations which had been established and cultivated over decades. The shakeup, however, did not suffice to reconfigure the power/knowledge relations. The 2011 uprising did not significantly alter the empowered status of Egypt’s security institutions or controversial exceptional laws. The state of emergency remained in effect for more than a year after Mubarak’s ousting. As this chapter shows, the 2011 protests, as well as the Egyptian dissent in earlier years, concentrated on the immediate effects of the securitisation process, such as the exceptional security practices and restrictions on civil liberties facilitated by the state of emergency. However, both failed to influence that power nexus beyond the effects, beyond the exception, and link the repressive exceptional framework to the narrative about the terrorist threat. The deeply rooted “truth” that underpinned and facilitated the existence of the exception remained largely unchallenged. This same “truth” helped the military prepare for and legitimise the 2013 coup and reinstate the powerful authoritarian state. Paradoxically, the military did so with the support of those who had demonstrated for a freer and more democratic Egypt only two years earlier.

The Resistance/Power Matrix Due to the strong embodiment of securitisation studies in the Western context and the fact that most empirically oriented securitisation studies analyse situations in more or less democratic contexts (Buzan and Wæver 2003: 42), the public inactivity or apathy to a securitisation process is implicitly interpreted as a legitimising approval of the securitisation (Vuori 2008: 70). This is, of course, a partly valid point. In every society, there are individuals who are either genuinely uninterested in securitisation processes or approve of securitisation without actively articulating their support. However, this view does not account for contexts or factors in which, as the Copenhagen School in more recent works admits, “the

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possibility of free speech and political structures that guarantee individuals protection against random as well as systematic violence” (Buzan and Hansen 2009: 216) may not be developed (see also Stritzel 2007; Vuori 2011). Nor does the analytical focus on the approval of securitisation cover the silence of those who lack opportunities to participate in political processes, experience limited access to traditional forums like print media, or do not articulate their security concerns or opposition to the securitisation processes out of fear of possible repercussions (Hansen 2000; Wilkinson 2007). In its proposal to address such sociopolitical contexts without the need to completely give up on securitisation framework, the TER-model relies on two underlying premises: the premise of negative approval and the necessity of viewing a governed society as a superior analytical category of audience. The absence of resistance to securitisation is viewed as a minimal form of approval. For the second premise, in the TERmodel, the governed society is an audience whose position is a significant (de)legitimising factor of the securitisation process, which likely influences the continuity of the process. Therefore, as long as the governed society acts as if it accepts the securitisation regardless of the real motivation, which might range from real support over apathy to disinterest or fear not to do so, the society approves the securitisation process. Instead of approval, the TER-model puts resistance to the securitisation process in the centre of attention. The inquiry into resistance makes particular sense in non-democratic contexts (on Algeria see Holm 2003; on China Vuori 2008). In contexts where the types of data typically used to detect public approval with the ongoing securitisation process in democratic societies, such as opinion polls, surveys, or even elections, are often not available or are significantly flawed, the analytical focus on the audience’s consent bears hardly any fruitful outcomes. Instead, the focus on resistance to the securitisation process hints at processes of resistance and elucidates the reasons for its absence. Thereby it is possible to detect factors, such as the spread of fear or co-optation schemes, which might numb the people’s will as well as their capacity to question securitisation processes. In this regard, the analytical focus on resistance by the governed society, proposed by the TER-model, brings the public, a field under-theorised in the securitisation scholarship, to the forefront (see Salter and Mutlu 2013; Tjalve 2011). Thus, this perspective overcomes securitisation’s fixation on elites

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(see Huysmans 2011: 375; McDonald 2008: 574) as well as on professionals in the security field (c.a.s.e. collective 2006: 459), which is also explicit in the research on the Middle East (Stetter 2008: 71f). It is empirically obvious that acts of resistance can be expressed in diverse forms: riots; demonstrations; through election boycotting; through individual disobedience, including blogging; or by organising clandestine events; are scattered across analytical levels. They also appear at different moments of securitisation and attain varying levels of intensity and epistemological importance. Accordingly, the governed society as a superior category of audience dissolves into a heterogeneous conglomerate of diverse individuals, collective actors, and authorities. The audience may also include individuals and groups within analytical categories of securitising actors, security practitioners, and designated security targets. The TER-model overcomes the perspective on resistance prevalent in the securitisation scholarship, which is reduced to acts of counter-securitisation associated primarily with the security targets (see Stritzel and Chang 2015; Vuori 2011), and treats the audience as heterogeneous, context-dependent units, which, empirically speaking, do not exist a priori. The audience as such cannot be conceptually predefined, as it is a product of resistance. This is a possible, but not an automatic, effect of the power of a securitisation process (see also Hansen 2011: 360). Resistance to securitisation is an effect of power. In this context, power is not a fixed category of material or ideological capacity based on a zerosum game wherein if one actor loses power, it is gained by another actor (Balzacq et al. 2015: 8). Instead, in line with Foucault’s understanding of the relationality of power (2009: 2ff), power is for the TER-model a link or a process between things. Power is thus both the product (effect) of a relationship and its cause. Resistance is, in this sense, a productive force that is not inherently negative or positive (Foucault 2002: 452). Since there are no relationships in which the mechanisms of power are not an intrinsic part, resistance is a part of mechanisms of power which alter, disturb, stabilise, or solidify the existing relationships, such as sexual, family, work-related relationships or, in the securitisation context, relationships between individual securitisation actors (Foucault 2009: 2). Like other processes, securitisation establishes and (re)produces specific webs of power relations. The power networks are closely bound to miscellaneous corpora of knowledge and regimes of truth, which induce diverse power effects through which security practices such as arbitrary arrests, indefinite detentions, torture, and extrajudicial killing are established,

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and forms of resistance emerge (Foucault 1980: 52). As in any other web of power relations, securitisation always embraces the possibility of resistance, which might occur at any level of agency—individual, group, or societal level—at any moment of securitisation with varying intensity and uncertain results (Vuori 2011: 190). Resistance can thus emerge without obvious warning in any form and oppose the hegemonic configuration of existing power/knowledge relations (Foucault 1982: 780f; 1990: 123). Therefore, resistance cannot be predefined, for it does not arise before the power relation which it opposes (Foucault 1990: 122f). Instead, it coexists with power/knowledge it opposes and undermines the power/knowledge relation. Depending on the context and configuration of power relations vested in the securitisation process, resistance as a productive power effect might modify existing mechanisms of power (Karskens 2009: 128; Wilson 2009: 31f). Acts of resistance such as demonstrations, elections campaigns, insurgency, blog entries, television programs might thus successfully disrupt established regimes of truth and thereby also the existing mechanisms of power which underpin securitisation. The acts of resistance, however, can also reinforce the very power relations they challenge because the results of resistance are not guaranteed. Margins of Freedom Following the understanding of resistance as proposed by the TERmodel, it is apparent that resistance is not a universal, static concept applicable to any sociopolitical context and time-period. Its form and intensity (if any resistance arises at all) is context-dependent and reflects the structure of existing power relations in a given sociopolitical context. Simply said, to oppose hegemonic power/knowledge relations in Egypt differs from doing so in Germany just as, for instance, to resist in Egypt in the 1990s varies from resisting a decade later. Understanding resistance as both an effect of power and a form of power makes it apparent that agency cannot be separated from the structure. In governmentalised societies, the margin of freedom is structured through a systematised, calculated exercise of power which is not a priori violent (Bevir 1999: 72f; Bröckling et al. 2011: 5f). The deliberate costeffect calculation includes the operation of biopower that creates “lines of force that make certain forms of behavior more probable than others” (Bröckling et al. 2011: 13). As Bevir (1999: 73) thus points out, the

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biopolitical operation of power does not aim “to extinguish the capacity of the subject for agency” as sovereign and disciplinary power do. Instead, it is based on the persuasion of individuals about the rightness of certain forms of behaviour. This might include “positive incentives to act in a certain way,” such as co-optation and inclusion into the clientelist system, making certain forms of behaviour more probable than others (Bröckling et al. 2011: 13). Since the deliberate cost–effect calculation requires the government to calculate desired effects against possible costs (Foucault 1982: 792; 2009: 6), repression is far from the only means used by the government to counter resistance and silence the dissent. It is also simply too costly to rely on. Similarly, in Mubarak’s Egypt, the self-government of Egyptians was stimulated by incentives to act in a certain way while there were also clear limitations imposed on individual’s conduct (for specific examples see Albrecht 2005; Brown and Shanin 2010; Shehata 2010). The mixture of restrictions and incentives encompassed restrictive laws, including the state of emergency, delegitimising narratives, coercion supported by fear proliferation as mentioned in the previous chapter, on the one hand, and a carrot and stick strategy combined with co-optation of parts of the dissent on the other. As for the latter strategy, Mubarak’s regime specifically targeted selected actors, including parts of the human rights community, legal opposition, or even at times the Muslim Brotherhood, with the aim of fragmenting and weakening the sites of dissent without resorting to immediate coercion. Accordingly, the co-opted actors were subsumed and appropriated into the official governmental structures and political processes. Thereby they became an acknowledged part of the optimised sociopolitical order, and so were their activities tolerated. Through their co-optation, however, they further solidified the asymmetric configuration of power/knowledge relations as their dependency on the political leadership increased (see Shehata 2010: 80). In turn, their options for challenging the hegemonic power/knowledge relations became constrained since they were themselves wedded to the status quo. Co-optation not only increased the dependency of the opposition actors on the state, but it also created cleavages and fractions between the co-opted actors and those who refused to be integrated into the official structures. This had a negative effect on mutual cooperation and alliances. An example of this can be seen in the human rights community. In the early 2000s, the government introduced a new, more restrictive

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agenda for the civil society that also affected human rights organisations. Through the provisions of the Association Law (2002/84), the government successfully integrated parts of the human rights movement “in the state-sanctioned pluralist order” (Shehata 2010: 81). While parts of the community succumbed to the pressure and registered as nongovernmental organisations, others defied the Law and circumvented it by declaring their organisations business enterprises. Mubarak’s regime also managed to co-opt some of critical human rights activists—including Hafiz Abu Seada, who had been labelled a traitor and brought before a military tribunal only a few years earlier—by appointing them to new governmental institutions dedicated to human rights issues, such as the National Council for Human Rights or the National Council for Women (Abdelrahman 2007: 296f; Shehata 2010: 80f). The limited margin of freedom notwithstanding, even in authoritarian contexts, there are no power/knowledge relations immune to resistance as no individual or group can ever control all mechanisms of power: neither the caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a society (and makes it function). (Foucault 1978: 95)

No matter how dominant or hegemonic the power/knowledge relations are, there are always some mechanisms of power accessible for group(s) or individuals to contest and challenge their configuration (Heller 1996: 101). Resistance is thus always possible and there is no limit to it (Foucault 1990: 123). Anyone, as long as they are free,1 has the capacity to act and thus also to resist, despite asymmetric power/knowledge configurations. Even when the power relation is completely out of balance, when it can truly be claimed that one side has ‘total power’ over the other, a power can be exercised over the other only insofar as the other still has the option of killing himself, of leaping out the window, or of killing the other person. This means that in power relations there is necessarily the possibility of 1 For Foucault the “free subject” does not connote associations related to liberal, democratic values. Nor is a free subject defined by their ability to act outside social context and thus being independent from power/knowledge regimes. A free subject is defined by having option(s) to act no matter the constraints imposed on their conduct.

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resistance because of there were no possibility of resistance […] there would be no power relations. (Foucault 2000: 292)

Foucault (2000: 292) himself admits that “[i]n a great many cases, power relations are fixed in such a way that they are perpetually asymmetrical and allow an extremely limited margin of freedom”. Yet, even “an extremely limited margin of freedom” permits resistance to emerge. In such a case, resistance might be reduced, as Foucault suggests, to fatal forms, be it suicide and/or murder. On the eve of the 2011 uprising, several Egyptians burned themselves. Inspired by the Tunisian vegetable vendor Muhammad Bouazizi’s selfimmolation, whose death sparked the Tunisian uprising in late 2010, they chose this form of resistance to protest the sociopolitical situation in Egypt. To be sure, by no means does the TER-model imply that resistance shall be celebrated as a heroic act of the powerless, oppressed, or marginalised (see Pickett 1996: 447). Resistance is rather an act of transgression that is not defined by a pre-existing normative character. Therefore, there is a priori no bad or good resistance: Is one right to revolt, or not? Let us leave the question open. People do revolt; that is a fact. […] A convict risks his life to protest unjust punishments; a madman can no longer bear being confined and humiliated; a people refuses the regime that oppresses it. That doesn’t make the first innocent, doesn’t cure the second, and doesn’t ensure for the third the tomorrow it was promised. Moreover, no one is obliged to support them. No one is obliged to find that these confused voices sing better than the others and speak the truth itself. (Foucault 2002: 452)

Since “[p]ower relations are both intentional and nonsubjective” (Foucault 1978: 94), resistance as their effect and a form of power embraces the same features (Heller 1996: 98f). It is intentional and nonsubjective. Resistance is intentional as far as power relations “are imbued, through and through, with calculation” and thus, “there is no power that is exercised without series of aims and objectives” (Foucault 1978: 95). According to Heller (1996: 99), who addresses resistance as an ontologically correlative form of power exercise, the intentionality of resistance is in its effect, which is subversion, delegitimisation, and possibly the alternation of the configuration of power/knowledge relations. In this regard, although those who resist might impartially or imperfectly

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understand the situation, “they are gifted with intentions and values and purposefulness that condition their acts” (Scott 1985: 38). The power/knowledge relations are, for Foucault, irreducible to those who exercise them. It is in no one’s capacity to fully grasp and control the power/knowledge mechanisms because “the power-relations that sustain the mechanisms of power are so complex that one cannot even attribute ‘subjective’ (in the sense of ‘completely determining’) power to particular institutions or groups” (Heller 1996: 86). The same logic applies to resistance. As a form of power, resistance does not guarantee that a specific outcome will be achieved—be it a release from the arbitrary custody, annulment of the state of emergency, adoption of Islamic governance, or a change of regime. Results of resistance are uncertain. They cannot be guaranteed beforehand because they are beyond the control of an individual or a group (Heller 1996: 85ff; see also Stritzel and Chang 2015: 553). In fact, resistance might backfire on those who resist—instead of outbalancing the configuration of power/knowledge relations, resistance might reinforce the power/knowledge relations it opposes. For instance, in the 1990s, the revolt of a few Egyptian justices who opposed the exceptional security framework and acquitted high-profiled Islamists on the grounds of testimonies enforced through torture ultimately strengthened the asymmetric configuration of power/knowledge relations. To handle political cases and secure their “smooth” proceedings, the regime increasingly turned to military tribunals, which were presided over by military personnel instead of the civilian judiciary. In this regard, resistance is thus nonsubjective insofar as there is always a possibility for unintended consequences to occur (Heller 1996: 87). To keep the analytical relevance of resistance to the securitisation framework, the TER-model concentrates on real resistance, which is defined as an organised, systematic, cooperative, and principled form of resistance, and usually involves a more dramatic public confrontation (Scott 1985: 33, 292). In contrast to everyday resistance, such as the disobedient behaviour of Egyptians in their endless, everyday encounters with the governmental officials, the police, or plainclothes detectives, the acts of real resistance are more likely to be recorded in the form of newspaper articles, human rights reports, government’s documents, and other materials, which allow for a retrospective analysis of resistance to the securitisation process. This is not to claim that everyday resistance is comprised of less important acts of resistance. Everyday resistance can truly alter existing power relations (Bayat 2013). However, due to its

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everydayness and covert character, as Scott (1985: 33ff) notes, it lacks general publicity necessary for the acts of resistance to be recorded and analysed systematically.2

Activism Meets Law The authoritarian context of Mubarak’s Egypt did not leave many options to channel alternative views, let alone to alter the existing sociopolitical status quo. The securitisation process, a powerful tool to delegitimise, ridicule, demean, threaten, and ultimately silence and control the civil dissent, significantly limited Egyptians’ options to question and criticise the ruling regime. The discursive dominance of security, which securitisation brought up to the forefront of political interests, made it particularly difficult to pursue alternative views on security matters, for security was clearly the red line. In many respects, the persistent “war on terror” campaign reduced the argumentation positions on securityrelated matters to a “with us or against us” logic. Anyone who contested the securitisation status quo or pursued alternative views on security was cast as a disloyal individual, a traitor (see Chapter 3). The regime’s strategies to forestall resistance comprised of a wide range of tools, including restrictive laws, delegitimisation campaigns, oppression, and the proliferation of fear. These efforts notwithstanding, there was always dissent that challenged the asymmetric configuration of power/knowledge relations. In light of the omnipresent abuses of security institutions and a restrictive sociopolitical environment, it comes as no surprise that the Egyptian human rights community emerged as one of the most vibrant sites of dissent, wherein outspoken individuals across the political spectrum and from a myriad of sectarian affiliations were integrated. Although the roots of the human rights movement in Egypt stem from the 1970s, against the backdrop of a nation-state crisis, the rise of Islamism, and a complicated relationship to Israel, its constitutive era arrived under Mubarak’s reign. Disillusioned about the political trajectory and restricted from meaningful political participation, well-educated, mainly secular political activists, intellectuals, and students turned to human rights as an avenue to fight 2 The everyday resistance is as such too elusive to be empirically grasped by the research design of this book. Yet, the scholarly work, which employs ethnographic and anthropologist methods to collect the data, might likely provide promising insights into the everyday resistance.

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the authoritarian structures through other means than political activism. Even though most human rights groups sooner or later distanced themselves from any political parties, the regime always perceived and treated them as political opponents. While the community acknowledged the lack of options to build and sustain a broad opposition movement, it did not give up on its ideals to publicly contest the abusive practices as well as authoritarian schemes of rule. From the outset of Mubarak’s era, in the mid-1980s, the movement pointed out at the friction areas within the power/knowledge nexus dominating the securitisation process. It thoroughly documented human rights abuses, counselled the victims and their relatives, and challenged the authoritarian state through the available legal means. Given the strong judiciary tradition in Egypt when compared with the regional standards, the existence of the SCC, as well as of few bold justices ready to breach the red lines, judicial institutions offered the community a promising platform to oppose and contest the regime. The legal realm was turned into a means and a dominant strategy for challenging the existing power/knowledge relations. Accordingly, for the human rights community, which was composed of increasing numbers of lawyers and legal experts, the courtrooms became one of those rare public spaces left where they could have publicly voiced criticism and contest the sociopolitical status quo. One of the most active groups, The Center for Human Rights Legal Aid (CHRLA) that represented victims of human rights violations in the mid-1990s, initiated more than 3,000 cases within the first four years of its existence (Moustafa 2006: 158). Although the law, in the narrow sense, proved to have a rather limited public impact, because court hearings or decisions were usually not subject to broader public discourse; the law mattered on the individual level. It was an effective tool to achieve small-scale victories in the form of acquittals for the clients, reclaiming their justice and dignity from their unlawful treatment in the legal black holes of the SSIS detention cells. Representing homines sacri, ranging from militant Islamists, nonviolent Islamists, liberal opposition, to “no-name” victims, the human rights lawyers exposed the abusive conduct of the security officials, their impunity, and the implications for the state of human rights in Egypt. Each such a case opened a micro-site of contestation in the exceptional framework, wherein human rights lawyers could regularly challenge the illegal dimensions of the exceptional framework (Abu Seada 2008: 168ff). Torture was in the spotlight, as human rights lawyer Ahmed Seif al-Islam

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recalled (personal interview with Ahmed Seif al-Islam 2013). Especially when a case incorporated grave forms of torture, some of the bolder judges joined in. Alongside the human rights lawyers, they challenged the use of sovereign violence as an illegal form of interrogation. If successful, the respective defendants were acquitted on procedural grounds (Sherry 1993). Unlike the many cases with “no-name” victims, the high-profile cases with militant Islamists, non-violent regime opponents, and other publicly known figures were presided by judges who exposed torture as an intolerable security practice gained considerable publicity. In the early 1990s, a court acquitted more than forty members of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, including its spiritual leader Omar Abdel Rahman. In another instance, a court dismissed a case of twenty-four Islamists charged with the assassination of the Speaker of the Parliament, Rifat al-Mahgoub (Sherry 1993). Both courts justified their unexpected rulings by declaring confessions extracted under torture and morally degrading treatment null and void (Fattah 2008: 80f; Moustafa 2008: 151f). Wahid Mahmoud, the judge who presided over the latter case, went so far as to criticise the incapacity of the security apparatus to properly interrogate suspects in the explanation of his ruling. For him, the use of torture to obtain confessions manifested “proof of the failure and incapacity of the police to discover the truth” (Mahmoud quoted in HRW 1994). In another example from the same era, the High State Security Court in Alexandria disputed the validity of the entire state of emergency. The Court ruled the state of emergency unconstitutional because it had been approved in 1988 by some parliamentarians who were appointed but did not win the elections (Fattah 2008: 85). These unexpected court rulings publicly ridiculed the regime, contested counterterrorism practices of the security apparatus, and as such, questioned the dominant power/knowledge structures upheld by the ongoing securitisation (Moustafa 2008: 151f). The administrative courts, a judiciary institution authorised to challenge legal decisions made by Egyptian authorities and forward contested issues to the Supreme Constitutional Court’s review offered another avenue to challenge the authoritarian structures. The administrative courts regularly reviewed bans on travelling, decisions about the confiscation of property, detention orders, revisions of electoral laws, and the president’s decisions to transfer cases to military tribunals (Moustafa 2008: 146ff). By initiating cases in administrative courts that included a petition to challenge the specific law at the Constitutional Court’s level,

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the human rights lawyers steadily contested and undermined the exceptional framework (Brown 1997: 135f; Rutherford 2008: 252). Supported by aligned justices at the administrative courts, the revision requests flooded the Constitutional Court. Some justices were even so bold to publish their critical legal reviews in the oppositional press, indicating their readiness to forward specific cases to the Constitutional Court should they land in their courtrooms (Moustafa 2006: 160). The Supreme Constitutional Court, established in 1979, did not fear pursuing rulings that were not in alignment with the regime’s policies. On several occasions, its rulings publicly embarrassed the regime and demonstrated the unexpected edge of judicial independence in Egypt. Twice, the Court ruled the electoral laws unconstitutional and thus allowed for independent candidates, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood to run in parliamentary elections. In another case, the Court repealed the draconian Association Law (1999/153) that foresaw wide-ranged restrictions and strict surveillance of non-governmental organisations, including their funding, international communication, and any political activities (for more on the NGO legislation see Brown 1997; Moustafa 2008). As much as the SCC acted boldly, challenged laws, and ridiculed the regime, during Mubarak’s reign, it did not, however, dare to directly contest the exceptional framework. In fact, the Court neither dismissed nor put on hold most cases related to the exceptional legislation. In the early 1990s, the administrative courts requested the Court to review Art. 3 and Art. 6 of the Emergency Law (1958/162) in two separate cases. While the former article constrained personal freedoms and rights, invalidating due process and de facto legalising arbitrary detention, the latter authorised the president or his delegate to refer any crime to a military tribunal (see also Brown 1997: 115f; Moustafa 2008: 151f). Although Art. 3 was forwarded for the Court’s inspection in 1993, the Court did not review it until 2013 when the Court repealed it. Ahmed Seif al-Islam attributed the delay to the fear of retribution from the security apparatus. Unlike the case of Art. 3, Art. 6 was ruled constitutional (personal interview with Ahmed Seif al-Islam 2013). This ruling authorised the president to cherry-pick any category of crime and/or any specific crime and refer its perpetrators to military tribunals (Abu Seada 2008: 173). In this regard, the engagement of the justices in the pushing limits of the authoritarian state should, however, not be overestimated. Through an elaborate system of financial rewards and career advancements, Mubarak’s regime weakened the appetite of Egyptian judges to contest

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the secret detention cells and expose security practices within as illegal (for more insights into Egyptian judiciary see al-Khudayri 2008; BernardMaugiron 2008). In practice, the carrot and stick policy functioned as following: The Ministry of Justice granted appointments to important, well-paid positions to loyal judges. For instance, secondments to international organisations and foreign governments were among popular rewards, for such appointments meant considerable financial enumerations and higher living standards. The stick for the lack of loyalty came in the form of naql (relocation) to some remote court, which usually negatively affected the stability and integrity of judges’ families (al-Khudayri 2008: 50ff). The reward and punishment policy also functioned with regards to the juridical overview of the regular elections. According to Ahmed Seif al-Islam, only docile, loyal judges were permitted to oversee elections, a task rewarded by 10,000 LE (see also al-Khudayri 2008: 51). Seif al-Islam told me that only a few judges confronted the illegality of the security practices and contested politically motivated cases, often linked to dubious terrorism charges, which were brought to their courts (personal interview with Ahmed Seif al-Islam 2013). As the Egyptian case illustrates, even in a very restricted context, legal mobilisation allowed for opening sites of contestation through which the authoritarian elements can be challenged. Yet, the outcome remained uncertain. Despite the public exposure and partial successes Egyptian lawyers and justices achieved in individual litigation cases, the law as a means of resistance did not significantly alter the hegemonic configuration of the power/knowledge relations (re)produced by the securitisation process. At times, the strategy took a heavy toll on the margin of freedom granted to the civil society, for the exceptional framework was reinforced and normalised than undermined. Provided the hegemonic configuration of power/knowledge relations, boosted by the persistent securitisation process, the ruling elites had the flexibility to adjust the margin of freedom for the Egyptian society as a collective and for specific individuals as it saw fit. The court orders and rulings that contested the decisions of the regime and/or security officials were frequently overlooked, ignored, or bypassed by the Egyptian authorities (Albrecht 2005: 381ff). In another instance, the court-ordered releases were routinely circumvented by successive detention orders; for example, the immediate re-arrest of the person after his release from the detention, ordering retrials, or delegating cases straight to the more reliably regime-loyal military courts (Abu Seada 2008: 170; Moustafa 2008: 151ff). As detailed

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in Chapter 2, both Mubarak’s and al-Sisi’s regime also took advantage of their superior position in formulating the legislation. They routinely issued laws, decrees, and amendments that targeted the vulnerabilities of their opponents and constrained the margin of freedom of the entire Egyptian society. Uneven Struggle and International Leverage Through their everyday encounters with their clients, the victims of abuses of the security apparatus, the human rights defenders had firsthand information about the immediate effects of the exception on the life of individual Egyptians. The human rights community was fully aware of the zones of indistinction into which people disappeared for weeks if not forever; of the abusive practices of security officials to discipline and silence anyone who challenged the status quo; of the ways the state authorities used the law to bypass due processes for defendants especially in political cases; of the intimidation schemes to make people silent; and sadly also of the extrajudicial killings (for more, see Chapter 4). All of this made the human rights community an unwelcome witness to the state’s dark practices. Its reports, press releases, petitions, and other forms of public statements fully exposed the state’s failure to provide and guarantee basic human rights and freedoms. Moreover, based on the evidence collected through contact with their clients, the community openly disputed the legitimacy of the exceptional security framework as a mechanism that served the survival of authoritarian structures instead of being a tool in a genuine fight against terrorism. Despite the claims by the president of the republic that the emergency laws are not used except with terrorists and drug dealers and that the ruling party is embarking on a process of democratic reform and consideration of citizens’ rights, still we have monitored and documented an increase of state violence against members of the political opposition. Thousands of peaceful demonstrators were arrested and many of them have been subjected to torture in SSI offies [sic] and police stations and prison. […] Tens of anti-riot police trucks occupying the city center has become a common scene that is meant to terrorize citizens. Many ar [sic] wondering: How much of the national budget goes to finance all those troops? Are we paying out of our own pockets so that the ministry of interior can buy more trucks and torture instruments, tear gas and water cannons? Do we pay taxes so that the government can use them to humiliate and torture us? (al-Nadeem Center 2006: 25)

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The endless record of the human rights abuses over the years occasionally attracted the attention of international actors. The domestic groups, aware of the regime’s obsession with building and keeping a positive image outside of Egypt necessary for the maintenance of strategic partnerships as well as of the steady tourists’ influx, bonded with established international human rights watchdogs, got observer statuses at international organisations, and lobbied foreign governments. The cooperation with international actors was an effective method of bypassing the limited margin of freedom and challenging the regime’s claims on a broader scale. When achieved, a concerted international pressure empowered the local community to increase leverage on the government. To a certain extent, the cooperation with internationally established actors provided the domestic groups with a form of protection from arbitrary retaliation by the state authorities. It was clearly easier to silence unknown activists than internationally acknowledged public figures or organisations. International pressure worked in favour, for instance, of the director of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights Hafiz Abu Seada. In 1999, he was accused of accepting foreign funding without prior governmental approval. Eventually, Abu Seada’s trial was postponed to an unspecified date in the future (Moustafa 2006: 164). Only a year later, a similar campaign led to the release of Saad Eddin Ibrahim from detention. Ibrahim worked as the director of Ibn Khaldun Center, which was accused of accepting foreign funding to pursue activities harmful to Egypt’s reputation. Neither his international connections nor his US citizenship helped Ibrahim and the Ibn Khaldun Center staff, as a few months later when the trial was resumed, Ibrahim was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment (Moustafa 2006: 166ff). As much as international pressure regularly provided a remedy in the Mubarak era, this is no longer the case. In 2020, the Egyptian prisons are overcrowded with prisoners of consciousness. Thousands of prominent activists, journalists, lawyers, politicians, syndicate members, along with “no-name” individuals share the prison cells, uncertain when their ordeal will end. The crowd became so enormous that it is fairly impossible to single out individual stories and campaigns led by family members, for there are so many. At times, one wonders who actually is not in prison. Accordingly, the plentiful campaigns initiated by relatives, friends, and coworkers to free their loved ones inevitably run into two challenges: to create and keep momentum and to align with international actors who are willing to act.

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Over the past few years, dozens of campaigns have “competed” to attract enough international attention to leverage against al-Sisi’s regime. As the case of Ismail al-Iskandarani, the internationally renowned Egyptian researcher and investigative journalist who covered the developments in northern Sinai, shows, a successful campaign in the international arena does not suffice if it is not followed by meaningful pressure of key international actors on Egypt. In 2015, the Egyptian authorities arrested al-Iskandarani upon his arrival to Egypt from Germany. Shortly after his arrest, a campaign accompanied by the hashtag #al-huriyya_lismail_aliskandarani (#Free_Ismail_al-Iskandarani) supportive of his immediate release was launched. The international human rights watchdogs and academic circles joined in. Al-Iskandarani’s case also became a topic for the German executive branch, as his arrest appeared to have been linked with his public appearance in Germany. However, despite the momentum achieved, the campaign failed to move the international actors to act on behalf of al-Iskandarani beyond paying lip service. In 2018, after more than two years of pretrial detention, al-Iskandarani was handed ten years of imprisonment for trumped-up charges, including belonging to a terrorist organisation and harming the military’s reputation (Youssef 2018). Al-Iskandarani’s case contrasts with the human rights defenders’ cases described above. In current Egypt, being a well-known figure backed by an international campaign and influential supporters might just not be enough to create sufficient leverage on the regime to be released.3 Towards Online Activism The human rights community has been one of the most vocal and consistent critics of Mubarak’s reign. Yet, the regime’s monopoly over mass communication has considerably constrained its public outreach. However, this unfavourable situation began to change against the backdrop of rapid progress in the field of information technologies. The increasing availability of new communication media, such as the Internet, satellite television, and smartphones, along with a limited liberalisation of the Egyptian media landscape in the late 1990s, disrupted the state’s domination over the distribution of information and facilitated

3 The incarceration of Alaa Abdal Fattah, an infamous political activist and human rights defender, provides a similar case.

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dissemination of alternative truths delegitimising Mubarak’s regime (see Moorehead 2005: 35f). The Internet specifically became a frequent site of dissent and instrument of uncensored communication. It created a parallel “public-sphere” (Lynch 2007a). Its borderless, largely unrestricted, and virtual character resulted in the opening of relatively free sites where Egyptians could discuss, criticise, and contest official policies (Kalathil and Boas 2003: 103ff). As such, it also democratised the dissent discussion. Besides the representatives of the traditional Egyptian opposition represented by the human rights community, new actors such as individual bloggers and diverse social groups emerged and joined the vibrant online dissent. Together, they questioned the efficiency and meaningfulness of the exceptional framework and shared their views and experience not only with Egyptian peers, but also with non-Egyptian media, international advocacy groups, and national governments. At times, the virtual space created a mediated pressure on Mubarak’s government to justify its exceptional security methods vis-a-vis the political dissent (Abdelrahman 2007: 288). The crackdown on the Ibn Khaldun Center in 2000 and the 2006 arrest of Alaa Abdal Fattah, a famous Egyptian blogger, led to major online anti-government campaigns. Both events drew international attention, an audience undesired by Mubarak’s establishment. Facing increasing international pressure, the regime eventually reassessed both cases and the defendants were acquitted (Yefet-Avshalom and Roniger 2006). Internet penetration grew rapidly in Egypt in the 2000s, as it did in other parts of the globalised world. While in 2001 only less than one per cent of Egyptians had access to the Internet at home, by 2010 one-third of the population had private access to the Internet (Internet Live Stats; Radsch 2008: 1f). In 2017, Internet penetration reached 50% (Dennis et al. 2017). The increasing Internet availability corresponded with a rise in online content related to human rights violations, which was circulated widely among Egyptian Internet users (Radsch 2008: 4ff; Salem 2014: 28). Once smartphones became a product available to a larger segment of Egyptians, human rights abuses started to be recorded and shared online by bystanders, witnesses, victims, or even perpetrators themselves. For instance, a page called al-ta’dhib fi masr (torture in Egypt)—affiliated loosely to al-Nadeem Center—aggregated diverse footages of ill-treatment and torture starting in 2006. Kefaya movement dedicated a part of its website to gather information about and report on abuses (Oweidat et al. 2008: 21). Wael Abbas, a prominent blogger

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and journalist, regularly shared reports about the brutality of the security apparatus on his blog al-wa’i al-masry (Egyptian awareness) as well as on his YouTube account. There were, however, many more groups and individuals who undertook similar projects. Besides photos and videos made by bystanders or victims, there was also an increasing trend among security officials to record their own acts of violence (al-Nadeem Center 2006). Some records leaked, went viral online, and sparked a large public outcry. These videos exposed the brutal practices of the security apparatus in an audiovisual manner, so visceral as to transmit a message to members of the illiterate social strata. One such a video that went viral and was shared by Wael Abbas depicted a microbus driver being sodomised by a police officer. The recording was taken by a police officer to humiliate the victim by distributing the video among the community of microbus drivers (el-Dawla 2009: 125ff). The dissemination of the anti-regime content was also supported by a nascent generation of Egyptian bloggers. By 2005, there were more than 1500 bloggers. Most of these writers belonged to an aggregation run by the pioneers of the Egyptian blogosphere, Manal Hassan and her husband Alaa Abdal Fattah (Radsch 2008: 3ff). Many bloggers contested the sociopolitical status quo through active offline engagement too. They regularly covered events and incidents such as demonstrations, violent dispersal of protests, abuses of security officials, and much more, which were given little or no attention in the mass media (Lynch 2007a). In this light, these blogs were a valuable source of information for many Egyptians, journalists, and the international audience, for they provided alternative accounts to the official narratives (Lynch 2007a; Radsch 2008). The rapidly growing community of bloggers affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood was not immune to human rights violations and abusive conduct of security officials either (Ajemian 2008; Etling et al. 2009). As the target of persecution per se, the Brotherhood-affine blogs focused primarily on the persecution of Brotherhood members, narrated individual stories of arrested members, and campaigned for their release. In many respects, as Lynch (2007a) observes, the Brotherhoodaffiliated blogs did not differ much from the blogs of non-Islamist blogosphere, insofar as they imitated “‘Free Alaa’ and ‘Free Kareem’ campaigns—including custom-made banners, link-exchanges, online petitions, personal testimonies, high-resolution photos of protests, and embedded videos.” The online campaign to free Hassan Malek, a second

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deputy chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood, that followed his arrest along with about forty other prominent Brotherhood members in 2007, was not different. The “Free Hassan Malek” campaign was run by Malek’s daughter. It featured descriptions of Malek’s suffering, along with supportive newspaper articles, interviews, and videos, including pleas from Malek’s youngest daughter to release her father (Ajemian 2008). Given the fact that Brotherhood members were frequent targets of abuse and subject to military tribunals, the Brotherhood-affiliated blogs provided accounts of events that alternated from the official narratives. The most popular blogs included Ana Ikhwan (I’m a Muslim Brother), Ensaa (Forget), and a slew of like-minded blogs such as the Mudunat did al-askar (Blogs against the military) that criticised the impunity of the security apparatus and the lack of due processes at the military courts (Ajemian 2008; Lynch 2007b). The blogs, along with the Brotherhood’s official websites, were an effective platform for the group to contest the terrorist label and to proliferate counter-narratives to the governmentsanctioned securitisation of the terrorist threat. The Brotherhood strictly refused to be identified as a group of terrorists, collaborators of militant groups, and/or violent extremists (Atia 2011). It regularly used the online tools to emphasise its doctrine of non-violence and accordingly denounced any violent means to reach the desired sociopolitical change. These tenets were summarised in the statement min al-Ikhwan ila al-nas (From the Brotherhood to the people) authored by Muhammad Akif, the Supreme Guide, and circulated online. Republished by the blog Ana Ikhwan, the statement unequivocally rejected violence and terrorism as a means to achieve the Brotherhood’s political objectives (see also Lynch 2007c). Needless to say, the Brotherhood’s doctrine of non-violence was further reinforced by militant Islamists, who openly disapproved of the Brotherhood’s accommodating tactics and despised the movement (Stein 2010: 43). Although there was a deep ideological cleavage between Brotherhoodaffiliated bloggers and the rest of the Egyptian political blogosphere, the exceptional framework and related abuses formed a common ground of virtual activism for both groups. Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, the author of the blog Ana Ikhwan, did not hesitate to express solidarity with an anti-Islamist commentator of his blog who was imprisoned for insulting Islam. When Mahmoud was taken by security officers himself, a campaign calling for his release was supported by actors from across the ideological spectrum, including leftist bloggers such as Alaa Abdal Fattah (Hosni

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2017: 12). As Abdel Moneim Mahmud summarised, “[o]ne important common point among us is that we live in an authoritarian country and we claim freedom and reform as Egyptians, and then come our intellectual affiliations” (quoted in Ben Gharbia 2007).

Civil Disobedience In Mubarak’s Egypt, the official narrativess of truth largely dominated the public discourse. With the exception of the virtual online platforms in the late 2000, there were a few possibilities for Egyptians to publicly contest the official accounts without fear of repercussion. The persistent state of emergency criminalised all kinds of public gatherings, demonstrations, protests, and strikes. The ban on public assemblies and paralysing effects of fear to be persecuted notwithstanding, protests and larger demonstrations against Mubarak’s government on a number of policies, including the state of emergency, began to appear in the early 2000s (see e.g. Tadros 2012). The reasons why Egyptians took to the streets to protest were diverse. An analysis of this is beyond the scope of this book. However, the indisputable rise in acts of civil disobedience, observable since the early 2000s, shared one common feature: increasing invalidation of the exceptional framework. Recounting his experience as a human rights lawyer for more than two decades, Ahmed Seif al-Islam noted that the state of emergency as a tool to deter and discipline Egyptians increasingly lost its meaning during the last decade of Mubarak’s reign (personal interview with Ahmed Seif al-Islam 2013). The exceptional legislation and security practices were no longer a reliable barrier that would forestall mass protests, demonstrations, and other forms of disobedience. While the exception as such did not lose its deterrent effect, it did lose its paralysing effect. A series of mass demonstrations in Egypt, the first of such a kind in decades, were inspired by several regional developments. In the early 2000s, Egyptians organised solidarity demonstrations in support of the second Palestinian intifada (2000–2005). At the same time, in disapproval of the US and Israeli military engagement in regional politics and despised by Egypt’s support of both actors, Egyptians protested US-intervention in Iraq (2003) as well as Israel’s military operations in Lebanon in 2006 and the Cast Lead operation in Gaza in 2008 (Kienle 2001: 90f). Activists and organisations linked to the human rights community played a key role in mobilising efforts and organising protests (Albrecht 2005: 385ff). Fearing

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redirection of the popular outrage at domestic issues, the government tolerated such protests, even though they breached the firm ban on public gatherings under the state of emergency. Habib al-Adli,the Minister of Interior, for instance, gave explicit permission for anti-US demonstrations on the eve of the US-led military operation in Iraq in 2003, emphasising that it was an exceptional decision, not a rule (al-Ahram 2003a, b). Although these demonstrations were increasingly tolerated by the regime, individual protesters were frequently subjected to abuses including arbitrary arrests, ill-treatment, and torture (for more see el-Dawla 2009; HRW 2004; Moorehead 2005). The anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations tested the waters for staging protests over domestic issues. Starting in the mid-2000, Egypt was hit by hundreds of labour strikes. Although protests against the poor living conditions of labourers were nothing new in Egypt (Kienle 2001: 92), no wave of strikes had ever before had such numbers and intensity (Beinin 2009: 77). One of the largest strikes of 2006 involved 30,000 textile workers from the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in Mahalla, who fought to improve their working conditions and increase their wages (Beinin 2009: 79f; Carapico 2010: 105). Two years later, in 2008, the labour movement was a driving factor in the organisation of a general strike on April 6. Workers and activists across the political spectrum called on Egyptians to join in a general strike urging people not to go to work, school, or police stations, but to stay home and stand up against the corrupt Mubarak’s government. The call summarised growing popular discontent with the sociopolitical status quo. Although economic reasons played a major role in the mobilisation of the Egyptian labour sector, these became more and more intertwined with demands for fundamental political reforms. The labour unrest concurred with a formation of several loose grassroots movements that questioned the hegemonic power/knowledge relations, demanded structural political reforms, and in their demands grew bold enough to cross red lines (see Beinin 2009: 79ff). Kefaya—officially named al-haraka al-masriyya min ajl al-taghir (the Egyptian Movement for Change)—was one of these movements. The loosely organised movement offered an inclusive dissent platform. Kefaya integrated Egyptians across the political spectrum and was the first to challenge Mubarak’s

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untouchability.4 In 2004, in anticipation of a foreseeable power transition from Husni Mubarak to his son Gamal Mubarak, Kefaya openly contested Mubarak’s position. The opinion diversity of Kefaya’s leaders notwithstanding, the group’s manifesto clearly identified “the repressive despotism that pervades all aspects of the Egyptian political system and want for democratic governance” (quoted in Clarke 2013: 203) as the prevailing problem of the Egyptian state and annulment of the state of emergency as a key step to improve the overall situation. After an initial success, the movement was subjected to an intense security campaign and yielded to fear of further repression. Kefaya leaders were closely monitored and subjected to intimidation tactics by the security apparatus. They were, for instance, regularly threatened that their public assemblies would be dispersed with the use of violence. Some prominent members were even attacked directly (Oweidat et al. 2008: 29). As a result, Kefaya supporters “became less willing to subject themselves to state cruelty and eventually were intimidated to the point where they would no longer participate in protests” (Oweidat et al. 2008: 30). Despite the movement’s collapse, the regime could not have effaced the path paved by the movement which was boldly followed by other opposition groups and leading Egyptian intellectuals, such as Ibrahim Issa, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper al-Dustur; Ayman Nour, leader of al-Ghad Party, and Saad Eddin Ibrahim, director of Ibn Khaldun Center. They publicly criticised the government and questioned Mubarak’s status as “the patriarch of the Egyptian family,” hence tilling “fertile ground for the emergence of an active civil resistance movement in Egypt” (Fahmy 2012: 372). In the 2000s, the number of protests rose exponentially. Demonstrations, strikes, and sit-ins with the involvement of the Egyptian labour force grew from around 100 incidents in 2003 to 266 in 2004—and then to 614 in 2007 (Clarke 2013: 205ff; Stork 2012: 468). The increasing incidence of protests combined with their grassroots, often spontaneous character facilitated by modern communication technologies to mobilise protesters produced new forms of civil disobedience such as open-air “advocacy-workshops” convened spontaneously via text messaging and the Internet (el-Mahdi 2009: 90). For the regime, it became progressively more difficult to effectively contain and suppress protests as they grew 4 It is noteworthy that despite the fact that the protest movements integrated a broad spectrum of Egyptians, the Muslim Brotherhood largely restrained from participating in such protests in order not to provoke the government to clampdown on the movement.

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in size, frequency, and expanded to include diverse societal levels. Not surprisingly, the security forces increasingly resorted to sovereign violence as a central strategy to counter and silence mushrooming voices of the dissent. Yet, the regime struggled to contain the growing discontent of the Egyptian population as such (Stork 2012: 470). The Fear Barrier’s Erosion The more sites of dissent appeared throughout the 2000, the more Mubarak’s regime seemed to turn primarily to repression to contain growing resistance and to deter those considering whether to join the ranks of discontent masses. Fear, a central tenet of the counter-resistance strategy, which had guaranteed the regime superiority over the governed masses for decades, began to fall apart. For most of Mubarak’s era, fear of being turned into a homo sacer, a target of persecution, disciplined the conduct of the governed population. At times it was so immense that it outweighed the fear of death, as Ghonim (2012: 3, 29) observed, and thus paralysed the capacity of many Egyptians to contest and resist the sociopolitical status quo. As one might expect, fear was thus viewed as one of the grounds behind the lack of political activism in the country. Citizens feel the presence of the state. … Some people are not willing to sacrifice their lives; they don’t want to go to prison. In addition, there are the difficulties of daily life: to get married, you need to struggle to earn enough income, and this takes up all one’s energy and time.” (Hussein, a leader of Islamist leaning Labour Party quoted in Wickham 2002: 74)

In such a context, wherein “the risks of opposition activism are high and the prospects of positive change are, at best, remote”, as Wickham (2002: 119) suggests, “the most ‘rational’ response of the individual is a retreat into self-preserving silence”. The self-preserving silence was certainly true for many Egyptians. Yet, it did not account for the “irrational” response. Especially in the 2000s, many Egyptians participated in diverse demonstrations, protests, labour strikes, and sit-ins and risked persecution. Even under such conditions—high risks and low chances of change—Egyptians revolted more than any time before during the Mubarak era. The wall of fear erected on the pillars of state of emergency that impeded voicing public discontent over the sociopolitical status quo was undermined (Ghonim 2012: 155).

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The erosion of the fear barrier is by no means a predictable event. Rather, it is an outcome of complex processes and contextual conditions. Whether and how one experiences or does not experience fear, and whether they are courageous enough to resist, are highly subjective matters influenced by individual contexts, including features of one’s background and character. Resistance is a complex matter and, as Foucault (2002: 449) notes, “the man who rebels is finally inexplicable”. The restrictive contextual environment might constrain some in their resistance so that they would require ten times more courage to revolt than others need (Havel 1990). In Mubarak’s Egypt, there were many people, particularly among those “no-name” citizens from impoverished and marginalised areas, whose willingness to resist was significantly constrained by fear from repercussions and related existential questions about if they should participate in demonstrations and protests. This is not to claim that those who joined the 2011 protests stopped due to fear. Rather, their individual determination to contest Mubarak’s regime was not incapacitated by fear; as a youth participating at Kefaya’s meeting stated: “Of course, I am afraid [of being arrested], but there is nothing else for me to do. I have no life, no job, and no future” (Oweidat et al. 2008: 18). According to Foucault, the paralysing effect of fear might be invalidated in a situation in which an individual’s life reaches a point, or more precisely, an individual is convinced of reaching such a point, that his life cannot be bartered anymore: beyond the threats, the violence, and the intimidations, there is the possibility of that moment when life can no longer be bought, when the authorities can no longer do anything, and when, facing the gallows and the machine guns, people revolt. (Foucault 2002: 449–450).

To put it differently: when the risk of death is perceived as a better option than the certainty of obedience, the barrier of fear loses its deterrent effect (Keating 1997: 186). In this type of situation, people might be more likely to risk their life or even intentionally embrace death as a protest of existing conditions, which they view as no longer bearable. Inspired by Muhammad Bouazizi, the Tunisian vendor whose death sparked the nationwide protests that resulted in the ousting of longtime Tunisian President Ben Ali, four Egyptians set themselves on fire in early 2011. Like Bouazizi, they chose death as an extreme form of

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protest against the sociopolitical status quo. Commenting on the selfimmolations, Asma Mahfuz, a young Egyptian activist, painted their act as a form of protest against conditions of life that became no more bearable. For her, the self-immolators feared the security apparatus more than their own death. In a video that went viral, she urged Egyptians to take to the streets on January 25 instead of killing themselves, where they could reclaim their dignity and fundamental rights. Don’t think you can be safe anymore! None of us are! As Mahfuz’s call underlined, there was no certainty about when one would be treated as an optimised citizen or a homo sacer. “Everybody constituted a possible target” (Salem 2014: 30). Anyone at any time could be subjected to a random sovereign decision by a security official. The borderline was blurrier than ever before. For many Egyptians, there was not much, if any, difference between the normal lives of optimised citizens and the undesirable forms of life of security targets. Both were subjected to the possibility of being turned into a homo sacer. The imposition of exceptional security measures—justified by the endless fight of terrorism—initially enjoyed varying degrees of popular support. Over time, however, the extraordinary policies became a burden and infringement on the personal dignity of ordinary Egyptians (Fahmy 2012: 351). The Agambenian exception spread beyond the designated scope of designated terrorist targets. It also transgressed the boundaries of the SSIS cells. As discussed in Chapter 4, the exception—once limited in its scope—became a general rule. It overflowed its spatiotemporal boundaries and started, in Agamben’s words (1998: 38), “to coincide with the normal order”, whereupon “everything again becomes possible”. The chance to be rendered a homo sacer became, for every Egyptian, an immediate and everyday possibility (see Salem 2014: 33). The death of Khalid Said in June 2010 epitomised this trend. Murdered by two security officers in an Alexandrian side street, Said’s death as a homo sacer underlined that his fate was a relevant possibility to anyone. Bare life was no longer an exception but rather a condition of normality. Said’s story, reduced to two photos of him, one from before and the other after his death, became a reminder of “the sense that if this could happen to him, it could happen to anyone, that ‘We are all Khaled Said’ [Kullina Khalid Sa’id] as the soon to be famous Facebook page put it” (Stork 2012: 464). Khalid Said’s case attracted nationwide attention. There were dozens of protests in support of Said and against the status quo that had made his death possible (see e.g. HRW 2011). In these

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protests, Egyptians refused to become another Khalid Said, another homo sacer. They defied the processes of subjectification they were exposed to and thus refused, as Foucault (1982: 782) puts it, “what they were,” or more precisely, what they were supposed to be. In early 2011, against the backdrop of blatantly rigged parliamentary elections, dramatic developments in Tunisia, and a deadly bomb attack on a Coptic church in Alexandria during the Coptic Christmas— the Facebook page “Kullina Khalid Sa’id” capitalised on the widespread sentiment of disapproval and called for a massive demonstration against torture, corruption, injustice, and unemployment. They intentionally chose January 25, National Police Day, which commemorates the patriotic role of the Egyptian police in resisting the British rulers in the 1920s, to protest the intrusive role and impunity of the security apparatus (Ashour 2012; Ghonim 2012). The popular demonstrations began on January 25, 2011, as protests against police brutality and abuses, dire economic conditions, and related corruption. Although some opposition factions, such as Nasserists and Islamists including the Muslim Brotherhood, assumed a cautious position and refused to take part in the protests, the demonstrations, which lasted over three weeks, included thousands of Egyptians from across the political spectrum (Tadros 2012: 30ff).5 Initially, the protesters called for the removal of Habib al-Adli, a highly unpopular Minister of Interior, along with a reform of the security apparatus. The demands grew bolder over time and, with the key support of Egypt’s military, achieved the resignation of Husni Mubarak. The 2011 protests, known as thawra al-huriyya wa-l-karama (the revolution of freedom and dignity), were the result of rising civil disobedience over the last decade. The hegemonic configuration of power/knowledge, which the securitisation process of the terrorist threat (re)produced and underpinned for three decades, was challenged. Husni Mubarak and his in-group were brought down.

The Securitisation Trap The 2011 uprising undermined the configuration of power/knowledge relations. However, it left the underlying corpus of knowledge about the terrorist threat largely uncontested. The protests, as well as the Egyptian dissent in earlier years, concentrated on the immediate effects of the securitisation process, such as the exceptional security practices and/or 5 If members of these opposition currents participated in the protests, it was their individual decision to do so.

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restrictions on civil liberties facilitated by the state of emergency. Yet, both failed to link the repressive framework to the narrative about the terrorist threat and thus to challenge “the truth”, which was underpinned and facilitated by the existence of the exceptional framework (see Chapter 3). This fatal error that cost Egyptians the hard-won glimmers of freedom, democracy, and dignity and led inevitably to a securitisation trap. Only two years later, in 2013, when the military ousted the Brotherhood-dominated government, the uncontested securitisation narrative prepared a fertile ground for a powerful re-emergence of the securitisation process. In the disguise of fighting terrorism, the exceptional security practices were restored, and so too were the fundamental of an authoritarian governance. Once again, the threat of terrorism was depicted as an existential menace to Egyptian society. Islamists, namely members of the Muslim Brotherhood and loosely anyone who sympathised with the ousted President Muhammad Mursi, was framed as supportive of terrorism and designated security targets. Under the pretence of protecting the population, the military-backed government introduced a series of exceptional policies, including a new piece of counterterrorism legislation, which consolidated the asymmetric configuration of the power/knowledge relations in favour of the post-coup political elite and security authorities. As in the Mubarak era, the securitisation process became a powerful political strategy to legitimise the authoritarian government while curbing any political opposition. The mainstream majority in Egypt welcomed the removal of the Brotherhood’s government, which had been widely perceived as an existential threat to the societal and political trajectory of the country. When the post-coup government declared that treating the Brotherhood as a terrorist entity was necessary, the social support expressed for the coup easily transformed into the support of the “war on terror”. The widespread euphoria boosted by the hypernationalist securitising rhetoric downplayed critical views on the counterterrorism campaign. Wide ranks of the society, including the bulk of human rights groups, at least during the first months after the coup, embraced the counterterrorism campaign as the only legitimate means to a stable, prosperous, and possibly democratic Egypt. Consequently, many Egyptians turned a blind eye to the exceptional, extrajudicial measures adopted in a crackdown on Mursi’s supporters, including the massacre of pro-Mursi supporters in August 2013. In this regard, Alaa Abdal Fattah, one of the prominent activists, warned that after the Raba’a massacre a renewed battle for the prevailing

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narrative would begin: “getting non-Islamists to accept that a massacre had happened at all, to reject the violence committed in their name” (Alaa Abdal Fattah quoted in The Guardian 2016). Surfing on the hypernationalist wave, the post-coup regime successfully mobilised large segments of the Egyptian public to support and approve of securitisation as the answer to an Islamist terrorist threat. In a very short timespan, the society became extremely polarised. The “either with us or against us” logic divided Egyptians into two large camps: supporters of ex-President Muhammad Mursi and supporters of the new militarybacked leadership. This atmosphere virtually disqualified any alternative positions on security matters (Soliman 2014). Provided the high social approval of the counterterrorism campaign, any criticism of the revived securitisation campaign meant to risk social ostracism and be labelled a supporter of terrorism (Hamzawy 2013). At the outset, the dissent was thus virtually reduced to the Brotherhood’s members and supporters and a few political activists and human rights groups that criticised the illegitimacy of the power transition and/or the grave violations of human rights conducted on behalf of the counterterrorism campaign. Short-lived initiatives such as al-Maydan al-Thalith (The Third Square) or Masmou3 (Listen) stood for a “third way” to the binary positions. Masmou3, a loose online movement, for instance, in regular tweets, called for daily protests by making noise at one’s window at a specific time: “If you reject religious fascism [the Muslim Brotherhood] & the Egyptian state’s route to civil war, every night at 9PM open your window & make some noise #masmou3. (masmou3 2003)

Like the non-Islamist opposition during the Mubarak era, the “Third Way” dissent challenged the exception and the empowerment and impunity of security forces. “The Third Way” spoke out against the increasing authoritarianism of the transitional government, legitimised by a vaguely framed counterterrorism campaign. At the same time, it also questioned the Brotherhood’s capacity and competency to lead the country. In result, its representatives were exposed to resentment by both the Muslim Brotherhood and the transitional leadership. They became unwanted individuals subjected to smear campaigns and were excluded from the optimised Egyptian society (see e.g. AI 2014: 8). As one political activist noted in his blog:

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[t]he discourse of terrorism has an effect of divide and rule. In the following months, I was not deemed the enemy per se, but by not siding with the conqueror I was a dissident, and therefore a target. (Wahid 2016)

Exposed to the high risk of being targeted and imprisoned, many, such as Ramy Essamy, the Tahrir revolution singer and songwriter, and Heba Morayef, a leading human rights activist, left Egypt for exile. Others, including Alaa Abdal Fattah, Yara Sallam, Mahinour al-Masry, Ahmed Maher, Ahmed Douma, and hundreds of others were arrested and imprisoned. The case of Alaa al-Aswani, an active Kefaya member and a prominent literary figure who converted from being a supporter to a critic of al-Sisi’s regime, illustrates the transformation many Egyptians originally supportive of the post-coup government and the counterterrorism campaign underwent. Like many others in the Egyptian leftist intelligentsia circles, al-Aswani supported Tamarod’s popular calls to remove the Brotherhood from power and was fond of al-Sisi’s “war on terror”. In line with the official securitising rhetoric, al-Aswani, for instance, described the massacre of Mursi’s supporters in August 2013 as a justified act in time of war, arguing that the Muslim Brotherhood is “a group of terrorists and fascists” (Kingsley 2013). A year later, al-Aswani’s position, however, began to change (Fisk 2014; McBain 2015). In a protest against an increasing number of restrictions imposed on freedom of speech in Egypt, al-Aswani stopped publishing his regular columns in the Egyptian daily al-Masry al-Youm, claiming that “criticism and difference of opinions are no longer allowed. Only praise at the expense of the truth is allowed” (Kortam 2014). Ever since, he has been subjected to a smear campaign in which he is depicted as a Qatari agent, an affiliate of the Brotherhood, and a CIA spy (see e.g. ANHRI 2014; Fisk 2014). Now, alAswani lives in the USA and writes regime-critical columns for the Arabic edition of Deutsche Welle. As the designated enemy of the state, the Muslim Brotherhood unsurprisingly questioned the military coup’s legitimacy and the subsequent persecution of its popular base. The Brotherhood officially denied the terrorist group label while its ranks fragmented as a result of the intense security crackdown. Members were increasingly torn between the peaceful, non-violent and a more aggressive, violent approach (Ayyash and Willi 2016). Especially in the early aftermath of the coup, when the channels for peaceful political opposition were still available many

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Brotherhood’s members and supporters participated in public protests and sit-ins, blocked roads, or distributed leaflets (Fahmy 2013). There were, however, also acts of violence that intensified in the aftermath of the security operation against the sit-ins in August 2013. Mobs of Mursi’s supporters torched and looted more than forty churches nationwide, killing four people (HRW 2013). Later on, against the backdrop of the intense counterterrorism campaign, which left no space for the peaceful expression of political concerns and tolerated no contest to the regime, violence became an increasingly attractive option for some Brotherhood members and supporters. Whereas the younger Brotherhood generation pushed for “smart violence”, the selective use of violence against the state authorities as a means of retaliation, the old guard did not appear to be willing or able to come up with an alternative to this method (Ayyash 2015; see also Fahmi 2015). Although the doctrine of non-violence still appears to be the dominant discourse among the Brotherhood members, there was a significant number of disillusioned Brotherhood members who joined homegrown militant groups to take up arms against the state (Fayed 2016). After the revival of the “war on terror” in 2013, the margin of Egyptian freedom became significantly constrained. The lack of possibilities to channel political opposition through non-violent means, on the one hand, intensified the inclination of some Egyptians, especially among the Islamists, to resort to violence. On the other hand, this situation led many Egyptians who had been politically active to yield their engagement. Letters from prisons, a literary genre which has boomed in recent years in Egypt, testifies to the prevalent state of despair and hopelessness among the latter group. Alaa Abdal Fattah was imprisoned for participating in an illegal protest in 2013. He wrote from prison three years later: It has been months since I wrote a letter and more than a year since I’ve written an article. I have nothing to say: no hopes, no dreams, no fears, no warnings, no insights; nothing, absolutely nothing. (an excerpt from a letter from prison published in The Guardian 2016)

The sense of despair, combined with feelings of futility when it comes to challenging the existing sociopolitical order, is also observable outside Egyptian prisons. This is underlined in a statement by political activist Wael Eskandar (2019):

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It is not easy to write these days. For those like myself for whom writing is a coping mechanism, it’s a slow death. Really, though, it’s not easy to do anything anymore. Over time, events have worn me down and I no longer have the energy to be shocked by a bomb explosion, outraged about a report on torture committed by security services or infuriated by the unjust sentencing of an innocent. It is not that I have found peace with what is happening, it’s that I’m exhausted. The weariness has sent me into a downward spiral of depression, guilt, and feelings of powerlessness.

A decade after the 2011 revolution, the sense of weariness Wael Eskandar mentions is a widespread condition to the life of many politically and civically active Egyptians. The unprecedented use of sovereign violence effectively silenced large parts of dissent. The rest are kept hostage by the fear that they will share the fate of their peers and be transformed into homines sacri in the Egyptian detention and prison facilities. The once vibrant dissident community languished, and the readiness to punish any anti-regime activity, seems rather bleak. Whether Egypt will experience a major upheaval similar to the 2011 revolution any time soon remains an open question. No regime, including al-Sisi’s Egypt, can be ever completely sure of its power. As Foucault reminds us and the events of the 2011 revolution document, where there is power, there is resistance, no matter how much the margin of freedom is restricted. The Transient Success of Resistance Resistance and the lack of thereof have been a central element in the persistence of the securitisation process in Egypt. Over several decades, the securitisation process was sustained without ever being decisively challenged. As the TER-model established, in authoritarian contexts, public approval is not a necessary precondition for securitisation to persist. Accordingly, the success and thus also the continuity of the securitisation process in Egypt is largely related to the regime’s capacity to contain resistance and control sites of dissent. Although expressions of disagreement over the sociopolitical status quo emerged, they were contextually constrained. Egypt’s case clearly shows that resistance is intertwined with the exception insofar that it cannot be analytically separated from the exception. In the name of security, the exception limits the margins of freedom by criminalising possibilities and options to contest the status quo. The

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exceptional security provisions serve more than the objective of countering the threat, in this case, terrorism. The second subliminal purpose of exceptional measures is to control dissent and foster the hegemonic power/knowledge relations configuration. This feature is stronger in authoritarian contexts than elsewhere. Over several decades in Egypt, the state of emergency measures were replaced increasingly with restrictive counterterrorism legislation; this was an effective path to achieving both objectives. It provided an exceptional framework to fight and counter terrorism. It also significantly empowered the political elite and security institutions to control the sites of dissent and contain resistance; to the extent that it was almost impossible to contest the securitisation process without facing substantial risks, including the possibility of becoming a homo sacer. The securitisation was thus not only a means to counter terrorism, but also to stifle resistance and oppress the Egyptian opposition on seemingly legitimate grounds vested in national security matters and thus to sustain the authoritarian form of governance. Insofar as power cannot seize complete control over what we say, think, and do (Foucault 1980: 136), the ultimate docility of a governed society is beyond a comprehensive reach of power even for authoritarian regimes of Mubarak or al-Sisi. Their government strategies to contain resistance were not, and cannot be, ever absolute. Diverse Egyptian actors, who questioned the “war on terror” and challenged the hegemonic configuration of power/knowledge relations underpinned by the securitisation, are proof. Yet, over the three decades of Mubarak’s reign and almost a full decade of al-Sisi’s reign, there has been no decisive moment for Egypt’s dissent to effectively and permanently alter the existing asymmetric power/knowledge configuration. This, however, does not mean that resistance had not built up over time. The synergies that emerged since the mid-1990s between the Egyptian human rights community, parts of the judiciary, intellectuals, and other prominent figures of Egyptian public life are testimony to that. The rising civil disobedience, especially in the 2000s, evidenced the increasing popular discontent, culminating in the 2011 movement. The 2011 uprising significantly challenged the hegemonic configuration of power/knowledge relations in Egypt. The effects of this moment, however, remained short-lived. The protesters exposed the myriad of exceptional powers, counterterrorism policies, special security measures,

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along with the brutality and abuses of the security institutions, and challenged them as an illegitimate means to govern the society. Yet, the political economy of truth-making, the securitisation meta-narrative of Islamist terrorism that buttressed and rationalised the exceptional security practices and underpinned the hegemonic power relations remained largely uncontested. As such, during and in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 uprising, when the hegemonic structure of power/knowledge relations was disrupted and vulnerable to change, the protesters and opposition missed an opportunity to construct a new politics of truth. Thus, only two years after the 2011 uprising and a year without the state of emergency, Egyptians were in an extremely good position to fall into the securitisation trap again. In 2013, the uncontested metanarrative of Islamist terrorism became a means to legitimise the military coup and the new authoritarian regime. It also became, yet again, an excuse to persecute and silence any political opposition, ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to liberal, secularised activists. Ever since, the governmental strategies to contain resistance have centred largely on coercive methods, which combine the arbitrary exercise of sovereign violence and the proliferation of fear. In result, the barrier of fear was re-erected and the extremely constrained margin of Egyptian freedom reduced the forms of resistance to either violence or resignation.

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CHAPTER 6

“War on Terror” in Turkey and Syria

The mutually reinforcing link between securitisation and authoritarian mechanisms is not unique to Egypt. There are many cases of counterterrorism campaigns throughout the Middle Eastern region and beyond that have justified severe state interventions into the margin of freedom of the governed society while elements of authoritarian governance were strengthened. This does not imply that each individual country shares the same securitisation experience as the Egyptian case described in this book. As the definition of terrorism varies, so does the securitisation narrative about the threat, the brutality of sovereign power operation, as well as the sites of dissent and their techniques. The particular expression of all three elements, the truth, the exception, and the resistance, captured by the TER-model, is, in this sense, unique and cannot be repeated in other sociopolitical contexts. That said, for most countries, terrorism is a relevant threat. The absence of a global agreement over what terrorism is, however, invites opportunistic catch-all definitions that, when applied, likely have a detrimental effect on social freedoms and rights. Accordingly, the intimate connection between autocratic resilience and the self-proclaimed, selfpreserving method of counterterrorism forms the bottom line of a shared experience across diverse geographical and sociopolitical contexts. The TER-model introduced in this book captures the ambiguity of such securitisation processes. Its three analytical dimensions focus on the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Reimer-Burgrova, Politics of Violence and Fear in MENA, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83932-1_6

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volatile edge between the necessary protection of and undesirable intervention on behalf of societal security and well-being. This chapter goes beyond Egypt and applies the TER-model on securitisation processes in Turkey and Syria in the 2010s. Like in Egypt, the counterterrorism campaigns in Turkey and Syria legitimised a wide crackdown on opposition forces, curbed margins of freedom, and ultimately strengthened the authoritarian mechanisms of governance. Although the course and brutality associated with the counterterrorism campaign in each country differed, the fact that the securitisation of the terrorist threat boosted authoritarian schemes is in both cases undeniable. This chapter does not aspire to provide an exhaustive account of the developments in both countries as this exceeds the aspirations and scope of this book. The aim is, rather, to showcase the practical utilisation of the TER-model in sociopolitical contexts outside of Egypt.

The History of Autocratic Ordering In 2000, when Bashar al-Assad took power from his deceased father Hafiz al-Assad and became the new Syrian President, optimism prevailed. People hoped that Syria would depart from the Hafiz al-Assad’s legacy of brutal oppression of the Syrian society. Syria, a socialist republic, had been governed by the iron fist of Hafiz al-Assad (1971–2000) and was anything but a state that respected the basic rights and freedoms of its citizens. The permanent state of emergency (1963–2011) granted the regime unlimited powers to arbitrarily crackdown on the opposition and keep a tight grip over the ruled society. Political activities were strictly monitored and if necessary, eliminated. Pervasive surveillance, intimidation, torture, as well as military and special courts, notorious for their disrespect for human rights, were central instruments of the regime to control the sites of dissent. Hafiz al-Assad’s regime used especially brutal means against the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (for more details see Conduit 2016). Similarly, as in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, outlawed in 1964, grew to become a fierce enemy of the ruling establishment. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood played a vanguard role in the Islamic uprising against al-Assad’s rule. Throughout the violent confrontation with the regime, the Brotherhood targeted prominent members of the ruling elite and government facilities. In 1980, the Brotherhood carried out an assassination attempt on Hafiz al-Assad. In

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retaliation, the security forces massacred approximately two thousand of mostly Islamist prisoners at the Tadmur prison—an incarceration facility notorious for its horrific treatment of prisoners—and membership in the Muslim Brotherhood became punishable with a death sentence (Haugbolle 2008: 271f). The violent confrontation between the Islamists and the state peaked with the 1982 Hama massacre. Hama, one of Brotherhood’s strongholds and a centre of anti-regime dissent, was attacked by the military after a three-week siege. The coordinated military operation that included bombing and the deployment of tanks and infantry left most of the old city centre in rubble and claimed thousands of casualties. The estimated numbers of fatalities range between 10,000 and 20,000 (Conduit 2016; Haugbolle 2008: 265). The Hama massacre, a crushing defeat for the opposition, put a definite end to the Islamic uprising (1976–1982). Hafiz al-Assad won and strengthened his position as a leader who was ready to use brute force to counter dissent whenever necessary. The consolidation of al-Assad’s power as an undisputed leader also coincided with the shift of centres of power. Syria transitioned from a one-party-republic to a presidential republic represented by an authoritarian leader. Although the ruling party, the Baath Party, remained an influential player and a central vehicle for the spread socialist ideology, its political power was significantly reduced. The real decision-making moved to the Presidential Office and a circle of a few trusted persons around the President. Hafiz al-Assad became the ultimate synonym for Syria’s government. He harboured aspirations to fill in the role of pan-Arab leader vacated after Gamal Abdal Nasser’s death in 1970. Accompanied by a state-sponsored cult of personality that celebrated him as Syria’s father, an unerring leader, a brave knight, or a modern-day Salah al-Din, his iconography became an inherent part of the Syrian public space (Wedeen 1998: 504). His son Bashar was incorporated into the image of the powerful ruling family and developed a taste for self-adoration similar to his father’s. Pictures of al-Assad’s family members were and still are virtually everywhere: on billboards alongside the road, in public buildings, on stickers at shops, on school books, and so on (see e.g. Gopal 2018). The accumulation of power in the presidential hands also further strengthened the role of sectarianism in the state order—an aspect that has been one of the driving factors of the bloody conflict of the last decade. In a majority Sunni country, the Shia minority, the Alawites, dominated the political power. Hafiz al-Assad, an Alawite, granted the Alawite elites

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the control over key security institutions including the military, intelligence, and security bodies. Doing so, he boosted the sectarian bond of the Alawite community, its privileged position in Syrian politics, and thereby secured the loyalty of the immediate ruling in-group. The uneven distribution of power marginalised the Sunni majority (for more see e.g. Faksh 1984). Over the next decades, this inequality formed a basis of a solid anti-regime dissent that called for a more inclusive form of a state organisation. The iron fist and brutal repression methods, however, kept the dissenting voices within the limits necessary to sustain an authoritarian state. When al-Assad’s son Bashar took the presidential office in 2000, many saw him as a progressive, educated man who could twist the totalitarian trajectory of the state to a more bearable form of a state organisation. The so-called Damascus Spring, a period of a tentative political liberalisation that followed his father’s death, stimulated the Syrian elite, educated circles with the hope that Bashar al-Assad would ease up the repressive mechanisms of societal control and grant greater margins of freedom for Syrians. Revitalised, the intelligentsia intensified its informal political activities and tested the waters of the regime under the new leader. The prevalence of muntadayat (informal discussion salons) and groups, in which a broad range of political, societal, and economic topics were discussed, mushroomed (Carnegie Middle East Center 2012). In September 2000, the intelligentsia circles, mostly formed by the civil society veterans of the 1976–1982 rebellion, authored the Statement of 99, in which they demanded political pluralism and the rule of law. The Statement of 1000, which appeared a few months later, was bolder and demanded, among items, the end of the state of emergency, the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, and the end of the Baath Party, monopoly of power (Haugbolle 2008: 268). Neither of the Statements, however, questioned the legitimacy of al-Assad’s reign or requested the change of the government. Bashar al-Assad tentatively pursued some policy changes that met some of the demands. The scale of the reforms made was, however, comparably minor and of a tentative nature, as the adopted decisions were soon withdrawn. Soon after, the regime resorted to repression; a timeproven mechanism known from earlier decades. Al-Assad’s government severely cracked down on the nascent dissent movement. In 2001, the key representatives were arrested and imprisoned, salons closed down, and potential regime opponents were closely surveilled. In 2005, the spirit of

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the Damascus Spring reached its definite end. The Damascus Declaration (2005) was released with signatures from a broad spectrum of the Syrian opposition, including the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood as well as representatives of Syrian Kurds. It criticised the regime as authoritarian, totalitarian, and cliquish. The regime’s response to this third oppositional statement was a crackdown harsh enough to debilitate the dissent’s base. Like his father, Bashar al-Assad made clear that repression was the supreme means to address the opposition forces in the country (see e.g. HRW 2010). The repression in the 2000s was, however, only a precursor of a much worse state-orchestrated violence that was yet to come. AlAssad’s determination to keep power and resort to brutal violence when addressing sites of dissent proved to be a crucial factor that drove Syria into a protracted bloody civil war in 2011. In Turkey at roughly the same time as when Bashar al-Assad assumed power in Syria, the political star Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan, a former mayor of Istanbul, began to rise in popularity nationwide. In the 2002 parliamentary elections, the conservative pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (the AKP) won 34% of the votes and secured a sweeping victory. The party of Erdo˘gan’s political base, was a greenhorn on the Turkish political scene, having been established only a year before the elections. Besides the AKP, only the social-democratic Republican People’s Party (the CHP) made it to the Turkish Grand National Assembly. The AKP gained two-thirds of the seats and became the strongest political force in the Turkish parliament with an outright majority (Cagaptay 2002). Erdo˘gan, the party’s leader, was a logical candidate for the Prime Minister office. However, a 1994 incident in which he recited a pro-Islamist poem led to him being banned from holding any political office. This situation, however, changed a few months later. A legal change and by-election in Siirt province in 2003, which came in reaction to local voting irregularities, gave Erdo˘gan the chance to run and win the elections again (CNN 2003). In 2003, Erdo˘gan became Turkey’s Prime Minister, an electoral and personal success that he repeated for three consecutive election periods (2003–2014). As in the case of Bashar al-Assad’s phase of performative reform, Erdo˘gan initially adopted several decisions that sparked hope for a more reformative and democratic vision of Turkey’s sociopolitical trajectory. The Democratic Initiative Process (DIP), a programme launched by Erdo˘gan to improve standards of democracy and bolster freedom and respect for human rights in Turkey, was one component of his reform

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package. Framed as Turkey’s democratic opening, the DIP foresaw, among others, a revision of the far-reaching rights associated with the 1991 Anti-Terror Law as well as a reconciliation of strained relationships between the state and ethnic and religious minorities. The major initiative was, however, the rapprochement with the Kurdish minority to end a protracted violent conflict that has resulted in more than 40,000 casualties over several decades. Through the Kurdish–Turkish peace process Erdo˘gan’s government eased up the state-sanctioned persecution of the Kurdish community. Accordingly, Kurds became freer to use the Kurdish language in the public space, Kurdish names of some cities and villages were restored, and many Kurdish political prisoners received a reduction of the imprisonment terms or even pardons. In return, Erdo˘gan’s government asked Kurdish militias to abandon violence and the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (the PKK), a Kurdish political organisation with armed units, to withdraw from Turkey (Ta¸spinar and Tol 2014). The 2013 deal negotiated between Erdo˘gan’s cabinet and Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed Kurdish leader and the PKK founder, however, lasted only a few months. The mutual distrust nurtured over decades, combined with the fact that the Turkish–Kurdish reconciliation can be hardly separated from the developments in other Kurd-dominated areas outside Turkey in northern Syria and Iraq, undermined the fragile truce. The territorial expansion of the ISIS—and their presence in northern Syria in particular, an area densely populated by Kurds—set the stage for one of the heaviest blows to the Kurdish–Turkish relations in recent history and was of the central factors that eventually led to the full collapse of the truce in 2015 (Kiri¸sci and Ekim 2015). Like as Bashar al-Assad, Recep Erdo˘gan was initially associated with political liberalisation and a promise of an inclusive form of politics (Kiri¸sci and Sloat 2019: 2). Reconciliation with the Kurds, the efforts to reach out to ethnic and religious minorities, and pro-democratic leanings were Erdo˘gan’s key political projects. Erdo˘gan’s role in politics was, however, controversial as early as the beginning of 2000s. Given the Islamic religious emphasis, which is grounded in the AKP’s ideology, many Turks, especially those in the urban-educated social strata, were alarmed by Erdo˘gan’s rise to power. Although the AKP’s take on Islamism is far from the focused and targeted approaches of Egyptian or Syrian branches of the Muslim Brotherhood adhere to, it has been no less worrisome for the Turks supportive of the secular nature of the Turkish state. The AKP’s Islamist ideology is less specific, more diffuse and does not necessarily call

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for an enforced societal transformation guided by Islam. Thus, it had the capacity to be more inclusive and integrate more of the populace (Cook 2017). The AKP’s emergence in 2002 and Erdo˘gan’s uninterrupted hold on power for more than two decades challenged the core ideological layer of the Turkish identity, i.e. the principle of secularism. The contestation of secularism as such is not a new topic in the Turkish domestic arena. It is rather an issue that has never been properly accommodated in modern Turkish history. In the early 1920s, the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk chose a secular vision of the state as a key fundament of Turkey’s state organisation. Pursuing the secular state vision, Kemal Atatürk abolished religious schools, outlawed Sufi orders, removed a constitutional article that defined Islam as the state religion, and abolished the institution of the caliphate. These decisions were bold and radical. They derailed Turkey from the centuries-old political-religious construct embodied by the Ottoman Empire. As a result, religion became a matter ultimately restricted to the private sphere. It was no longer considered a topic that would shape the political decision-making process. The old system, built over centuries, was replaced by a new one within the scope of a few years—a societal transformation that has not yet been fully completed. Although secularism as a form of state organisation prevailed, the disagreement of many Turks with the new order lives on. The Kemalist state vision that dominated the Turkish discourse over the last century clearly favoured secularism over faith. Moreover, it associated secularism with progress, while faith was implicitly linked to backward thinking and undesired underdevelopment. In result, it naturally nurtured discontent and insecurities of those who preferred the latter, including Erdo˘gan himself. The AKP’s political rise touched this sore point of the Turkish identity. Strengthened by the consecutive electoral victories, the AKP challenged secularism as a pillar of the state. Similar to the men in power in Syria and Egypt, Erdo˘gan’s government increasingly portrayed secular principles as imported Western concepts incompatible with the genuine Turkish values based on a long Islamic tradition. Accordingly, secularism became associated with Western interests and detrimental effects on societal well-being (Kaliber and Kaliber 2019). Although the identity struggle over secular and religious visions of the state order is an ongoing process, the significant shift in the discourse in favour of the anti-secular camp that took place in the last two decades is undeniable. It prepared a fertile ground for Erdo˘gan; the Turkish

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President easily switched into “securitisation mode” in the aftermath of the failed 2016 coup and his style of governance has been increasingly authoritarian. Both state leaders Bashar al-Assad and Recep Erdo˘gan have not brought about the sociopolitical liberalisation many had initially hoped to see. Instead, the populace of Syria and Turkey have witnessed an observable regression in the field of rights and freedoms (see the Democracy Index 2019). The dramatic developments of the 2010s in both countries played a central role in this negative trend. In 2011 and 2012, Bashar al-Assad brutally suppressed a nascent protest movement inspired by the Arab Spring. The initial confrontation toppled over into a protracted civil war that has attracted hardcore Islamist militants along with regional powers to join. According to London-based human rights group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the civil war has to date claimed up to 600,000 lives and displaced about 12 million Syrians— almost 60% of the pre-war Syrian population (SOHR 2020). Meanwhile, in Turkey, the attempted coup in 2016 which failed to remove Recep Erdo˘gan from power provided the President with a unique opportunity to strengthen his position and legitimise a wide-ranged crackdown on his opponents. In this respect, both state leaders, when confronted with a challenge to their position of power, resorted to a security narrative and linked a variety of topics to the all-encompassing threat of terrorism. By doing so, they succeeded in legitimising the reinforcement of autocratic mechanisms, along with the repression of political opposition and the killing of civilians en masse in the case of Syria.

The Economy of the Truth The powerful narrative of a terrorist threat is far from being unique to Egypt. The terrorist as an enemy figure has been central to security discourses in Syria and Turkey, too. That said, all three countries have experienced some form of militant violence. It is by no means an intention of this book to downplay the human suffering that this violence has caused. As this book suggests, the exceptional frameworks introduced by securitisation processes to protect the societies from terrorist threats have been no less “threatening” to the governed societies than the terrorist threats themselves. The counterterrorism measures tend to reinforce authoritarian mechanisms and structures of power dominance

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and thus bear long-term detrimental effects on social freedoms and liberties. This happens, of course, to a different extent and at varying levels of intensity in individual contexts. The securitisation of the terrorist threat in Turkey has clearly not been the same as the nevertheless similar process in Syria, wherein the counterterrorism rhetorics of al-Assad’s government justified a massive wave of extrajudicial killings of civilians. The trend set by the securitisation processes in all three countries is, however, unambiguous: the reinforcement of authoritarian mechanisms of governance and security structures seems to be its inevitable result. The narrative of an omnipresent yet vague terrorist enemy is a convenient one for political actors that seek a legitimate justification to counter and silence their opponents. Terrorism per se is automatically associated with danger, devastation, and death. At the same time, its definition is broad enough to accommodate a flexible variety of individuals—be it a peaceful communist or a diehard Islamist. Asking “who is a terrorist”, reflects the sociopolitical contexts and historical experience of securitising actors under scrutiny. Therefore, although terrorism appears to be a universal threat, the associations with the terrorist threat vary according to the contextual background. When the popular protests against al-Assad’s regime broke out in Syria in 2011, the regime did not immediately resort to the enemy code of a terrorist. Instead, it categorised the protesters into three groups: those whose needs were justified; the outlaws and criminals who sought to take advantage of the existing chaos; and the violent religious extremists (al-Assad 2011). The latter group, which the regime assessed initially as a minority voice among the protesting crowds, hinted at the Islamist adversary, an enemy figure present in the Syrian security discourse for decades: We have known and experienced this kind of [extremist and takfiri] ideology decades ago when it tried to infiltrate Syria; and Syria was able to eliminate it thanks to the wisdom and intelligence of the Syrian people. The ideology we see today is no different from that we saw decades ago. It is exactly the same. What has changed, however, is the methods and the persons. This kind of ideology lurks in dark corners in order to emerge when an opportunity presents itself or when it finds a handy mask to put on. It kills in the name of religion, destroys in the name of reform, and spreads chaos in the name of freedom. It is very sad to see in any society in the world some groups that belong to other bygone ages, that belong to a period we do not live in and we do not belong to. (al-Assad 2011)

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The excerpt from al-Assad’s speech captures the regime’s employment of the powerful term takfiri ideology, which is associated with radical Muslims who follow an exclusive vision of Islam and excommunicate other Muslims from the umma as non-believers and kafirs (apostates), to exclude the protesters from the optimised Syrian society. Although the takfiri label is per se a religiously loaded expression, the official Syrian discourse related the incompatibility of such individuals to a betrayal of the Syrian nation. Because of their alleged objective to weaken national unity, tarnish Syria’s image internationally, and seek foreign support in order to achieve their own egoistic goals, the takfiri individuals were depicted as unpatriotic and disloyal to the Syrian nation. Moreover, by including takfiri argumentation into the securitisation discourse, the regime mobilised discursive sediments associated with the Islamist threat and thus fanned the sectarian fears. It was meant to alarm Syria’s diverse religious and ethnic minorities by spreading the idea that should the takfiri ideology prevail, their status, currently protected by al-Assad’s regime, would be threatened. Later, the rise and expansion of the ISIS and other Islamist militant groups in the Syrian territory further strengthened this form of securitising rhetoric linked to deeply-rooted sectarian anxieties, which are anchored in the collective memory of the Syrian population. As much as the vision of the Islamist enemy was and still is a powerful one in the Syrian security discourse, soon after the explosion of protests, al-Assad’s regime moved away from framing the threat posed to the regime’s integrity as a threat posed by Islamists only. Instead, the securitisation narrative increasingly mentioned the vaguely defined figure of a terrorist as the main culprit behind the state crisis. The Islamist enemy did not disappear per se. Rather, it was blended in with the terrorist figure, the universal code for Syria’s enemies. The terrorist label—an open-to-interpretation and yet universally understandable signifier for a threat—offered the regime a suitable means to cover the sociopolitical variety of the opposition movement and exclude virtually anyone as an alleged terrorist from the optimised Syrian society. By 2013, the terrorist label became so established in the security discourse that internal security documents referred to all any dissidents as terrorists (SJAC 2019: 20). Like in Egypt, the terrorist was depicted as a negation of the optimised Syrian citizen. They were a criminal, blood-thirsty individual who used violence in the pursuit of their objectives, such as harming Syria’s image, creating chaos, and undermining Syria’s prosperity. The terrorist

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was characterised by a lack of intellectual capacity and an unwillingness to accept dialogue to as a form of conflict resolution. Terrorists are concerned neither with reform nor with dialogue. They are criminals who have set themselves a task; and they are not concerned with condemnation or denunciation. They do not care about the tears of wives who have lost their husbands and mothers who have lost their children. They will never stop until they complete their task regardless of anything. They will never stop unless we stop them. Not distinguishing between terrorism and the political process is a great error made by some people. It lends legitimacy to terrorism sought by terrorists and their masters from the first day of the events. Making this distinction between terrorism and the political process is essential in order to understand and know how to move towards improving the conditions we live under. (al-Assad 2012)

The use of the terrorist threat also helped the government emphasise the urgency of acting beyond the usual political field. It allowed them to frame the contemporary conflict between the government and the opposition forces as an exceptional, war-like situation which had been enforced by an alleged disinterest of opposition in finding a genuine political solution: When we say that the issue is that of terrorism, then we are no longer in the internal political sphere. We are now facing a real war waged from outside. And dealing with a war is different from dealing with an internal conflict or dealing with Syrian parties. This point should be very clear. […] Today we are defending a cause and a homeland. We are not doing what we are doing because we love blood. A battle has been forced on us, and the result was the blood which has been spilled. (al-Assad 2012)

As Calculli (2019: 228, 238) observes al-Assad’s defensive rhetorics is a common masking strategy of securiritizing actors to legitimise an excessive use of violence against the perceived threat. The challenge posed by the Syrian opposition, which was increasingly referred to as a terrorist threat, allowed the regime to justify the extensive use of violence to crackdown on the protesters. Accordingly, the fight of terrorism was depicted as a defensive, yet heroic last resort act, which was necessary to secure the survival of the nation. The use of violence by the state authorities was not a choice. It was an only option left to counter the terrorist

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adversary for the sake of the Syrian nation (al-Assad 2012). Counterterrorism was framed as an act of self-defence necessary to protect the nation and the optimised Syrians as steadfast, nation-loving patriots, who were ready to sacrifice themselves for the nation (see Calculli 2019: 238). Thus, although the securitisation rhetorics in Syria integrated some religious connotations, these have been so far less consistent when compared to the securitisation discourse in Egypt. In Syria, the emphasis on the national identity prevailed over the religious one. The biopolitical optimisation processes relied on national identity as a key criterion to exclude the undesirable individuals, labelled as terrorists, from the Syrian optimised collective. The national ethos played a role in the securitisation process in Turkey in the 2010s, too. Over many decades, the Kurdish minority and its separatist tendencies embodied one of the state’s major enemies. The lengthy, violent conflict between the state and the Kurdish militants, mainly represented by the PKK designated by the Turkish authorities as a terrorist organisation, poisoned the relationship between the Turks and Kurds with distrust, and left the question of the national identity open to political abuse on both sides. In late 2014, when the conflict in neighbouring Syria reached the Turkish borders and posed an existential threat to hundreds of thousand Syrian Kurds, the mutually incompatible preferences of both parties became time-sensitive hot button issues. Local Kurdish populations were trapped between the ISIS advancement on one side, and repression by al-Assad’s security forces on the other. This challenging context forged a strong sense of solidarity among the Kurdish communities across the border. Yet, the Turkish leadership was overwhelmingly reluctant to step in allowing Kurdish fighters to cross into Syria and halt thus the expansion of the ISIS in the immediate proximity of its own borders (Letsch and Traynor 2014). Although Turkey entered the Syrian conflict in summer 2016 on the premise that it wanted to counter ISIS, it promptly launched a series of massive military operations focused on the Kurdish populace across the border. Determined “to destroy the terror corridor east of the Euphrates” (Erdo˘gan 2019) the Turkish military interventions systematically undermined the territorial integrity and autonomy of the Kurdish-dominated autonomous region of Rojava. The People’s Protection Units (the YPG), a predominantly Kurdish militia in Syria, which formed a backbone of the anti-Assad Syrian Democratic Forces (the SDF) and played a key role in countering the ISIS expansion, was forced to retreat the area.

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By 2020, Turkey managed to bring Syrian border area under its military control. Thousands of people fled their homes—a result that was hardly appreciated by the Kurds on either side of the border. The securitisation of the terrorist threat did not apply to Kurds only. In July 2016, when a group of military men attempted to overthrow Erdo˘gan’s rule, another state enemy rose to prominence. Despite the absence of solid evidence, the Turkish authorities immediately linked the coup to Fethullah Gülen, an exiled Turkish Islamic preacher and the founder of a volunteer-based, religious transnational movement known as Hizmet (Service). In the 2000s, Gülen’s movement and Erdo˘gan’s AKP formed a firm political alliance that helped Erdo˘gan to seize the control over the country and resulted in many members of the Gülenist base taking influential positions within the bureaucratic apparatus. Later, the cooperation withered away, transforming into a power struggle between the two camps (Kiri¸sci and Sloat 2019: 3). In the early 2010s, both parties engaged in a series of attacks and counter-attacks. Erdo˘gan refused to list dozens of Gülenists on AKP lists for the parliamentary elections. Meanwhile, Gülenist prosecutors investigated several AKP members, including members of Erdo˘gan’s family, for corruption. In response, the government closed several Gülenist media outlets, seized companies of Gülenist adherents, and dismissed hundreds of state officials (Kiri¸sci and Sloat 2019). Two months before the failed coup d’état, in May 2016, the tension between the two parties further intensified. Turkey listed the Gülenist movement as a terrorist organisation, now commonly referred to as the FETO (the Fethullahist Terrorist Organisation). The depiction of Gülen and his movement as the main culprit behind the overthrow plot in July 2016 was the last straw that broke this once-thriving alliance. Erdo˘gan showed no doubt about the complicity of Gülen and his supporters in the coup plot. Accordingly, Erdo˘gan compared the Gülenist movement to the PKK and the ISIS: I would like to once more underline that there is no difference between Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETO), which is the perpetrator of the July 15 armed coup attempt that martyred our 240 citizens, the PKK which is the murderer of our 70 members of the security forces over the last one month alone including soldiers, police officers and village guards, and the Daesh [ISIS] which is the possible perpetrator of the latest attack in Gaziantep. (Erdo˘gan 2016a)

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Through the securitisation rhetorics, Turkey placed the Gülenist movement, PKK, YPG, and ISIS, in a singular category of the Turkish terrorist enemy (see e.g. Erdo˘gan 2016b), their diverse ideologies and objectives vis-à-vis Turkey notwithstanding. The comparison of the presumed coup perpetrators to the ultraviolent militants of the ISIS, the global terrorist threat number one at the time, added a powerful mobilising effect against anyone associated with the Gülenist movement. Moreover, the authorities used the vague terrorist/Gülenist label to designate and treat accordingly those who did not share the official state vision as outlined by the AKP government. Like in Syria, the Turkish securitisation discourse was not immune to conspiracy theories either. The depiction of groups as diverse as the Gülenist movement, PKK, YPG, and ISIS as all being terrorist organisations was nurtured by an unsubstantiated suggestion that these groups were acting on behalf of an unspecified anti-Turkish power centre. The unknown mastermind supposedly deployed these groups to destroy Turkey’s success and unity: The only aim of these terrorist organizations, which are managed by the same center despite their different names, is to harm the ‘Spirit of New Great Offensive’ that came into existence on July 15 and August 7, and to bring this country to its knees. (Erdo˘gan 2016b)

Needless to mention, this argument ignored blatant realities such as the fact that for instance, the YPG fought ISIS in northern Syria and the Gülenist movement and the PKK were not on amicable terms either. The Turkish securitisation rhetoric reflected the boosted the selfesteem of the ruling elite who were pleased by the coup’s failure. Unlike Syria’s rather defensive approach that highlighted Syria’s role as the victim of the alleged terrorist plot, the Turkish leadership opted for a more aggressive and confident securitising tone. Reinforced by the failed coup attempt, Erdo˘gan expressed no doubt that he could defeat the terrorist enemies and routinely emphasised the readiness to use all means necessary to achieve this objective: Our nation gave a strong message to those who disregarded its will assuming they would subjugate and seize its country through coup, terror and violence. Those who take the road with similar intentions should henceforth know that they will be confronted by a 570 thousand-strong

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military, 260 thousand-strong police force, and the entire 79 million-strong nation. […] No one can prevent us from doing whatever necessary to eradicate all terrorist organizations that pose a threat to the survival of our nation and state regardless of who is standing behind them. (Erdo˘gan 2016c)

To mobilise the society in support of the securitisation process, Erdo˘gan compared the fight against terrorism to nothing less than the war for independence of the Turkish state that came after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War; this is a powerful reference that resonates within the Turkish collective memory. In this context, it became common for the authorities to frame the attempted coup as a historical threshold of a new war for independence; an ongoing fight against the terrorist enemies. The modern-day war for independence, driven by the Turkish heroism and love for the homeland, was depicted as a struggle to protect four central principles from the terrorist enemies: We are defending what our ancestors entrusted to us and the legacy we will pass on to our children with the struggle we are waging for ‘ONE NATION, ONE FLAG, ONE HOMELAND AND ONE STATE.’ (Erdo˘gan 2016d)

The four principles: one nation, one flag, one homeland, and one state became a vehicle for the biopolitical re-optimisation of Turkish society. Through routinised repetition, they were incorporated into the securitising discourse and framed as something that required protection from the terrorist threat. The concept increasingly replaced the existing national narrative that had been centred on the six arrows of Kemalism; Republicanism, Populism, Nationalism, Laicism, Statism, and Reformism. As a new motto of the Turkish nation-state and a powerful ideological base of Erdo˘gan’s establishment. In 2017, one year after the coup, the four principles were integrated into the AKP by-laws and became thus an official part of the party ideology (Art. 4.16 of the AKP by-laws). The four principles wrapped up the optimisation of the Turkish society happening against the backdrop of the securitisation process. It justified the departure from the Kemalist state vision based on republicanism and laicism towards an authoritarian presidential republic with declared religious leanings.

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In both Turkey and Syria, the securitising narratives were new instruments of the ruling elites to optimise the governed society and target political opponents. To mobilise the popular support for the securitising processes Turkish and Syrian ruling elites relied on existing regimes of truth that embodied figures of old enemies and deeply-rooted anxieties; both of which had been nurtured through racist and nationalist discourses in the collective memories of the respective societies over decades. Although it represented ultimately different groups of individuals and was based on different criteria in each country, the category of the enemy shared the universal label of “terrorist”; an enemy code that is automatically associated with a threat and understandable to all societal strata, from the peasants to the upper-class society members. Accordingly, Syrian and Turkish leaders were quick to label their opponents as terrorists. The securitisation of a terrorist enemy, comprehensible to masses, allowed for a powerful and simplified us against them rhetoric that left no space for any position in between (see also Calculli 2019: 231). It mobilised popular support and thus facilitated the adoption of extraordinary means to counter the threat.

The Conditions of Exception Neither Syria nor Turkey have ever been genuine democracies. Born from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, both states took the form of a republic, and have been defined by the important role of the military and tendencies to rely on strong leadership. Although Turkey has not reached the totalitarian character the Syrian government found in al-Assad’s dynasty, it has displayed clear leanings towards an authoritarian style of governance. The securitisation of a broadly defined terrorist threat that intensified in the aftermath of the failed coup further catalysed this trend. Justified by the urge to fight and counter the terrorist enemy Turkey adopted legislation, policies, and security measures that fundamentally strengthened the asymmetric power/knowledge configuration in favour of the executive power controlled by Erdo˘gan and his inner circle. In the summer of 2016, in an immediate reaction to the attempted coup, Turkey declared the state of emergency. The state of emergency, which lasted until summer 2018, empowered the executive power to bypass the system of checks and balances through executive orders that replaced the regular parliamentary legislative procedures and introduced illiberal facets into the Turkish legislation (Akça et al. 2018). In 2017, the

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constitutional referendum made this system, which strongly favoured the executive branch, a permanent component of the Turkish government structure. Turks approved the controversial constitutional amendments by a narrow majority (51%). In June 2018, Turkey, still in a legal state of emergency, held snap general and presidential elections. Erdo˘gan won the presidential election and became thus the first President to govern the country with the increased powers approved by the referendum. The country became a presidential republic with power centred in the hands of the president. Accordingly, the office of prime minister was abolished, and substantial legislative powers were delegated directly to the president (Ekim and Kiri¸sci 2017). The independence of the judiciary shrank, too. Under the presidential system, the president gained almost total control over judiciary appointments. Out of twenty-eight top-ranking judiciary members, the president selects eighteen (Kiri¸sci and Sloat 2019; Öztürk and Gözaydın 2017). Wide-ranged oppression of Turkish society accompanied the essential changes in the state structure. Adopting securitisation rhetoric, the Turkish authorities identified more than 150,000 public servants as potential terrorist threats for their alleged links to the Gülen movement and dismissed them summarily (The Wall Street Journal 2018). The massive purge, often compared to a witch-hunt, targeted teachers and university lecturers, justices and prosecutors, and other key members of the bureaucratic apparatus. Of course, the military ranks were purged as well. The state universities were brought under Erdo˘gan’s direct control, and their traditional privilege of selecting their own rectors was abolished (Kiri¸sci and Sloat 2019: 7). The civil society and the private sector were not spared from the massive crackdown either. By executive decree and without individualised justifications, more than 1,500 civil society organisations including associations, foundations, and trade unions were closed down. According to Amnesty International, only eleven have reopened since (AI 2018). Within one year of the failed coup, the authorities also took control over almost 1,000 companies including a bank, many industrial companies, as well as media houses with alleged links to Gülenists (Reuters 2017). The wide-ranged crackdown on alleged terrorists also targeted Kurds. In south-east Turkey, an area densely populated by the Kurdish minority, the authorities intensified an already existing crackdown on Kurds associated with the PKK. The counterterrorism measures adopted in the region included arbitrary detentions, summary dismissals of Kurdish officials as

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well as the shutdown of Kurdish media, but also major human rights abuses such enforced disappearances, excessive use of violence, torture as well as extrajudicial killing of up to 1,200 residents and widespread destruction of property (OHCHR 2017). The increase in state violence drove up to half a million people out of their homes between July 2015 and December 2016. According to a UN report, the harsh measures were meant to suppress the dissent rather than to counter a real terrorist threat (OHCHR 2017: 4). Although the state of emergency was eventually lifted in the summer of 2018 after seven consecutive renewals, its absence did not mean the nation returned to the normalcy before its imposition. Only a few days after the state of emergency was annulled, Turkey adopted a legislation package that de facto replaced the state of emergency. The package is limited to three years and is expected to expire in the summer of 2021. It empowers the authorities to dismiss civil servants arbitrarily, to confiscate passports, to ban public assemblies, and to restrict the movement of individuals between and within provinces. Moreover, the package de facto legalises the use of arbitrary detention. It empowers the police to pick up specific suspects without charge, hold them for up to twelve days, and to repeat the detention in the same investigation. The law also relaxed the judicial oversight of pretrial detention. The individuals in pretrial detention are required to be visually reviewed by the court only every 90 days, instead of the previous 30 days (RSF 2018b; Yackley 2018). The everyday practice of security authorities barely changed after the end of the state of emergency. Provided a vague legal definition of terrorism and the repressive climate sanctioned by the securitisation process, the uplifting of the state of emergency did not significantly alter the empowered status of the security authorities. The officials continued to act as petty sovereigns and carried on with arbitrary detentions, travel bans, seizure of property, as well as the blatant misuse of terrorism charges to intimidate and silence the dissent (AI 2019b). In September 2020, the authorities, for instance, arrested nearly 50 lawyers in a terrorism investigation that sought to link lawyers with the alleged crimes of their clients. Accordingly, the prosecution accused the arrested lawyers—mostly defence attorneys—“of acting on the orders of a terrorist organisation because of the legal work they perform on behalf of their clients” (HRW 2020b). The terror group in question was the Gülen movement. The records of human rights groups clearly document that this was not an isolated incident. Over the last few years, lawyers have been repeatedly

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targeted and accused of Gülenist or Kurdish/PKK links due to the alleged crimes of their clients (FIDH 2020; HRW 2020b). In contrast to Turkey, Syria had been permanently ruled under the state of emergency from 1963 until 2011, when al-Assad’s regime, pressured by the growing public protests, lifted the measure (TIMEP 2019). For 48 years, the Syrian rulers justified upholding the state of emergency with a mixture of internal and external threats, including the threat associated with their southern neighbour, Israel. In a pattern similar to Egypt, the Syrian authorities routinely claimed to have deployed the state of emergency, including the exceptional decrees only in a very limited manner to counter the threat. The reality, however, did not mirror the official claims. The Syrian human rights groups unequivocally identified the state of emergency as a centrepiece of the Syrian autocracy, a rationale behind the lack of any sense of normalcy in the everyday life of Syrians, and a source of a phobia “that prevents even conceiving of any normalcy in the future” (Hadad 2009: 546). In a manner similar to the pattern known from Egypt, the state of emergency was abandoned and replaced with permanent counterterrorism legislation (VDC 2015). In 2012, Bashar al-Assad ratified the CounterTerrorism Law (2012/19) which defined a terrorist act in a catch-all definition as: every act intended to create panic among people, disturb public security, damage the infrastructural or institutional foundations of the state, that is committed via the use of weapons, ammunition, explosives, flammable materials, poisonous products, or epidemiological or microbial instruments […] or via the use of any tool that achieves the same purpose. (TIMEP 2019)

The broad definition invited the criminalisation of a wide range of nonviolent activities and, like in Egypt and Turkey, provided a legal cover for oppressive practices in the formal absence of the state of emergency (see Chapter 2 for Egypt; see also HRW 2013). Syria also adopted a legislative decree (2012/63) which empowered the authorities to intimidate and persecute individuals charged in cases related to national security and terrorism before a court verdict has been reached. In particular, the authorities were authorised to seize moveable and immoveable assets of the accused person and to impose a travel ban.Both of which the officials routinely applied (TIMEP 2019).

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Complementary to the Counter-Terrorism Law, the Syrian government passed the Law on Counter-Terrorism Court (2012/22) which established the Counter-Terrorism Court (CTC), a special court for terrorism-related cases. By default, the CTC was designated to operate outside the frontiers of the normal judiciary, for it was not required to follow regular trial and due process standards as set by the Syrian criminal law (VDC 2015). The case of Mazen Darwish, a well-known Syrian human rights lawyer, and his colleagues from the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, was one of the first prominent cases heard by the Court. In 2013, a year after the arrest, Darwish and his colleagues were referred to the Court and accused of “publicising terrorist acts” for their coverage and documentation of the anti-regime protests (HRW 2015a). Through several adjournments, the Court achieved lengthy delays. Thus, although the charges were later dropped, Darwish and his colleagues spent more than three years in arbitrary detention in conditions that included torture and massive ill-treatment (AI 2015). Darwish’s case was, however, just a tip of the iceberg. Within three years of its operation, between 2012 and 2015, over 80,000 civilians were referred to the Court (VDC 2015). The ambiguous interpretation of what classifies as an act of terrorism, which the controversial and restrictive legislation backed in both countries, bolstered the status of security officials as petty sovereigns. Having been granted a free hand to interpret the vague legal definitions, the security authorities were in position to arbitrarily decide on who belonged to the category of the optimised citizen and who did not anymore. The unpredictable arbitrariness of their decisions combined with the widespread ill-treatment and harsh punishments of security suspects contributed in Syria as well as in Turkey significantly—Egypt is not an exception to this rule (see Chapters 4 and 5)—to an overall climate of insecurity and fear, an underlying tool authoritarian regimes apply to discipline and optimise the governed society. This does not imply that the repression justified by the securitisation of terrorist threat reached the same level in Turkey as in Syria. In many respects, the Syrian exception defied description of conceivable violence. Over the span of a decade, between the outbreak of the protests in 2011 and late 2019, Syrian authorities arbitrarily detained and severely tortured up to 1.2 million persons (SNHR 2019: 2). The torture survivors recounted grave forms of ill-treatment and violence

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in unrecorded detention cells as well as in official incarceration facilities. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the Syrian regime inflicted up to 72 horrific methods on individuals held in its detention centres and military hospitals. Besides the regionally widespread torture practices such as beating, electrocution, body suspension, and sexual abuse, the Syrian petty sovereigns resorted to pulling out detainees’ nails, gouging their eyes—a practice that often led to the death of the torture victim—shearing and cutting off body parts, stabbing, or stapling the body. To maximise the experienced trauma, some detainees had to share cells with deceased inmates before being forced to remove the body remains. In result, the violence combined with the widespread health neglect, deliberate deprivation of food, water, and basic hygiene conditions turned the contingency of death into a routine, everyday matter (for more see SNHR 2019). The thousands of photos leaked by a Syrian military defector and whistle-blower, nicknamed Caesar, corroborated the accounts of torture survivors. Between May 2011 and August 2013, Caesar, a military police photographer, collected more than 28,000 photos of people who are believed to have died in government custody (HRW 2015b: 2). The post-mortem photos of torture victims exposed a distressing level of brutality of the security officials, for whom the killing became an everyday, routinised security practice in the mode of exception, not an outcome of an individual failure or a haphazard act as commonly claimed by the regime (see e.g. al-Assad 2012). The exception is not a one-size-fits-all concept and logically cannot be generalised. The exception in Turkey is not comparable with the exception that prevailed in Syria or Egypt. The display of a plain, unrestricted form of sovereign violence brought the brutality of al-Assad’s regime to an extreme that can bear hardly a comparison. It is also not the prime analytical focus of the TER-model to assess whether an exception is moderate or not, for the contextual premises vary greatly in time and place. The underlying principles of the exception, however, remain the same. Its existence tends to reinforce the asymmetric power/knowledge relations and thereby strengthen the authoritarian structures of power. Thus, the fact that Turkey has not adopted sovereign violence as brutal as al-Assad’s regime did should not distract us from the massive consolidation of power in favour of Erdo˘gan.

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The Unpredictable Resistance Resistance is a precarious business, the results of which no one can be certain of beforehand for they are beyond the control of an individual or a group (see Heller 1996; Stritzel and Chang 2015). This is a central assumption of the third dimension of the TER-model. This said, acts of resistance can irritate the existing configuration of the power/knowledge relations without necessarily undermine the underlying hegemonic power structures. In fact, in the 2010s, neither the 2011 revolution in Egypt, the 2011 popular protests in Syria, nor the 2016 attempted coup in Turkey decisively challenged the asymmetric power/knowledge relations. Rather, on several occasions, resistance backfired and further consolidated the existing authoritarian structures. These acts of resistance instead provided the securitising elites with a pretext for toughening existing and/or introducing new exceptional measures to the detriment of the margins of freedom. In July 2016, when the high-ranking military elites attempted to thwart Erdo˘gan’s rule, the country had been already sliding towards the authoritarian rule of one strongman. Supported by the securitising discourse Erdo˘gan’s government had been deliberately dismantling the civil society, designating its opponents as state enemies, and embedding authoritarian principles into the state structure. The coup was meant to challenge this trend and undermine the nascent hegemonic configuration of power/knowledge relations. Yet, it backfired. Although the putschists managed to get control of a few key institutions, broadcast their statement across national TV, and bomb the parliament in session, they did not gain the decisive support of the majority security forces nor the endorsement of public. In fact, the Turkish political parties, the opposition parties, and representatives of civil society condemned the coup attempt (see e.g. The Guardian 2016). The attempt to overthrow Erdo˘gan’s rule accelerated Turkey’s pace towards an authoritarian state. The coup, as already mentioned above, became a pretext for Erdo˘gan and his power circle to intensify the securitisation of a vaguely defined terrorist threat and thus to justify massive inroads into the margin of freedom of the governed society. The perpetrators were exemplarily punished, the state of emergency was declared, and a major crackdown on sites of dissent was launched. Under the cloak of fighting terrorism, Turkey introduced a series of restrictive measures that significantly reduced the options of the governed society to question

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and oppose the dominant securitisation discourse without fear of negative repercussions. We can’t complain, because we can’t complain—this joke, which made rounds on social media in Turkey, reflects on the massive inroads the state made into the margin of freedom of the governed society (AI 2019a: 6). The vibrant Turkish media landscape, a target of the increasingly restrictive measures since the early 2010s (for more see Corke et al. 2014), were hit especially hard by the exceptional measures. Within two weeks of the coup, Erdo˘gan issued an emergency decree that shutdown 131 media organisations, including major news agencies, nationwide newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and TV and radio stations. The shutdown accompanied a targeted campaign against individual journalists and media employees. Nearly 90 journalists and media employees received arrest warrants, mostly for the alleged support of and/or affiliations with terrorist organisations. Several hundred press cards were rescinded (HRW 2016). One of the prominent victims of the purge was Zaman, a major highly circulated daily newspaper. Originally a pro-AKP outlet, it grew increasingly critical of Erdo˘gan’s rule after the AKP and Gülenists parted ways in the early 2010s (Corke et al. 2014: 5). In March 2016, in what was described as a death blow to the Turkish media, based on unproven accusations that Zaman was the media arm of a terrorist organisation, the Gülen movement, the state took over the outlet (Schenkkan 2016). After the coup, Zaman was completely shut down. Nearly 50 arrest warrants were issued for Zaman staffers (BBC 2016). Accused of involvement in the failed coup, aiding or being a member of a terrorist organisation (the Gülenist movement), many of the arrested Zaman staffers spent several months in pretrial detention before being acquitted (RSF 2017). In a show trial in 2018, six former Zaman columnists received up to 10 and a half years of imprisonment for membership in a terrorist organisation; a conviction that was the manifestation of the broad application of the terrorism charges against the regime critics (RSF 2018a). The fate of former Zaman employees is not unique to the Turkish media landscape. Former Cumhuriyet staffers had a similar experience; they were convicted of terrorism-related crimes, including the support of terrorist organisations (the PKK and the Gülen movement) and received harsh punishments of up to seven years of imprisonment (Gall 2018). As in the case of the Zaman colleagues, their “transgression” was the coverage that exposed wrongdoings of the Erdo˘gan’s government (RSF 2019).

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The crackdown on the media became so intense that Turkey became a world leader in the number of imprisoned media staff, outstripping the usual culprits China and Iran (RSF 2016). Within a few years, Turkey dropped by nearly ten places in the annual press freedom ranking cultivated by the Reporters without Borders, from 149 (of 180 countries) in 2015 to 157 in 2019 (RSF 2020). In the context of the repressive campaign and climate of fear, the media outlets were shut down. They were once an influential actor that offered a relatively unrestricted space for government-critical positions and alternative discourses, yet their watchdog function was depleted. As the mainstream media shrank to a mere echo of the official state discourse, the importance of the online platforms in providing free space for independent news sites and alternative discourses grew (O’Donohue et al. 2020). Social media, streaming services, and blogs became an arena for the expression and exchange of opinions divergent from the official discourse, to question security policies such as military campaigns in Syria and Iraq, and to criticise the harsh crackdown on freedom of press and expression. The online sphere opened relatively unrestricted venues for the dissent to critically expose and discuss government policies. Medyascope, an independent news channel, was one of the new online actors that offered alternative journalism to the government-friendly mainstream media. Instead of a satellite TV, it turned to social media such as Facebook, YouTube, or Periscope to broadcast its news. Over the course of a few years, Medyascope managed to attract a considerable viewership. Its YouTube channel regularly receives three million views a month (EED 2020). The thirst of the populace for other news beyond the government-sanctioned content is also shown in the high numbers of followers amassed by individual journalists on their social media accounts. One of the most prominent Turkish journalists in exile, Can Dündar, a former editor-in-chief of the Cumhuriyet newspaper, entertains a base of 5 million followers on his Twitter account (see Dündar 2020). Fatih Portakal, a former presenter at FOX Türkiye who is critical of Erdo˘gan’s rule, tops Dündar with 7.8 million Twitter followers (see Portakal 2020). In a country with almost 13 million active Twitter users, such numbers are quite impressive (Statista 2020). The popularity of the online media and its role in forming an alternative discourse did not go unnoticed by the Turkish authorities. Accordingly, social media, online news sites, and streaming services became the most recent target of the purge campaign justified by countering of a

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terrorist threat. In result, creating or commenting on online content critical of the political status quo became a dangerous activity associated with a real risk of imprisonment, often linked to far-stretched terrorism charges (see e.g. CPJ 2020). This was the case of Canan Kaftanciou˘glu, an opposition leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP). In a politically motivated trial, Kaftanciou˘glu received nine years of imprisonment for her tweets that dated back for several years and allegedly spread terrorist propaganda (Kucukgocmen and Gumrukcu 2019). Besides the targeted prosecution of individuals, the authorities have been systematically purging the online arena by requesting companies withhold content from diverse online platforms (Zidan 2018). Twitter, for instance, recorded more than 40,000 requests raised by Turkey; an amount which makes up 41% of all global requests (for more see Twitter 2020). In summer 2020, Turkey introduced legislation tailored to bring the online sphere under governmental control through further constraints. The new Social Media Law de facto banned the operation of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in Turkey unless they comply with the restrictive national media laws (HRW 2020a; O’Donohue et al. 2020). Although at the time of writing this book, the position of the social media companies is not yet defined, the state control over the online content is doomed to increase. When Syrians, inspired by the unexpected results of protests in Egypt and Tunisia, joined the Arab Spring and rose up en masse against al-Assad’s repressive regime, they broke the barrier of fear that had previously paralysed them (Gopal 2018; Pearlman 2016). The 2011 protests brought a genuine moment of unknown freedom after decades of enforced silence. This “renaissance of freedom of expression” as Charaf (2014) put it, was linked to the hope that the civil unrest might lead to the end of al-Assad’s era. A few concessions made by the regime, which included the renouncement of the state of emergency after several decades, nurtured optimism in the early stages of the nationwide protests. Yet, as the course of later developments showed, the hopes were premature. Syrian events diverged from Egypt’s timeline, the key actor of the establishment and the gatekeeper to the sovereign violence, the military, remained loyal to the ruler and demonstrated a willingness to use lethal force to counter the anti-regime protest (The New York Times 2011). As the overwhelmingly peaceful protests were brutally suppressed, it became clear that non-violent contestation of the political status quo was insufficient to alter the hegemonic power configuration. It failed to reach its objective: the removal of al-Assad’s regime; and backfired.

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The regime, determined to silence any dissent, drastically constrained the protest movement. Through the repressive methods that included rounds of arbitrary arrests, forced disappearances, brutal torture, and extrajudicial killings of regime critics, they re-established the barrier of fear. By implication, the margin of freedom radically shrunk and so too did the pool of Syrians courageous enough to continue actively supporting the uprising. As the climate of fear came to dominate the life of Syrians again, many opted for a flight into silence and enforced obedience. For others, the extremely constrained margin of freedom reduced the options of resistance to violence. These Syrians formed and joined diverse rebel groups that have fought the regime forces and aligned militias, but also other rival rebel militias. It is worth mentioning that the anti-regime groups often pursued specific agendas that were not necessarily more democratic or less brutal than those of the regime forces (for more details see Laub 2017). Violence may be the form of resistance most obvious to external observers, but it was not the only method used by Syrians. Many Syrians kept the spirit of a peaceful form of dissent alive and engaged in a range of non-violent anti-regime activities that could have cost them their lives if exposed. One of such subversive and highly dangerous activity was the documentation of the unprecedented brutality of al-Assad’s regime. The Violations Documentation Center in Syria (VDC), a loose network of Syrian opposition activists and human rights defenders, belongs to such sites of dissent. Since 2011, the VDC has documented the human rights abuses in a consistent and detailed manner. Focused on future justice-related procedures, the organisation compiled an extensive, online database of victims of violence. The searchable database includes disappeared, arrested, and deceased persons, their personal data, circumstances of the abuse, as well as the perpetrator(s). The VDC researchers did not only document abuses by regime forces only. Instead, they covered other parties of the violent conflict as perpetrators, too. Caesar, the Syrian military defector, who copied photos of corpses—deceased victims of violence—and smuggled them out of Syria, reached another important milestone in collecting evidence against al-Assad’s regime. As the photos were taken to systematically catalogue the corpses and thus included specific clues about the victims’ identity, they became valuable, graphic evidence of the regime’s brutality (HRW 2015b: 4, 34f; SNHR 2019: 37).

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Such detailed evidence, compiled consistently and extensively, available online and in English, is unique in the regional context. It demonstrates the professionalism of initiatives like the VDC that follow international standards on reporting human rights abuses in order to present evidence usable at international courts. Thereby, it also reveals their overall aspiration: to bring al-Assad’s regime to justice, sooner or later. To date, there has been, however, little international response beyond condemnation, displays of outrage, or photography exhibitions. Caesar commented disappointedly: “I honestly thought that if I could have the courage to go for the years that I did … endangering my life every single day, that once I came out and showed the world what I had, that the entire conscience of the world would move” (quoted in Simon and Bolduan 2019). Although, as Caesar’s disappointed reaction echoed, the international reaction has largely failed the expectations of the Syrian activists and human rights defenders, their resistance has had an impact. In 2020, six years after Caesar’s leaks were made public, the United States adopted the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, known as the Caesar Act, that imposed economic sanctions on the Syrian regime. In the same year, a German court opened the world’s first criminal trial on state torture in Syria and charged two former security agents for crimes against humanity and torture, respectively (for a detailed follow-up of the trial see ECCHR 2020). As such, both cases signalled to the perpetrators that their status above the law is subject to change based on the collected evidence. In both Syria and Turkey, the securitisation processes facilitated the adoption of restrictive policies, which constrained the margins of freedom of the governed populations. The repressive measures and the deployment of violence aided the proliferation of fear that paralysed many Turks and Syrians into obedient silence. Yet, neither the Syrian nor the Turkish regime managed to fully tame the sites of dissent. Although the forms of resistance varied in both countries, its manifestations clearly showed that no matter how hegemonic the power/knowledge relations are, resistance is always possible and cannot be ever fully suppressed. The Reinforcement of Authoritarianism It is apparent that diverse counterterrorism campaigns and “wars on terror” are not innocent political strategies to counter a terrorist threat. The exceptional policies and security practices, which the ruling elites tend to argue to be the only possible remedy to address the threat, bear immense sociopolitical consequences for the governed societies.

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Although, as the Turkish and Syrian cases show, the exceptional measures might vary greatly between countries, the underlying principle remains the same: a successful securitisation process is prone to strengthen the asymmetric configuration of power/knowledge relations in favour of the securitising elites. Like al-Sadat’s assassination in 1981, the 2011 anti-regime protests in Syria and the 2016 failed coup in Turkey were major discursive events that catalysed securitisation processes in both countries. The security discourse, dominated then by powerful securitising narratives of a vague terrorist threat, brought forward the figure of a terrorist as a catch-allcode for virtually anyone who did not fit into the re-optimised collective. Accordingly, in the highly polarised securitisation context which prevailed in both countries, those who disagreed or opposed the dominant security discourse were easily associated with the enemy and/or identified directly as terrorists. On behalf of security, defined as a protection of the governed society from a terrorist threat, both governments resorted to exceptional steps. Turkey introduced the state of emergency, purged the bureaucratic apparatus, and cracked down on media and civil society. Moreover, under the emergency, Turkey underwent a major transformation from a parliamentarian to a presidential republic with distinct authoritarian features. Syria replaced the state of emergency with highly restrictive counterterrorism legislation, violently repressed the protest movement, and escalated the confrontation into a protracted bloody civil war. Although the exceptional steps adopted in both countries differed, their effect—the biopolitical optimisation of the governed society—was felt by both the Syrian and Turkish societies. The simplistic us against them securitisation perspective empowered the ruling elites to identify and target their opponents as terrorists/supportive of terrorism and thus to legitimise their exclusion from the protected collective as undesired, unruly individuals. The deployment and intensity of sovereign violence varied in both countries. The Syrian exception, dominated by the raw form of sovereign violence and terror that is hardly imaginable to external observers, fully embraced the possibility of physical death. Turkey’s exception was different. The targeted individuals did not face death en masse, as was the case in Syria. The Turkish exception featured a more subtle operation of sovereign power that did not necessarily seek to kill. This does not, however, make the experience of targeted individuals less painful.

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No matter whether the operation of sovereign power was raw or subtle, its existence proliferated silence and fear among the governed population. Under the guise of societal protection, the ruling elites introduced several series of exceptional measures and restrictive policies that directly influenced the structural opportunities and constraints for resistance to emerge. While the margin of freedom in Syria and Turkey shrank, the authoritarianism expanded. Besides the restrictive policies, the fear of becoming a homo sacer—a target excluded from the protected society— disciplined the governed individuals not to overstep the volatile red lines of officially approved criticism. In such a context, the willingness of people in both countries to (continue to) resist and challenge the asymmetric configuration of power/knowledge relations ebbed away. Yet, as the sites of dissent in both countries showed, no matter how the margin of freedom is constrained, resistance is always possible, even if it is a difficult and highly risky undertaking. The securitisation processes in both countries empowered the ruling elites to adopt steps that would have been otherwise unthinkable. On the pretence of fighting terrorism, the ruling elites attacked and severely undermined the sites of dissent. The governed societies, exposed to optimising processes, underwent a significant transformation, too. Against the polarised us against them securitisation context, Syrians and Turks learnt the criteria of what makes an optimised citizen. Unless they were willing to risk being placed in the category of the terrorist enemy, the governed individuals yielded to the disciplining force of the optimisation process. In result, the securitisation of a vague terrorist threat in Syria as well as in Turkey led to the reinforcement of the hegemonic of power/knowledge relations. The securitisation processes in both countries were unique and reflected a wider sociopolitical context in each of them. The differences notwithstanding, the TER-model proved to provide a solid analytical toolbox to study these processes and make sense of the link between the counterterrorism campaigns in both countries and the authoritarian governance.

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Simon, Mallory, and Kate Bolduan. His first mission was to smuggle war crimes evidence: Now it’s to convince Congress to act. 2019. Available at https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/08/politics/syria-defector-caesarin-washington/index.html. Accessed August 10, 2020. SJAC. 2019. Wall have ears: An analysis of classified Syrian security sector documents. The Syria Justice and Accountability Centre. Available at https://syriaaccountability.org/wp-content/uploads/Walls-Have-Ears-Eng lish.pdf. Accessed September 5, 2020. SNHR. 2019. Documentation of 72 torture methods the Syrian regime continues to practice in its detention centers and military hospitals: Identifying 801 individuals who appeared in Caesar photographs, the US Congress must pass the Caesar Act to provide accountability. The Syrian Network for Human Rights. Available at http://sn4hr.org/wp-content/pdf/english/ Documentation_of_72_Torture_Methods_the_Syrian_Regime_Continues_to_ Practice_in_Its_Detention_Centers_and_Military_Hospitals_en.pdf. Accessed August 5, 2020. SOHR. 2020. Syrian Revolution NINE years on: 586,100 persons killed and millions of Syrians displaced and injured. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Available at https://www.syriahr.com/en/157193/. Accessed August 15, 2020. Statista. 2020. Leading countries based on number of Twitter users as of October 2020. Available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-ofactive-twitter-users-in-selected-countries/. Accessed November 27, 2020. Stritzel, Holger, and Sean C. Chang. 2015. Securitization and countersecuritization in Afghanistan. Security Dialogue 46 (6): 548–567. Ta¸spinar, Ömer, and Gönül Tol. 2014. Turkey and the Kurds: From predicament to opportunity. Brookings - Center on the United States and Europe. Available at https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/ 2016/06/Turkey-and-the-Kurds_Predicament-to-Opportunity.pdf. Accessed September 12, 2020. The Economist. 2019. Democracy Index 2019. Available at https://www.eiu.com/ topic/democracy-index. Accessed October 20, 2020. The Guardian. 2016. Military coup was well planned and very nearly succeeded, say Turkish officials. The Guardian, July 18. Available at https://www.thegua rdian.com/world/2016/jul/18/military-coup-was-well-planned-and-verynearly-succeeded-say-turkish-officials. Accessed September 20, 2020. The New York Times. 2011. Syrian troops open fire on protesters in several cities. The New York Times, March 26. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/ 2011/03/26/world/middleeast/26syria.html. Accessed August 5, 2020. The Wall Street Journal. 2018. How the Turkish purge unfolded. 2018. Available at http://www.wsj.com/graphics/turkish-purge/. Accessed July 24, 2020.

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TIMEP. 2019. TIMEP Brief: Law No.19 of 2012: Counter-terrorism law. The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. Available at https://timep.org/ reports-briefings/timep-brief-law-no-19-of-2012-counter-terrorism-law/. Accessed August 5, 2020. Twitter. 2020. Turkey: Information and removal requests. The Twitter. Available at https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/countries/tr.html. Accessed August 5, 2020. VDC. 2015. Special report on Counter-Terrorism Law No. 19 and the Counter-Terrorism Court in Syria: Counter-Terrorism Court: A tool for war crimes. Violations Documentation Center in Syria. Available at https://syriaaccountability.org/wp-content/uploads/Counter-Terror ism-Court-in-Syria-a-Tool-for-War-Crimes.pdf. Accessed August 5, 2020. Wedeen, Lisa. 1998. Acting “as if”: Symbolic politics and social control in Syria. Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (3): 503–523. Yackley, Ayla J. 2018. Turkey ends state of emergency, but introduces restrictive new rules. al-Monito,. July 19. Available at https://www.al-monitor.com/ pulse/originals/2018/07/turkey-state-of-emergency-expires.html;. Accessed August 3, 2020. Zidan, Ahmed. 2018. How Turkey silences journalists online, one removal request at a time. The Committee to Protect Journalists. Available at https://cpj.org/2018/08/how-turkey-silences-journalists-online-one-rem oval/. Accessed August 20, 2020.

CHAPTER 7

The Authoritarian Persistence

On a Friday in late November 2013, I was sipping my third cup of tea in a cosy apartment in the Cairan neighbourhood of Mohandessin, taking down notes and asking another round of questions to Ahmed Seif al-Islam, an Egyptian veteran human rights defender and lawyer, when my interview partner got a spontaneous idea: to join his son’s birthday party. A few hours later, I found myself in a palm garden attached to a summer house on the outskirts of the city. The event was a gettogether of a “Tahrir” crowd, which turned out to be the birthday party of Alaa Abdal Fattah, a leading Egyptian blogger and a prominent political activist associated with the 2011 revolution. The palm garden, far away from the noise and chaos of the city, created the perfect conditions to leave behind the worries about the future trajectory of Egypt, the military takeover earlier that year, the state-sanctioned lethal violence, the extremely polarised society, the upcoming criminalisation of public assemblies, and much more. It was a rare moment of joy, however shortlived. A less than a week later, Alaa was arrested. Since then, he has spent all his birthdays incarcerated. When Alaa and thousands of other Egyptians celebrated the unexpected end of Husni Mubarak’s reign in 2011 after several weeks of protests, it was hardly imaginable that within a few years, the state repression would worsen. Now, towards the end of 2020, seven years since the birthday party and almost a decade since the 2011 revolution, Alaa © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Reimer-Burgrova, Politics of Violence and Fear in MENA, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83932-1_7

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is still in prison. After a short break in 2019, when his term for illegally protesting against the draconian Protest Law was over, the security authorities promptly re-arrested him. They accused him of vague and unfounded charges including “funding a terrorist group” and “spreading false news undermining national security”; Alaa is now held in pre-trial detention, which has been continuously renewed for more than a year (FIDH 2020). Alaa’s story is not the unique experience of a prominent activist. It is an experience shared by thousands of other Egyptians. As such, it is an account of widespread state repression in a country in which the securitising discourse prevailed over the rule of law.

The Durability of Securitisation Securitisation belongs to the basic equipment of the ruling elites in Egypt. For several decades, diverse Egyptian governments relied on the securitisation of a vaguely defined terrorist threat to justify and legitimise the existence of exceptional policies and oppressive security practices. Throughout the entire reign of Husni Mubarak, the “war on terror” served the regime as a convenient political strategy to maintain the position of power, to target the political opposition, and to discipline the majority society to silence and docility. Such a blatant use of the “war on terror” legitimisation, wherein security is prioritised over the rule of law and the asymmetric power/knowledge configuration is reinforced, is not unusual. Syria and Turkey, analysed in the previous chapter, showed similar patterns in their securitising campaigns of terrorist threats. Like in Egypt, the securitisation of an undefined terrorist threat was far from an innocent political process to protect the governed society from an imminent threat. Instead, it established, upheld, and normalised the existence of oppressive mechanisms of governance and legitimised violence against wide segments of the society. In a context of a de facto permanent “war on terror”, the ruling elites in all three countries rationalised the existence of exceptional system as the necessary response to protect the governed societies from a terrorist threat. Yet, as the empirical data documents, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey applied the exceptional measures and policies beyond this objective, targeting the political opposition and disciplining the governed society. In all cases, the securitisation process reinforced the authoritarian structures of power by empowering security authorities as well as executive organs to act beyond the established norms. Moreover,

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as the scrutiny of Egypt’s “war on terror” showed (see Chapter 4), the exceptional ordering was integrated into the everyday life of the targeted populace in a way that enabled its normalisation over time. Hence, the exceptional framework, which was introduced and legitimised by securitising political strategies as an interim and scope-limited measure, was embedded into the political ordering. For an observer informed about the developments in the countries addressed in this analysis, the mutually reinforcing link between securitisations of the terrorist threat and autocratic practices of oppression is fairly obvious. However, as this book pointed out, especially in the context of the Middle East, there is still a deficit in scholarship that comprehensively addresses such political strategies that, justified by security argumentation, target and oppress local populations and contribute to the persistence of autocratic mechanisms of power. With this in mind, this book outlined an original, theoretically driven, conceptual framework, the truth-exception-resistance model (the TER-model). Focusing on the mutually reinforcing link between securitisation processes and autocratic practices of oppression, the TER-model concentrated on the questions of securitisation durability and specifically addressed the persistence of the “war on terror” framework in Egypt. My research did not inquire into whether the “war on terror” reinforced the autocratic practices of oppression. Instead, it looked into how this reinforcement was upheld throughout several decades. By doing so, my research identified three underlying observations which contribute to securitisation’s persistence and thus render autocratic mechanisms of power a permanent part of the respective political ordering: legitimisation, empowerment, and resistance. Legitimisation Securitisation addresses and excludes the individuals associated with the threat from the optimised society. It also disqualifies and excludes those who, due to their conduct and/or positions, exceed the boundaries of the re-optimised collective, all while preserving the facade of political legitimacy. Thereby, it legitimises the oppression against wide segments of the governed society. For the TER-model, the securitisation process is based on a binary optics through which it redefines both those who are associated with the threat and thereby disqualified as threatening to the optimised collective and those who are framed as worthy of protection. The latter, the

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optimised society, is thus more than a mere passive referent object to be protected. It is the target of governmental interventions through which it is re-optimised and reconfigured largely along the binary positions of security and threat, us and them, acceptable and unacceptable forms of life and conduct. The reconfiguration of the bandwidth of acceptability stimulated by the “war on terror” in Egypt, bore implications for both the security targets as well as the majority Egyptian society. The security targets associated with the Islamist enemy figure, a central securitisation frame in Egypt, were placed beyond the bandwidth of acceptability and thus excluded from the optimised society (see Chapter 3). This way, the life of those who were identified as security targets, as terrorists, was rendered devoid of value (see Agamben 1998; Tagma 2009). These people faced being subjected to exceptional security measures, such as arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detention, ill-treatment, torture, and extrajudicial killings (see Chapter 4). Society at large was not spared the exceptional treatment either. Although the authorities maintained the use of harsh counterterrorism measures in a limited manner, the empirical reality proved them wrong. The exclusion from the optimised, protected society linked with the possibility of being subjected to the exceptional measures was a contingency valid for virtually anyone. The disagreement over the counterterrorism politics, the criticism of the abusive police practice, but also a more general defiance of the sociopolitical status quo was often enough to lose the status of an optimised citizen and thus to be associated with the security targets. The analysis of the securitisation dichotomy between the protected us and the threatening them showed that the exclusion often occurred through the de-Egyptianisation of the concerned individuals. As discussed in detail in this book, this was a common experience shared by human rights organisations, social movements, but also outspoken individuals. These groups and individuals were thus often depicted as siding with the terrorists and excluded from the optimised collective as the dangerous other. They were thus subjected to exceptional measures sanctioned by the state of emergency and counterterrorism legislation. Empowerment Securitisation empowers the security authorities to act beyond the established norms. This empowerment, especially in the securitisation context of Agambenian exception in which the law is rendered an empty signifier

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for the security practice, forges a culture of impunity and transforms the security officials into petty sovereigns. It is hardly reversible and motivates actors and institutions in the security field to keep securitisation going. Securitisation is a process that, if successful, leads to the adoption of security measures which would have been hardly thinkable otherwise (Buzan et al. 1998: 24). In Egypt, the state of emergency was the legal justification that embedded the exceptional order into the existing political order and encouraged the security authorities to act beyond the established norms. The Agambenian exception, as described in Chapter 4, was a mode of operation for the Egyptian security authorities. As a realm in which sovereign power operates through “para-legal detachment from the law” (Opitz 2011: 106), the law was not a point of reference for the Egyptian security agents involved in the counterterrorism campaign. Accordingly, the routine counterterrorism practices, which included systematic intimidation, enforced disappearances, incommunicado detention, torture, or extrajudicial killings were illegal, yet tolerated practices of the security agents. So too was the existence of unauthorised detention facilities and torture chambers—illegal yet tolerated. The Egyptian security officials took on the role of petty sovereigns. By virtue of their position and the empowerment provided by the securitisation process, they regularly made decisions in their everyday security practice on the worthiness and unworthiness of individual subjects. Their practice defined the bandwidth of acceptable. Their everyday decisions mattered; it was up to them whether an individual would be apprehended, detained, tortured, or killed. As the gatekeepers to the zones of indistinction, in which the law is rendered an empty signifier, they operated in a mode of sanctioned impunity. In this regard, as Chapter 4 discussed in detail, such an enormous empowerment of security officials created an environment of path-dependency in which the exception was gradually normalised and became a new rule. The security authorities were prone to maintain the securitisation status quo. They were unwilling to give up the acquired privileges or to be held accountable for the security operations they conducted in impunity. Resistance As long as securitisation is not decisively challenged, it can be upheld. In this regard, it matters how securitisation is challenged, not whether it is challenged.

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According to the TER-model, in contexts of illiberal political systems, where expressions of disagreement over the sociopolitical status quo are likely to be contextually constrained, public approval is not a necessary precondition for securitisation to persist. The governed society approves the securitisation process as long as the society acts as if it accepts the securitisation regardless its real motivation, which might range from real support over apathy to disinterest or fear not to do so. In Egypt, the “war on terror” was, despite its persistence throughout the entire Mubarak’s reign, far from being widely supported. Yet, the readiness of Egyptians to speak up and challenge the exceptionalist discourse, as outlined in Chapter 5, was considerably reduced to a few sites of dissent with limited public outreach and mobilisation capacities. The exceptional framework legitimised by the securitisation process restrained margins of the Egyptian freedom by criminalising possibilities and options for non-violent contestations of the dominant power/knowledge relations. Thus, although expressions of disagreement over the sociopolitical status quo emerged, their incidence was contextually constrained and thus limited to individuals who surmounted their fear of repercussions. As was already mentioned in the previous arguments, those who challenged the status quo risked being classified as beyond the bandwidth of the optimised collective and thus possibly subjected to exceptional security practices. In this regard, Egypt’s securitisation case showed that the process might be successfully perpetuated over a longer period of time, existing resistance notwithstanding. The 2011 revolution demonstrated that even in the context of a severely constrained margin of freedom, resistance can build up and challenge the asymmetric configuration of the power/knowledge relations. The 2011 protests achieved the ousting of long-term autocrat, Husni Mubarak. Yet, they failed to bring about a deeper systemic change that would undermine and delegitimise the exceptional framework forged by the lengthy securitisation process. In result, as discussed in Chapter 5, the autocratic practices of oppression survived Mubarak’s removal, because the securitising regime of truth they relied on had not been contested and replaced. Specifically, the protests failed to challenge the meta-narrative of the terrorist threat, generated through the lengthy securitisation, and thus to constitute a new politics of truth which would delegitimise the oppression routinely justified by the need to counter a vague terrorist threat. The securitising mechanisms of autocracy thus remained in place and ultimately showed themselves again under Abdal Fattah al-Sisi, after the

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Muslim Brotherhood had been unable to alter the bifurcation of Egyptian society and politics during its short reign. In the end, whether a securitisation process will persist or not is a complex matter shrouded in uncertainty. We can, as the use of the TERmodel in this book shows, inquire into how a securitisation process is perpetuated over time. Thereby, we can learn more about the securitisation process itself and gain insights into the complex matrix of security, legitimacy of a ruling elite, and political oppression.

The TER-Model Beyond Egypt This book studied the securitisation persistence primarily in relation to the lengthy “war on terror” in Egypt. Yet, my research results are pertinent for scholarship engaged with perpetuated securitisation cases beyond Egypt. The cases of Turkey and Syria, discussed in short in the previous chapter, demonstrate the applicability and relevance of the TER-model in securitising contexts outside Egypt. Like in Egypt, the securitisation of the terrorist threat in both countries reinforced the asymmetric configuration of power in favour of political and security elites, granted specific agencies extensive rights, and fostered authoritarian governance, while constraining a variety of rights on the side of the political opposition. The political and security elites, meanwhile, maintained the exception to legitimise their position of power and justify their record of abusive and corrupt conduct. The symbiotic relationship between the exception and the authoritarian resilience, which the securitisation processes in Turkey and Syria forged, justified and further deepened a system of oppressive mechanisms, normalised systematic abuse of power, and in case of Syria also justified use of brutal violence. Thus, as Chapter 6 suggested, the research should not be limited to Egypt. The developments of the last two decades have offered enough empirical material with regard to national “wars on terror” in diverse geographical and sociopolitical contexts for the TER-model to be applied. The TER-model outlined an understanding of securitisation as a political strategy to consolidate asymmetric power relations and to introduce and legitimise the Agambenian form of exception. Though, as abundant securitisation studies testify (e.g. Abrahamsen 2005; Diez et al. 2016; Lupovici 2014), securitisation does not necessarily have to include anything resembling the Agambenian exception. The securitisation of global warming clearly illustrates that securitisation might, in fact, urge

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parties to take joint action without notions of zones of indistinction and homines sacri. The conceptual framework of the TER-model is thus limited in its application in contexts which lack extremity, as the Copenhagen School presumes. Nevertheless, its contributions at the individual nodes—truth, exception, and resistance—can be adopted and further elaborated on separately. These three nodes suggest many specific directions for the research of perpetuated securitisation processes which are located thematically beyond the threat of terrorism. Thus, in contrast to addressing the general problem of perpetuated securitisation, focusing on one of the TER-model dimensions can produce valuable insights. The dimension of resistance emerges as one of the most promising fields for further research. It comes along with the most recent trend within the securitisation scholarship that engages with the complex relations between securitisation’ persistence and the discourses and practices of resistance (e.g. Adamides 2020; Stritzel and Chang 2015; Topgyal 2016). Hence, it offers a possibility to extend and contribute to one of the most vibrant areas of the current securitisation scholarship. This book analysed the acts of resistance that appeared since Husni Mubarak took power in 1981. Yet, with regard to the research design and the lengthy period of time under scrutiny, the analysis intentionally neglected the acts of resistance which emerged in the day to day life of ordinary Egyptians, such as daily encounters with police, the SSIS, or mukhbireen. A research inquiry into everyday resistance would likely offer new insights into the interrelation between the solidification of knowledge/power relations, (absent) resistance, and persistence of a securitisation process. The exception constitutes another major area of further study. The exception—fear—(absent) resistance nexus specifically deserves extra attention. Instead of fear of the perceived threat, which is traditionally associated with securitisation processes, the research in this book concentrated on fear produced and proliferated through the exceptional security practices of the security authorities. Specifically, it pointed out that this form of fear is a pertinent factor to the persistence of the securitisation process, as it significantly constrains the willingness of the governed individuals to question the sociopolitical status quo. The centrality of fear proliferation to maintain docility of the governed society, which was suggested by the analysis of human right reports as well as interviews with human rights activists, is certainly worthy of further and more thorough research. Specifically, inquiries into how this form of fear is proliferated

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within the society, how it affects the everyday conduct in a given sociopolitical context, and how it can be surmounted, should be central for researchers who concentrate on this facet of the TER-model. It would also be desirable to relate the research of fear back to a larger discussion within the securitisation scholarship dedicated to the analytical relevance of silence of marginalised groups (see Balzacq et al. 2015; Hansen 2000). Last but not least, much research remains to be done on the sociopolitical ramifications of the securitisation process in terms of the marginalisation and oppression of actors located beyond the category of security targets. As it was argued in Chapter 3, the process of constructing a threat legitimises a governmental intervention in the referent object. The referent object is thus not just a mere object of protection, but also becomes a subject of re-optimisation. This observation opens a research path to examine mechanisms of discrimination, marginalisation, and, in more extreme cases, of persecution of those who do not comply with the redefined bandwidth of the optimised, yet are not identified as security targets per se. The research in this book focused, in the first place, on the oppression of the political opposition. Yet, as the empirical evidence suggests, there were other actors, such as LGBTQ communities, that were classified as being beyond the bandwidth of an optimised society and subjected to an exceptional security treatment (HRW 2020b). In this regard, it is desirable to examine the optimisation of the referent object and its sociopolitical ramifications in greater detail and in diverse empirical contexts.

Epilogue The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 reached Egypt while Alaa was in the Tora prison. The Egyptian authorities used the pandemic as an opportunity to toughen up already harsh conditions within the incarceration facilities in the country. Between March and August 2020 Egyptian prisoners and detainees were deprived of visits, including from their lawyers. Other forms of contact, such as phone calls or letters, became severely restricted, too. Thousands of inmates were thus held incommunicado for months. Although human rights organisations reported some cases of COVID-19 related deaths of inmates, the strict information lockdown has allowed only to speculate on the scale of the pandemic situation within the hygienic standards inappropriate, overcrowded detention and prison facilities in Egypt.

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When Alaa’s mother Laila Soueif went on 20 June 2020 to Tora Prison to deliver a letter and food to her son, the prison guards refused to hand over a promised letter from her son. Worried about his well-being, Laila Soueif refused to leave without the letter. Waiting outside the prison, she was joined by her two daughters, Mona and Sanaa. In the early hours of June 22, all three women were attacked, beaten, and robbed of their belongings by female thugs, while the prison officials watched the entire incident. A day later, Sanaa Seif sought justice at the Public Prosecutor. Instead, she was arrested at the office’s door. Since then, she has been held in al-Qanater prison, a female incarnation facility, pending investigations into unsupported terrorism-related charges (AI 2020). Sanaa joined Alaa and thousands of other political detainees arbitrarily held in the Egyptian prisons, the pandemic notwithstanding. Since the pretrial detention can be arbitrarily extended for up to two years without trial, it is uncertain whether Sanaa or Alaa will be released or receive certainty in the form of a concrete court verdict any time soon (HRW 2020a). Until then, they have to deal with the void the imprisonment has reduced their life to: When did life become so foolish? My day revolves around silly details, details that should be simple, but here they’re as far as can be from simplicity. I create for myself targets out of nothing, just to keep me looking forward to the next day. When did I learn to adjust like this? Is this the best way to adjust to prison? Or am I adopting unhealthy practices that will slowly unhinge me? And why do I concern myself with what’s healthy when I’m drowning in nothingness? And Alaa! Will he carry on inventing tricks to help himself adjust? I feel like my head will burst with thinking about nothingness, and I try to remember: what was my head working on before I came here? Sanaa Seif, al-Qanater Prison, 2020.

References Abrahamsen, Rita. 2005. Blair’s Africa: The politics of securitization and fear. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 30 (1): 55–80. Adamides, Constantinos. 2020. Securitization and desecuritization processes in protracted conflicts: The case of Cyprus. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies: Palgrave Pivot.

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Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. AI. 2020. Urgent action: Human rights activist detained for a third time. The Amnesty International. Available at https://www.amnesty.org/dow nload/Documents/MDE1230132020ENGLISH.pdf. Accessed November 20, 2020. Balzacq, Thierry, Sarah Léonard, and Jan Ruzicka. 2015. ‘Securitization’ revisited: Theory and cases. International Relations 30 (4): 1–38. Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde. 1998. Security: A new framework for analysis. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Diez, Thomas, Franziskus von Lucke, and Zehra Wellmann. 2016. The securitization of climate change: Actors, processes and consequences. New York, Oxon: Routledge, Taylor&Francis Group. FIDH. 2020. Egypt: Alaa Abdel Fattah and Mohamed El-Baqer arbitrarily added to “terror list” The International Federation for Human Rights. Available at https://www.fidh.org/en/issues/human-rights-defenders/egypt-alaaabdel-fattah-and-mohamed-el-baqer-arbitrarily-added-to. Accessed December 2, 2020. Hansen, Lene. 2000. The Little Mermaid’s silent security dilemma and the absence of gender in the Copenhagen School. Millennium - Journal of International Studies 29 (2): 285–306. HRW. 2020a. Egypt: No pretense of judicial review for hundreds: COVID-19 court closure exacerbates grossly unfair system. The Human Rights Watch. Available at https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/18/egypt-no-pretense-judicial-rev iew-hundreds. Accessed November 20, 2020. ———. 2020b. Egypt: Security forces abuse, torture LGBT people: Arbitrary arrests, discrimination, entrapment, privacy violations. The Human Rights Watch. Available at https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/10/01/egyptsecurity-forces-abuse-torture-lgbt-people. Accessed November 20, 2020. Lupovici, Amir. 2014. The limits of securitization theory: Observational criticism and the curious absence of Israel. International Studies Review 16 (3): 390– 410. Opitz, Sven. 2011. Government unlimited: The security dispositif of illiberal governmentality. In Governmentality: Current issues and future challenges, eds. Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke, 93–114. Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought 71. New York: Routledge. Seif, Sanaa. 2020. Letter from Qanater Prison. Available at https://www. facebook.com/FreeSanaaSeif/posts/3418429424859891:1. Accessed November 25, 2020. Stritzel, Holger, and Sean C. Chang. 2015. Securitization and countersecuritization in Afghanistan. Security Dialogue 46 (6): 548–567.

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Tagma, Halit M. 2009. Homo sacer vs. homo soccer mom: Reading Agamben and Foucault in the war on terror. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 34 (4): 407–435. Topgyal, Tsering. 2016. The Tibetan self-immolations as counter-securitization: Towards an inter-unit theory of securitization. Asian Security 12 (3): 166– 187.

Index

A Abbas, Wael, 166 Abdal Fattah, Alaa, 126, 131, 166–168, 176–177, 227, 235–236 Abduh, Muhammad, 41 Abu Qerqas, 75, 86 Abu Seada, Hafiz, 155, 164 administrative courts, 160 Akif, Muhammad, 168 AKP. See Justice and Development Party al-Adli, Habib, 170, 175 al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din, 41 al-Ahram, 73 al-Alfi, Hassan, 75, 87 al-Assad, Bashar, 3, 194, 195, 198, 209 al-Assad, Hafiz, 3, 192–194 al-Aswani, Alaa, 178 al-Azhar, 72, 83–85 al-Badie, Muhammad, 138 al-Baradei, Muhammad, 78 al-Batran, Hamdi, 111

al-Ghad Party, 171 al-Haqq, Jad, 84 Ali, Ben, 173 al-Iskandarani, Ismail, 165 al-Islambuli, Khalid, 67 al-Ittihad Party, 32 al-Mahgoub, Rifat, 160 al-Qotri, Mahmoud, 112 al-Sadat, Anwar, 28, 37, 38, 67–69, 79, 89 al-Shatir, Khairat, 46 al-Sisi, Abdal Fattah, 2, 44, 55, 69, 79, 110, 125, 136, 163, 232 al-Wafd, 40 al-Zend, Ahmad, 138 Amn al-Dawla. See State Security Investigations Service Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, 56, 63 anti-colonial movement, 40–41 Anti-Terror Law (1992/97), 44, 53 Anti-Terror Law (2015/94), 48–49, 73, 125 April 6 Youth Movement, 83 Arab-Israel wars. See wars with Israel

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Reimer-Burgrova, Politics of Violence and Fear in MENA, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83932-1

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240

INDEX

ashwaiyyat , 129–130 assassination of al-Sadat, Anwar, 28, 39, 50, 67–69 Association Law (1999/153), 161 Association Law (2002/84), 155 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 197

B Baath Party, 193, 194 Badrawy, Hossam, 32 Bakara, Khaled, 125 bare life, 102–115, 136–138, 174. See also homo sacer biopolitics, 15–18, 153 optimisation, 66–67, 74–79, 91–92, 101, 110, 120 securitising dichotomies, 66, 110, 127 bios. See dignified life blogging, 165–169 Bouazizi, Muhammad, 156, 173 bread riots in 1977, 84 British rule over Egypt, 40, 175

C Caesar, 211, 216 Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, 217 Cast Lead operation (2008), 169 Center for Human Rights Legal Aid, 159 Central Security Forces, 52, 102, 113 CHP. See Republican People’s Party clientelism, 30–32 Code of Military Justice (1966/25), 45 communist as an enemy, 42, 79 Constitutional amendments (2019), 56

Copenhagen School, 8–11, 71, 74, 100–101, 150, 234. See also securitisation theory Corrective Revolution, 38 Counter-Terrorism Court in Syria, 210 Counter-Terrorism Law (2012/19), 209 counterterrorism legislation in Egypt, 42–50 in Syria, 209–210 in Turkey, 208–209 coup d’état attempt in Turkey (2016), 3, 198, 203, 206, 207, 212–214, 218 coup d’état in Egypt (2013), 2, 34, 69, 73, 105, 136 COVID-19, 235 CSF. See Central Security Forces Cumhuriyet , 213 D Damascus Declaration (2005), 195 Damascus Spring, 194 Darwish, Mazen, 210 da’wa, 78 Democratic Initiative Process, 195–196 dignified life, 104, 111, 118 dispersal of pro-Mursi sit-ins, 131. See also Raba’a al-Adawiyya massacre reactions, 137 Douma, Ahmed, 131, 178 drugs as a threat, 79–80 Dündar, Can, 214 E Egyptian Citizen Party, 32 Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights, 164 elections

INDEX

parliamentary in Egypt (2010), 175 parliamentary in Egypt (2011–2012), 33 parliamentary in Egypt (2015), 35, 47 parliamentary in Turkey (2002), 195 parliamentary in Turkey (2011), 203 presidential in Egypt (2012), 32, 33 electoral reform in Egypt (2015), 35 Elmasry, Mahinour, 131 Emergency Law (1958/162), 42–44, 50, 53, 79 Emergency State Security Courts, 43 enforced testimonies, 115–118, 132, 157 Erdo˘gan, Recep Tayyip, 3, 21, 195–197, 203–207 exception expansion, 131–135, 174 normalisation, 17, 46–50, 134–135, 141, 162, 229 and securitisation theory, 9–11 and the TER-model, 16–19, 99–141, 206–211 extrajudicial killing, 2, 49, 102, 107, 108, 111, 123, 137, 199, 216, 231 extremism, 77, 84, 85 F fanaticism, 77, 84, 85, 129 Fawda, Farag, 84 fear paralysing effect, 54, 122–125, 172–175, 180, 215 of repression, 89, 120–127, 151, 169, 171, 213, 232 of security officials, 52, 54, 120–127, 133, 161 of terrorism, 88, 120

241

feloul , 32 fitna, 85–87 FJP. See Freedom and Justice Party Freedom and Justice Party, 33 G general strike on April 6, 2008, 170 Ghonim, Wael, 135 GihazMabahith Amn al-Dawla. See State Security Investigations Service governmentality, 15–18, 66, 153 Gülen, Fethullah, 203–206 Gülen movement as a terrorist group, 204–205, 213 Gulf War (1991), 132 H Hama massacre (1982), 3, 193 Hammadi, Hazem, 108 Hassan, Manal, 167 Hizmet. See Gülen movement homo sacer, 106–115, 124, 126, 136–138, 172–175 human rights abuses, 2, 102–139, 210–211 community in Egypt, 82, 154, 158–160, 163, 169, 181 community in Syria, 216–217 international leverage, 163–165 Hussein, Mahmud, 125 I Ibn Khaldun Center, 164, 166, 171 Ibrahim, Saad Eddin, 164, 171 Imbaba siege, 129 infitah, 28 informal housing. See ashwaiyyat Internet, 73, 165, 171 ISIS. See Islamic State in Iraq and Syria

242

INDEX

Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, 49, 56, 63, 196, 200–204 Islamist as an enemy, 2, 36, 40, 68–69, 87–90, 128, 200, 230 Islamist insurgency of 1990s, 41, 75, 129 Israel. See also peace with Israel; wars with Israel relationship with Egypt, 27, 37–39, 42, 51, 169 relationship with Syria, 2, 209 Issa, Ibrahim, 171 J jahiliyya, 85–87 January 25th revolution. See revolution of 2011 judicial oversight of elections, 162 Justice and Development Party, 195–198, 203–205 K Kaftanciou˘glu, Canan, 215 Kefaya, 82–83, 166, 170, 173, 178 khawarij , 85–87 Kurdistan Worker’s Party, 196, 202, 203, 207 Kurds in Syria, 4, 202 Kurds in Turkey, 3, 195–196, 202, 207. See also Turkish-Kurdish reapproachment L labour protests, 170–171 Law on Counter-Terrorism Court (2012/22), 210 Law on Terrorist Entities (2015/8), 48 Law on the Treatment of Senior Military Commanders (2018/161), 35, 123

legal black holes, 16, 102–106, 159 Luxor massacre (1997), 34, 85 M Madani, Abd al-Harith, 107 Mahalla textile company, 170 Mahfuz, Asma, 174 Mahmoud, Abdel Moneim, 168 Mahmoud, Wahid, 160 Malek, Hassan, 167 martyrdom, 75 masmou3. See third way position Medyascope, 214 military. See also military courts; Supreme Council of the Armed Forces after the 2011 revolution, 47, 55–56 economic empire, 51, 56 military courts, 45–47, 50, 155, 157, 161, 162, 168 Ministry of Interior, 50–55. See also Central Security Forces; State Security Investigations Service ministers of interior, 75, 87, 170, 175 rivalry with Ministry of Defense, 51–56 Mubarak, Gamal, 171 Mubarak, Husni, 27, 29–30, 39, 40, 68–69, 87–90, 169–172 mukhabarat. See State Security Investigations Service Mursi, Muhammad, 2, 32–35, 47, 55, 83, 123, 138, 176 Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. See also Freedom and Justice Party; Mursi, Muhammad after the 2013 coup d’état, 48, 79, 129, 178 anti-Brotherhood sentiment, 34–35, 83, 136

INDEX

online activism, 167–169 political engagement, 33, 89, 161 as a terrorist other, 2, 45, 50, 65, 69, 73, 79, 88–90, 176, 178 ideology, 40 under al-Sadat, Anwar, 38, 89 under Nasser, Gamal Abdal, 36–37, 69, 88 Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, 2, 192

N Nasser, Gamal Abdal, 36–42, 69, 88 National Council for Human Rights, 155 National Council for Women, 155 National Democratic Party, 30–32 nationalism in Egypt, 27, 40, 81–83, 90 in Syria, 201 in Turkey, 3, 202 National Salvation Front, 83 National Security Agency, 55, 102, 106 national treason, 66, 81–83, 158 NDP. See National Democratic Party non-Islamist enemy, 90 Nour, Ayman, 171 NSA. See National Security Agency

O Öcalan, Abdullah, 196 online public sphere, 165–169 in Turkey, 214 operation Martyr’s Right, 76 overthrow of Mursi, Muhammad. See coup d’état in Egypt (2013)

P panarabism, 27, 37, 193

243

Paris School, 9, 11–12, 70–72. See also securitisation theory peace with Israel, 27, 37, 51 People’s Protection Units, 202, 204 PKK. See Kurdistan Worker’s Party political prisoners, 105–106, 122, 130–131, 164–165, 196 Portakal, Fatih, 214 poverty, 28–29 power/knowledge relations, 64–66, 150–153 contestation, 155–158, 175 prisoners of conscience. See political prisoners Protest Law (2013/107), 48, 228 R Raba’a al-Adawiyaa massacre, 123, 129, 136–138, 176 Raba’a symbol, 125, 129 Ragab, Mohamed, 32 red lines, 73, 126, 159, 171 Regeni, Giulio, 139 regimes of truth, 64–67, 70, 109, 152, 206. See also TER-model, truth Republican People’s Party, 195, 215 resistance. See TER-model, resistance revolution of 2011, 32, 43, 51–52, 99, 124, 131, 135, 149, 173, 175 revolution of 2013. See coup d’état in Egypt (2013) S Said, Khalid, 124, 126, 134–135, 174 Facebook page Kullina Khalid Said, 135, 174 Salam, Yara, 131 SCAF. See Supreme Council of the Armed Forces

244

INDEX

SCC. See Supreme Constitutional Court Schmitt, Carl, 10, 17, 101, 109 SDF. See Syrian Democratic Forces sectarianism, 86 in Syria, 193, 200 securitisation theory, 8–14 non-liberal context, 100, 150 TER-model, 12–19, 74–79, 100–101, 150–153, 231–233 security clearance, 54 security practitioners analytical relevance, 70, 71, 152 empowerment of, 72, 120, 123, 127–135, 140, 230–231 internal pressure, 115–118 irreplaceability, 71–72, 116, 118, 141 Seif al-Islam, Ahmed, 227 Seif, Mona, 236 Seif, Sanaa, 236 self-censorship, 73–74 sexual abuse, 104, 120, 121, 126, 211 Shafiq, Ahmad, 32 shahid. See martyrdom Sinai counterterrorism operation, 56, 76, 108 coverage of counterterrorism campaign, 49 state of emergency, 44 sirat al-mustaqim (the straight path of Islam), 78, 86 slums. See ashwaiyyat smear campaigns after the 2013 coup, 177, 178 against al-Baradei, Muhammad, 78 against human rights activists in Egypt, 82–83 against opponents of Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan, 4 Soueif, Laila, 236

sovereign decision on exception, 108, 127, 137 sovereign power, 17, 101, 102, 110–111, 127, 191, 219, 231 sovereign violence, 101, 104, 111, 120–122, 132–135, 141, 172, 211, 215, 218 SSIS. See State Security Investigations Service Statement of 1000, 194 Statement of 99, 194 state of emergency. See also Emergency Law (1958/162) after the 2013 coup, 44, 69, 99 before 1981, 42 between 2011 and 2013, 43, 150 declaration, 41–42, 67, 110 rationalisation, 69, 80 in Syria, 209 in Turkey, 206–208 State Security Investigations Service after the 2011 revolution, 55, 102 operation in mode of exception, 52–55, 102–108, 113–135 Supreme Constitutional Court, 54, 159–161 Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, 47, 55, 123, 138 surveillance, 46, 53–54, 161 Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, 210 Syrian Democratic Forces, 202

T Ta’ifa al-Mansura. See Victorious Sect takfir (excommunication), 85 takfiri ideology, 200 Tamarod, 83, 178 Tantawy, Muhammad Sayyid, 84 Taweel, Esra, 106 TER-model

INDEX

conceptualisation, 4–19 exception, 99–141, 206–211 key arguments, 229–233 outside Egypt, 198–206, 233–235 resistance, 149–182, 212–217 truth, 63–92, 198–206 terrorism definition, 45, 48, 125, 209, 210 terrorist other in Egypt, 63, 75, 77–90, 117, 128–130 terrorist other in Syria, 199–202 terrorist other in Turkey, 3, 202–204 third way position, 176–178 torture. See also extrajudicial killing challenged by courts, 159–160 clean torture, 111–115 in Syria, 210–211 legal definition, 122 techniques, 104, 112–115 torture victims, 118–123 truth. See TER-model, truth Turkish-Kurdish reproachment, 195–196 Twitter as a site of dissent, 214

245

U US-intervention in Iraq (2003), 169 V Victorious Sect, 116–118 Violations Documentation Center in Syria, 216 W wars with Israel, 2, 37, 42 whistle-blower, 111–112, 211, 216 Y YPG. See People’s Protection Units Z Zaman, 213 zoë. See bare life zone of indistinction, 17, 20, 101– 106, 108–111, 115, 120, 127, 129, 134, 136, 231, 234. See also exception; legal black holes; TER-model