Counterrevolution in Egypt: How Sisi broke the dream of a new republic

When Egyptians rose up in against the rule of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, many of us believed we were living through the end of a dictatorship.

Fifteen years later, it is clearer than ever that what followed was not simply the return of the old regime. Egypt’s counterrevolution did not restore Mubarakism. It produced something harsher, more centralised, and more ambitious in its violence. It built a new order.

That is the argument at the heart of my new book, Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi’s New Republic, which is out on 5 May. 

The book grew out of years of research, but also out of lived experience. I write not only as a scholar of Egypt’s security sector, but as someone who was arrested, tortured, surveilled, and blacklisted by the very institutions I am trying to understand. 

For me, this is not an abstract question of authoritarian resilience. It is an attempt to explain how a revolution that shook the regime to its core was defeated, and why the state that emerged from that defeat looks so different from what came before.

A lazy reading of Egypt’s trajectory blames the failure of the revolution on familiar culprits: The Muslim Brotherhood’s incompetence, liberal opportunism, leftist fragmentation, or foreign meddling. 

There is truth in parts of that story, but it is not the full story. Revolutions do not fail only because revolutionaries make mistakes. They also fail because the forces of counterrevolution learn, regroup, and strike back.

In Egypt, the decisive factor was the survival and later unification of the coercive apparatus: the army, police, intelligence services, and the sprawling security bureaucracy that had long guarded the regime.

The rise of the police state

Under Mubarak, these institutions were powerful but fragmented. That fragmentation was not a flaw but part of the design. 

Since 1952, Egyptian rulers had organised the coercive apparatus to prevent coups. Rival agencies with overlapping mandates kept one another in check. 

The army, General Intelligence, Military Intelligence, and the interior ministry all had their own turf, their own sources of patronage, and their own suspicions. 

Mubarak’s central fear was not a popular uprising but like many autocrats, he feared a coup from within.

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That fear shaped the structure of the state. It also helps explain why the police became so central under Mubarak. 

The regime needed a force capable of suppressing unrest without relying too heavily on the army. 

Over time, the police became militarised on a vast scale. The so-called war on terror of the 1990s was critical here. 

It provided cover to expand police power, normalise torture, and treat wide sections of the population, especially the poor, as suspect communities to be pacified rather than citizens to be protected.

By the 2000s, the police were not merely crushing political dissent. They were ruling through daily terror. Almost every Egyptian knew what it meant to be stopped, slapped, extorted, humiliated, or tortured. 

Police stations were torture chambers and checkpoints became instruments of class domination. 

Entire neighbourhoods were treated as hostile territory. When the uprising erupted in January 2011, it was no accident that protesters torched police stations and targeted State Security offices. 

Those attacks were not mindless rage. They were acts of political clarity. People understood where repression lived.

Old order, new conditions

The famous scenes from Tahrir Square often obscure an essential fact: on 28 January 2011, the police collapsed. 

That collapse was a historic shock to the regime and Mubarak had no choice but to call in the army. 

This is where another myth needs to die; the army was not pro-revolution. It did not roll into Cairo to save the uprising. It rolled in to save the state.

What held the generals back from immediately crushing the revolt was not sympathy with democratic demands but rather calculation. 

This is where another myth needs to die; the army was not pro-revolution. It did not roll into Cairo to save the uprising. It rolled in to save the state

The army’s senior command understood that a massacre could trigger mutiny among lower and middle-ranking officers or conscripts, many of whom were far closer socially to the protesters than to the brass. 

So the army played a more patient game. It let Mubarak fall in order to preserve the system. 

Then it took charge of the transition and worked methodically to contain, fragment, and exhaust the revolutionary process.

This is one of the book’s central interventions. For years, there has been a tendency to romanticise the army’s early posture in 2011, as if it stood above politics. It did not. 

It was always a counterrevolutionary actor, even when it moved cautiously. 

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) managed the transition not to dismantle the old order, but to rescue it under new conditions.

That became obvious in the months that followed. State Security was formally dissolved, but its core personnel and functions survived under a new name. 

The military repressed protesters, used military trials against civilians, and defended the architecture of impunity. 

Misreading the state

Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood, once it gained parliamentary and presidential power, chose accommodation over confrontation. 

Rather than seriously reforming the police or the intelligence services, it sought to win them over, and failed.

President Mohamed Morsi and the Brotherhood misread the state. They behaved as if electoral legitimacy meant actual power. 

In reality, they inherited political office, but not actual rule. They tried to strike bargains with institutions that had no intention of surrendering autonomy or privilege. 

Worse, they alienated broad sectors of the revolutionary camp while adopting law-and-order rhetoric against dissent. 

By the time the anti-Brotherhood mobilisations of 30 June 2013 arrived, the terrain had already been prepared for a decisive counterrevolutionary blow.

The coalition that enabled the 2013 coup was broad and contradictory. It included remnants of the Mubarak order, business elites, sections of the judiciary, state bureaucrats, media figures, liberals, Nasserists, some leftists, women’s groups, and Coptic constituencies, all united by hostility to Brotherhood rule. 

Many of them believed the military would intervene, remove Morsi, and then step back. They were deceived.

The new republic

Sisi’s rise marked a structural shift not just another rotation within the ruling bloc. After 2011, the dominant fear inside the state was no longer a coup. It was the people.

The lesson drawn by the coercive apparatus from the uprising was blunt: never again allow society the space to threaten the regime’s survival. 

That required ending the old fragmentation and replacing it with coordination, hierarchy, and a common war mentality.

For the first time since 1952, Egypt’s repressive apparatus was effectively unified. Rivalry did not disappear entirely, but it was subordinated to a higher imperative: preventing another revolution. 

Rabaa was not an aberration. It was foundational. It announced the terms of the new order

Sisi used patronage, purges, surveillance, and selective empowerment to bring the agencies into line. 

Intelligence sharing increased, coordination bodies proliferated, security chiefs became central to governance. The result was not simply more repression, but a different kind of state.

This is why I call it the New Republic, or the Second Republic in the regime’s own language. 

The term captures something many observers still miss. Sisi’s order is a new model of rule, one in which the military and security services do not merely protect the state from above, but increasingly colonise it from within.

You see this in the bureaucracy, where retired officers occupy civilian posts at every level. 

You see it in the media, where control is tighter and more direct than under Mubarak. 

You see it in urban planning, where demolitions, road expansion, smart cities, and the new administrative capital are all bound up with surveillance and securitisation. 

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You see it in the treatment of public space itself, which is no longer simply policed, but redesigned to preempt collective action.

This order has no meaningful social contract. It offers neither Nasserist redistribution nor even Mubarak’s more flexible authoritarian bargain.

It relies less on hegemony than on force, less on persuasion than on obliteration. 

That is why mass violence under Sisi is not reactive in the way it often was under Mubarak. 

It is proactive, demonstrative, and frequently theatrical. Rabaa was not an aberration. It was foundational. It announced the terms of the new order.

That order remains resilient not because it is loved, but because it is organised. Its institutions learnt from 2011. 

They studied their weaknesses, closed ranks, and reengineered the state accordingly. Any serious attempt to understand contemporary Egypt has to begin there.

For too long, the story of post-2011 Egypt has been told through personalities, elections, or elite intrigue. But the deeper story is institutional. 

It is about how coercive power was built, how it adapted under pressure, and how it turned defeat into a project of reconstruction. 

That is the story I tell in Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi’s New Republic.  

Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi’s New Republic by Hossam el-Hamalawy is published by Verso and is available for pre-order now