Authoritarian restitution in bad economic times Egypt and the crisis of global neoliberalism

Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Authoritarian restitution in bad economic times Egypt and the crisis of global neoliberalism☆ Amr Adly American University in Cairo, Department of Political Science, Egypt

A R T I C LE I N FO

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Developmentalism Military backed regime Repression Foreign debt Multi scalar

There has been an unmistakable confluence of authoritarian restitution with the re-adoption of neoliberal economic measures in post-2013 Egypt. However, unlike earlier neoliberal restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s, both processes of political and economic restructuring happened against a crisis-ridden neoliberal global order. How have both phenomena been related? This article argues that authoritarian restitution in Egypt allowed the country’s re-insertion into the neoliberal global order in a time of prolonged and multifaceted crises, both domestically and globally. Sustained repression of the opposition and civil society became the primary condition for accessing badly-needed borrowing from IFIs and international bond markets, on relatively favorable terms for the regime (lower rates) and foreign investors (lower risks). The process has been multi-scalar where domestic developments were relatively autonomous yet deeply interrelated with regional and global actors, dynamics and flows with a considerable overlap and interpenetration between geopolitics and economics.

1. Introduction There has been an unmistakable confluence of the recent authoritarian restitution in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and the re-adoption and intensification of neoliberal policies. However, unlike earlier rounds of neoliberal “reform” in 1980s and 1990s, ongoing political and economic restructuring in MENA has been happening against a crisis-ridden neoliberal global order, which has recently transpired in lower growth rates and more volatile financial markets. These global changes are taking place against the backdrop of the erosion of the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism (Evenett and Fritz, 2015; Panitch and Gindin, 2012; Pepinsky, 2012). This article investigates the extent to which the crisis of global neoliberalism since 2008 explains the dynamics and mechanisms of authoritarian restitution in MENA by focusing on Egypt after the July 2013 military coup that came on the heels of another interval of revolutionary upheaval (2011–2013). Extant literature has barely explored in a systematic manner how the crisis of the neoliberal global order has impacted authoritarian restitution in MENA after the revolutionary wave of 2011. I address this gap and herein lies the article’s potential contribution. It asserts that the crisis of neoliberal globalization contributed to the authoritarian restitution through multiple and complex mechanisms in multi-scalar processes encompassing global, regional and national actors, flows and

☆

dynamics. I also hope to bring two bodies of literature to converse with one another: the first is the scholarly work on the Arab Spring, including the resilience and restitution of authoritarian rule (Bellin, 2012; Gibson, 2017; Pinfari, 2013) and the literature on the impact of global economic crises on regime type and regime change in the Global South (Bromhead, Eichengreen, and O'Rourke, 2013; Klapsis, 2014: Pepinsky, 2012). Authoritarian restitution refers to the successful re-imposition of authoritarian rule, defined in the tradition of Juan Linz (1964, 297) as “limited, not responsible, political pluralism, with noticeable constraints on political institutions and groups”. Authoritarian restitution has happened through the frequent resort to physical coercion and the curtailing of basic rights and freedoms, following a temporary rupture caused by popular upheaval or revolutionary action. I build particularly on Eva Bellin’s emphasis on the coherence of coercive state apparatuses as crucial for the resilience – and restitution – of Arab authoritarianisms (2012). I argue that the path to authoritarian restitution in post-2013 Egypt was shaped by the domestic elites’ responses to opportunities and constraints offered by a crisis-ridden neoliberal global economic order. Economically, the contraction in global trade in the aftermath of the financial meltdown of 2008–2009 made it hard for the Egyptian economy to recover and rendered it more dependent on foreign aid from allied Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) oil-rich countries and then

As part of a special edition: Developmentalism in an Age of Authoritarian Neoliberalism edited by Murat Arsel and Alfredo Saad Filho. E-mail address: [email protected].

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.01.001 Received 2 January 2019; Received in revised form 22 December 2019; Accepted 6 January 2020 0016-7185/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Amr Adly, Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.01.001

Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

A. Adly

economic factors and dynamics came to shape Egypt’s authoritarian restitution since 2013. In section one, the article underscores how Egypt’s reinsertion into the global economic order contributed to the restitution of authoritarian rule. Section two fleshes out the main argument revolving around external debt. Section three conceptualizes Egypt’s current authoritarian regime by contrasting it with the historical notion of bureaucratic authoritarianism. Section four delves into the military-led developmentalism that has come to dominate the political-economic scene in the recent years and the contradictions it suffers. Section five concludes.

on heavy external borrowing sanctioned by IMF conditionality. These dynamics consolidated the political outcomes shaped by domestic and regional processes, flows and actors (Ali, 2018; Joya, 2017). In turn, Egypt’s re-insertion into the neoliberal global order in a time of prolonged and multifaceted crises, domestically, regionally and globally, shaped the incentives and capacity of the military elites to deepen the country’s authoritarian trajectory. On the one hand, the capacity of the military-backed regime, especially since 2016, to follow through with unpopular austerity measures became a precondition for a positive macroeconomic environment for foreign borrowing (Comaroff, 2011; Robinson, 2004). On the other, the access to foreign borrowing proved crucial for the political-economic stabilization of the country on authoritarian terms. The crisis-ridden neoliberal global context, however, did not overdetermine political developments inside Egypt. Domestic processes were largely autonomous corresponding to national trajectories of postindependence state formation and the evolution of socio-political actors (Bayart, 2008). Yet, they were deeply interrelated with regional and global actors, dynamics and flows with a considerable overlap between economics and geopolitics. The actors, flows and processes, present on the global and regional scales, got translated into constraints as well as opportunities for contending domestic actors in Egypt. A case in point is the re-invented and re-invigorated economic role of the military in the post-2013 Egyptian context, which will be discussed at length. Indeed, intensifying neoliberal reforms went hand in hand with an expanded role of the military in the economy under the banner of “economic nationalism”. This approach was translated into many megaprojects in what could be labeled as “military-led developmentalism” (Joya, 2018). This meant a bigger role for the state than for the market, yet with a strong commitment to the precepts of neoliberal economics like austerity and a floated exchange rate system under the aegis of IFI conditionality and amid a deepening dependency on foreign borrowing. Khalil and Dill (2018) labeled this mix “statist neoliberalism”. I argue that Egypt’s military-led developmentalism constitutes a national variant of a distressed neoliberal global order, displaying the previously underlined multi-scalar processes at play. Developmentalism is defined in this volume as the portrayal of national economic development as the solution to the societal problems facing these nations. The ability (or even the promise) of generating high growth rates justifies the sacrificing of other political values like the freedom of expression and association as well as the respect for human rights. Whereas the turn to state developmentalism can be said to be crosscutting in the Global South amid the crisis of neoliberal globalization, it has assumed specific features in the Egyptian context depending on the political trajectory since 2011 as well as other historical conditions traced back to the formation of the post-independence state in Egypt. Structural and contingent conditions tossed the military institution into the very center of an extended, and often violent and repressive, authoritarian restitution (Stacher, 2015). In that context, not only was the military made an object of national consensus, but also it started to play a critical role in the economic plans of the new ruling regime (Joya, 2018). This article adopts a process tracing methodology. It pursues the careful reconstruction of the political and economic events that constituted the critical junctures that shaped Egypt’s trajectory of authoritarian restitution since 2011. These events unfolded simultaneously on the national, regional and global levels and herein lies the ethos of my multi-scalar processes approach. In tracing these processes, I relied on economic databases, reports and reviews and sometimes international and local newspaper coverage of the evolution of Egypt’s external linkages through debt, foreign investments and trade by international financial institutions, the WTO, credit-rating agencies, the Egyptian Central Bank and official websites and speeches. The paper proceeds hence with a thorough description of the multiscalar processes through which domestic, regional and global political-

2. How do global economic crises impact regime type and change? Whether and how economic crises, domestic as well as international, are related to regime type and regime change has been a constant interest of comparative political economy in the past decades. O’Donnell’s piece on “bureaucratic authoritarianism” linked the rise of a specific genre of authoritarianism to the structural difficulties of industrial deepening in 1960s Argentina (1988). O’Donnell’s thesis pioneered in linking national regime change and type to the country’s mode of insertion into the global division of labor. His focus however remained strictly national, with some possible regional implications for Latin America. A bit later, another scholarly trend attempted to explain the breakdown of authoritarianism in the Global South by using the same economic crises-related variable, namely the debt crisis unleashed by the oil shocks of the 1970s, the crisis of import-substitution industrialization and the ensuing stagflation. Haggard and Kaufman (1997) included economic crisis among the variables that could explain successful democratization of a number of Latin American and East Asian countries towards the end of the Cold War. Economic historians have also linked the Great Depression of the 1930s with the breakdown of democracies in Europe and beyond (Bromhead, Eichengreen and O'Rourke, 2013; Klapsis, 2014). Departing from earlier structuralist analyses, more recent literature stressed the role of non-economic intermediate variables like institutions, cultural norms and the agency of sociopolitical actors in shaping the impact of economic crises on political institutions. Many emphasized the importance of pre-crisis or background conditions in mediating the impact of economic crises, domestic or global, on regime change (Klapsis, 2014; Pepinsky, 2012). Since the end of the Cold War, left-leaning scholarship, critical of globalization as an attempted universalization of neoliberalism on a world scale, associated global neoliberalism with the long-term decline of democracy in the core economic countries. More recent works held the crisis of neoliberalism as accelerating the institutional and normative erosion of democracy and the rise of -often rightwing- authoritarianism (Bruff, 2014; Streeck, 2014). In a similar vein, Diamond and March (2008) talked about a global “democracy rollback”. However, little has been written on how the ongoing crisis of global neoliberalism was related to authoritarian restitution and the failure to establish democratic orders in the aftermath of popular uprisings in the periphery, with Egypt and MENA more generally, as primary examples. In MENA, a region with little democracy to fear for anyway, this debate unfolded differently. There was a thick literature on how neoliberal transformations contributed to authoritarian resilience before the 2011 revolutions through enriching politically-connected cronies and captors via rounds of privatization of public assets and the creation of private monopolies (Chekir and Diwan, 2014; Diwan, 2013; ElTarouty, 2015; Haddad, 2011; Heydemann, 2004; Mitchell, 1999). Conversely, another stream of literature argued that neoliberal transformation undermined the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes and lead to further social polarization that eventually contributed to the outbreak of the 2011 revolutions (Achcar, 2013; Hanieh, 2013; King, 2009; Soliman, 2011). I capitalize on the theoretical tradition of historical institutionalism. 2

Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

A. Adly

economic force found its way quite differently in concrete national political situations. As much as national political trajectories have influenced how neoliberalism materialized domestically in a diversity of ways, the same factors must have been present in mediating the domestic manifestations of the crisis of neoliberal globalization. Multi-scalar analysis has been employed in the literature on social movements and urban contention (Leitner et al., 2008; Miller, 2016; Tarrow, 2006). Conceptually, it refers to interrelated processes and discourses taking place simultaneously in different spaces through networks of individuals and organizations. This logic however applies to many other macro-and meso-level processes than just social movements, such as regime change, revolutions and economic-policy shifts, especially in the presence of strong market, hierarchical and ideational linkages between domestic actors and others abroad (Stallings et al., 1992). In these cases, the linkages are not exclusively horizontal through networks as is the case with individuals and organizations in social movements. Instead, there is myriad actors, flows and dynamics that may be vertical like IFI conditionality, or horizontal but with significant elements of power unevenness, like market transactions between domestic and international actors that have differential access to resources and information and hence to influence.

I hence trace the recent resurgence of authoritarian rule in post-revolutionary Egypt to the interaction between the country’s institutional legacy and economic structural constraints including the country’s pervious patterns of insertion into regional and global geopolitics and economics. Despite the centrality of pre-crisis institutions and patterns of interaction, there has always been room for agency of different actors reacting to constraints as well as opportunities on all three scales. Choices were hence structured but not overwhelmed or over-determined in any mechanical or uniform manner (Steinmo et al., 1992). The exact path of authoritarian restitution was hence shaped by the agency of the most relevant domestic actors. This did not happen however in isolation of a broader regional and global context, which has been rife with state and non-state actors, flows of capital, goods and people as well as trans-national dynamics including the fight against terrorism, the contagion of popular uprising and cross-regional and global ideational linkages and organizational networks. 3. Authoritarian restitution as a multi-scalar process After thirty years in power, Egypt’s long-standing dictator Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011) was deposed on the heels of a mass popular uprising. Millions of Egyptians took to the streets protesting widespread corruption and cronyism, electoral fraud and police brutality. The Egyptian revolution was part of a broader regional phenomenon where popular protest swept eastward from Tunisia through Egypt and all the way to Syria, Bahrain and Yemen. The immediate outcome of the revolution in Egypt was the removal of Mubarak and an interim takeover by the military, which sided with the masses in February 2011. Following the toppling of Mubarak, there has been an intense struggle in Egypt over the redefinition of state-society relations, which not only had to do with the push for democracy and basic human rights and freedoms but also involved the controversy over the role of Islam in politics (Kraetzschmar and Revitt, 2018). Additionally, political actors were embroiled in the struggle for an elite consolidation, with Islamists, namely the Muslim Brotherhood-Egypt’s most powerful and best-organized opposition group- making incessant advances in a series of legislative and executive elections in 2011 and 2012. The military dominated the political transformation through a tension-ridden partnership with the Muslim Brotherhood (Albrecht, Croissant, & Lawson, 2016; Taylor, 2014). However, the transition did not go smoothly as identity-politics concerned with the redefinition of the role of Islam in public life, led to an increasingly violent polarization between the Islamists and their opponents (Rutherford, 2013; Schielke, 2015). Compounded by administrative and political incompetence, the Brotherhood’s rule became a subject of broad popular contestation. Eventually, mass protests demanding that the Brotherhood-backed president Mohamed Morsi stepdown erupted in June 2013. Subsequently, the military stepped in and deposed Morsi on July 3rd, 2013 in what was described as a popularly-supported coup (Pinfari, 2013). Ever since, Egypt underwent a full-fledged authoritarian restitution that was marked by heightened and sustained political repression, defined here after Davenport (2007) as the use of physical coercion -or the threat to employ it- by political authorities with the aim of restricting or preventing the citizenry – or groups within it – from taking part in political life. Intuitively, political repression is central to authoritarian restitution. This is attested to by Egypt’s consistently deteriorating ranking in almost all areas of political and civil rights and freedoms since 2013 (Freedom House, 2019). I argue that Egypt’s authoritarian restitution has been the result of multi-scalar processes. The crisis of global neoliberalism, initiated by the meltdown of 2008, has made itself present in Egypt’s authoritarian restitution. The impact of these global dynamics however were mediated by regional and national institutional and socio-political arrangements. Adopting the multi-scalar approach, each scale: national, regional and global, had its own “historicity” using Bayart’s key concept (2008), which explains how neoliberalism as a global ideological and

3.1. The national scale Egypt’s authoritarian restitution has gone hand in hand with an intensified re-adoption of neoliberal measures, under the auspices of IFI. This was followed later by an increasing involvement of international private funds in financing the country’s external sovereign debt. Following the coup of July 2013, the military-backed regime of General Abdelfattah al-Sisi, a military commander-turned president, signed a stand-by agreement with the IMF in November 2016. The regime has ever since pursued an aggressive neoliberal agenda that included a massive devaluation of the Egyptian pound, multiple rounds of austerity measures and a set of regulations conducive for foreign investment (IMF, 2019). Politically, the regime has effectively employed its wide repressive practices, initially used against the political opposition and civil society groups, in order to pass unpopular economic measures including slashing subsidies, rolling back public services as well as the floatation of the local currency_ all resulting in high inflation rates. Simultaneously, the military-backed regime adopted a nationalist rhetoric, which drew on xenophobia and the conspiracy theory. This rhetoric has been used to justify austerity measures (El-Nawawy and Elmasry, 2016). The official rhetoric held that, like the fight against terrorism, austerity was another instance of national emergency requiring unity and unanimity behind the incumbent leadership (Mansour, 2016, 9). This resurgent nationalism coupled with the pursuit of neoliberal reforms, went hand in hand with the expansion of military economic activities into many civilian sectors including construction and real estate, logistics, transportation and communications to name just a few (Abul-Magd, 2016; Barayez, 2016; Sayigh, 2019). Military economic units and affiliated business networks have also been striking partnerships with foreign and Arab Gulf investors, though ultimately not always successfully (Joya, 2018). The state, incarnated in the military, claimed a growing role in re-launching the economy through infrastructural megaprojects that evoked national pride as well as ethos of military-led developmentalism. Overall, since 2016, linkages with the global neoliberal order were re-invigorated through IMF conditionality, expanding foreign borrowing on international bond markets and intensifying partnerships with multinationals, especially in the field of natural gas excavation. 3.2. The regional scale Regional dynamics intersected with national ones through multiple mechanisms. Record-high oil prices between 2008 and 2014 amplified the ability of GCC oil-rich monarchies to impact the outcome of the 3

Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

A. Adly

challenge the claimed universality of human rights, he stressed the importance of social and economic progress as a more pressing matter that would substitute for the former or at least justify its suspension. This was an expression of “developmentalism”, defined in this volume as the ideological stance of authoritarian leaders and regimes holding economic growth (or the promise of it) as the solution to all other social and political problems (See Arsel, Adaman and Saad Filho in this volume). In the meantime, globalization as an economic process securing and promising flows of trade, money and technology was not attacked as such. Rather, the Egyptian regime perceived economic globalization as key to national recovery that was somehow compatible with the renewed stress on nationalism and the expanding military-led developmentalism. Explicit reference was made to the Chinese model of development, combining all features of an authoritarian government, an extensive role of the state next to the private sector, foreign investors and a globalized capitalist economy (Gat, 2007).

post-revolutionary process in Egypt and beyond, given their long history of interdependence between capital-surplus and labor-surplus Arab countries (Fardoust, 2016; Hanieh, 2016). The Egyptian military found natural allies in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia who were wary of popular revolutions across the region and the threats of a spillover into their own countries, which is a case of promoting “autocratization” in their neighborhood (Bader et al., 2010). Geopolitics was inseparable from economics. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE threw their diplomatic and financial weight behind Egypt’s military takeover of July 2013 looking for a strong and reliable conservative ally that could crush the Muslim Brotherhood on the one hand, and commit to Gulf security which remains undermined by a rising Iranian threat, on the other (Mason, 2017; Podeh, 2017). A telling example would be the GCC financing of the regime’s large arms deals from Germany, France and Russia in 2014 and 2015, with a total cost hovering around $10 billion (Colonna, 2018). These huge deals served multiple purposes. On the one hand, they helped in legitimizing the new military-backed regime in Europe, by signing large infrastructure and armament deals with key French and German companies. On the other, they offered alternative sources of weapon supply to Egypt in the wake of the American suspension of military aid in 2014 (lifted in 2015).

4. Egypt’s re-insertion into the global economy through foreign debt One principal point of intersection between all three scales was that access to international financial resources via borrowing was contingent on the regime’s sustained capacity for repression over a long period of time. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to hold that repression domestically became an essential condition for incurring debt from IFIs, including the IMF, the World Bank and other development agencies as well as on international markets (Comaroff, 2011; Robinson, 2004). This implied a transformation in the function of repression from initially crushing political dissent following the coup in 2013 and through 2015 into using it in order to pass unpopular austerity measures that inflicted considerable economic harm on the majority of Egyptians, especially in the aftermath of the IMF deal in November 2016. Typical of densely-populated and resource-poor countries in the Global South, Egypt has always suffered from a structural and chronic balance of payments deficit. Following the 2011 uprising, the balance of payments outlook deteriorated rapidly as tourism collapsed, capital flight intensified and foreign currency reserves decreased. According to the Central Bank of Egypt, foreign reserves fell by more than half after the uprising, declining from $37 billion in 2010 to $15.9 billion in 2015. Simultaneously, average growth rates declined from an average of 6.2 percent (2006–2010) to 2.5 percent (2011–2015) (World Bank, 2017a). Net foreign direct investment as a percentage of GDP shrank significantly after the uprising, dropping from 2.9 percent in 2010 to 2.1 percent in 2015 (World Bank, 2017b). During the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief rule (2012–2013), they reached out to their regional allies to secure grants and soft loans. They reportedly received a total of $8 billion principally from Qatar (alThani, 2017). The Brotherhood government did not oppose an IMF deal in principle. As a matter of fact, they revived talks with the IMF, received a delegation from the international organization and negotiated some agreement (Joya, 2017, 348). Nothing eventually came out of this, thanks to the access to easy money from their regional allies on the one hand, and because of their inability to impose unpopular austerity measures on the other, while not in control of the state repressive apparatuses. The same dynamics would continue under the militarybacked regime in 2013 and 2014 following the disposal of the Brotherhood-backed president. Between 2013 and 2015, Egypt received around $23 billion in cheap credit and in-kind (oil and natural gas) and cash aid from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (Reuters, 2015). The figure did not include military aid streams, estimated to have exceeded $10 billion by 2015 (Colonna, 2018). Most of the money was used to fill Egypt’s seemingly unfathomable financing gap, estimated to hover around $10 billion annually. Immediately following the takeover, the militarybacked regime had little capacity to impose unpopular economic

3.3. The global scale On the global scale, it is plausible to trace the Arab revolutions and their aftermaths, to various – neither coherent nor uniform, not to mention intended – influences of neoliberal globalization. One of the crucial factors was the slowdown that followed the global financial crisis that hit the Eurozone in 2009, Egypt’s largest trade partner, second biggest source of FDI and tourism. Contraction in international trade coupled with (and most probably induced by) the soaring prices of primary goods, have taken their toll on the standards of living of Egyptians in the years immediately preceding the 2011 revolution. Being a net food and fuel importer, the Egyptian population and the country’s fiscal and financial balances, were hard hit by these external shocks (Pepinsky, 2012; Roccu, 2013). Growth rates slumped as early as 2009, and the ability to perform well on the FDI – and export fronts deteriorated rapidly. These were all factors that could explain the outbreak of mass protests across the Arab region (Achcar, 2013; Hanieh, 2013; Roccu, 2013). The same dynamics governed the authoritarian restitution of mid2013, which was enabled and constrained in the same time by the crisis of neoliberal globalization. Economically, the contraction in global trade in the aftermath of the crises of 2008 and 2009 made it hard for the Egyptian economy to recover and rendered it more dependent on foreign aid from allied GCC oil-rich countries and then on heavy external borrowing sanctioned by the IMF conditionality. In parallel, the erosion of the ideological hegemony of universalist political liberalism helped in legitimizing the sustained political repression and systematic human rights violations in post-2013 Egypt. This regression took place against the backdrop of imminent threats posed by transnational terrorist organizations and of the rising tide of irregular migration across the Mediterranean Sea. On the discursive level, al-Sisi’s dismissal of “civil and political human rights” as simply “inapplicable” to the Egyptian context during a joint press conference with President Macron of France, was representative of the re-insertion of Egypt into the global world order on differential terms (Ahram Online, 2016). This would serve as an excellent contrast with the human rights discourse under the Mubarak regime. Despite being unmistakably authoritarian, Mubarak subscribed, rhetorically at least, to the universality of human rights. The regime claimed to be consistently working on the improvement of basic human rights in accordance with its international commitments and even erected bureaucratic bodies to oversee the “ongoing progress” (Abdelrahman, 2004; Hassan, 2011). Whereas al-Sisi invoked national and cultural specificity to 4

Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

A. Adly

institutions (Jakobsen, 2006; Jensen, 2008). Moreover, the sectoral breakdown suggests that most of the increase has happened in the oil and natural gas sector, which has served as FDI traditional destination since the 1970s. The most tangible impact the IMF package has had so far has been on easing the government’s access to more external borrowing. This is not likely to change in the near future as long as it sticks to the IMF precepts and hence secures itself further borrowing on international markets. As long as Egypt can borrow in order to roll over its debt -meaning using borrowing in order to service foreign debt-, then the country won’t be at the risk of bankruptcy. The sustenance of the debt cycle remains political at heart. The IMF’s praise of the government’s economic policy hinges on one key factor, which is the continued ability to pass and uphold unpopular measures with negative impacts on the standards of living of a majority of Egyptians without causing much upheaval. This has been expressed in the IMF language as “leadership commitment” and a show of “political will” (Enterprise, 2018). The other political side of keeping the debt cycle going is the geopolitical importance of a stable and governable Egypt for a Europe concerned over irregular migration and a US primarily interested in fighting terrorism and guaranteeing Israel’s security. Last but not least, a friendly and stable Egypt, even if highly indebted, is a geostrategic asset for the GCC monarchies, which have implicitly underwritten Egypt’s debt, providing an additional guarantee for investors.

measures at a time when it was engaged in quashing the Islamist opposition. The Saudis and Emiratis were financing the country’s political and security stabilization rather than an economic reform program. Given the mass inflow of in-kind and cash aid, long-term deposits at the Central Bank and cheap loans, there seemed to be little need to use repression in order to impose austerity measures (Abrams, 2015). It was not until the GCC allies stopped pumping money that the IMF became the lender of last resort. This was due to political as well as economic reasons including tensions over the stance on the civil war in Syria and plummeting international oil prices. Securing the deal with the IMF was based on extending massive loans to the Egyptian government over the following three years. The IMF was expected to provide $12 billion out of a total $21 billion while the rest was to be collected on international money markets (IMF, 2019). The IMF deal has been crucial for accessing international bond markets and for the country’s credit rating. As long as the Egyptian government proved capable of following through with the precepts of the IMF conditionality to slash the budget deficit by cutting subsidies, raising indirect taxes and keeping a stable, albeit significantly depreciated, exchange rate, financial investors would deem Egypt’s risks relatively low. The IMF became the de facto maker of monetary, fiscal and commercial policies in the country. Rather accurately, Egyptian officials believed that upholding the IMF deal and heeding the conditions for further disbursement stood as a “certificate” – shahada – that attested to the overall commitment of the Egyptian government to reform (elBediwi and Abdel-Tawab, 2018). This certificate was almost literal when it came to credit rating and the subsequent lowering down of the cost of borrowing on the market. The IMF enjoyed the leverage of assessing progress in government policies and the hidden, but ever present, threat of withholding tranches of the IMF loan, in event of which it would send a negative signal to investors on the market that the Egyptian government has not been doing its homework (Ahram Online, 2018). Rather expectedly, Egypt’s foreign debt has been growing at very high rates since 2016. The country’s stock of external debt climbed from $33.7 billion in 2010 to $48 billion in July 2015. It then increased by a staggering 66 percent in two years jumping from $48 billion to $79 billion in July 2017. It hit $92.6 billion in the third quarter of 2018. Correspondingly, the ratio of public debt (including domestic debt) to GDP increased from 85 percent in 2015 to 92.3 percent in 2017 and further to 101.3 percent in 2018 (Trading Economics, 2018). The increase has also happened in the ratio of foreign debt service to total export earnings, which is a widely-used indicator for the capacity of the economy as a whole to meet its foreign obligations. The ratio increased from 6 percent in 2010 to around 19 percent in 2016, reaching an unprecedented high since the early 1990s. This means that considerable pressure will be laid on the economy as a whole in order to generate the necessary foreign currency for the servicing of a formidable foreign debt. Theoretically according to the neoliberal logic, incurring these large debts would help the Central Bank of Egypt in accumulating foreign reserves that would stabilize the country’s exchange rate system and hence its other interrelated macroeconomic indicators i.e. inflation. Indeed, the government used the massive foreign debt incurred since 2016 to rebuild its reserves, which increased from around $16.5 billion in 2015 to around $45 billion by the end of 2018 (Central Bank of Egypt, 2015, 2018). According to the plan, large foreign reserves should gradually enable free capital mobility and hence entice foreign investors to pour money into the economy without fearing being locked in, not being able to pull their capital out or to transfer their profit repatriations abroad. So far however, no dramatic increase in FDI has taken place in Egypt. It also remains below the pre-2009 levels as indicated in Fig. 1. This seems to resonate with the well-established common wisdom linking higher levels of FDI (as percentages of GDP) to democratic

5. Egypt’s regime as a reincarnation of bureaucratic authoritarianism It has already become clear that Egypt’s post-2013 regime was the result of an evolution through a series of critical junctures rather than a specific functional design from the start. As stated earlier, the basic institutional features of the new authoritarianism have been shaped by multiple interactive domestic, regional and global processes, actors and flows. I claim that Egypt’s current regime can be classified institutionally as a bureaucratic authoritarianism, following O'Donnell’s (1988) classic definition referring to a set of organizations in which specialists in coercion have decisive weight, as do those who seek to “normalize” the economy. However, despite the institutional similarity, Egypt’s new authoritarianism evolved to serve very different socioeconomic functions, primarily when it comes to re-inserting the country into the global economic order on different terms than the ones that prevailed before 2011. Indeed, by 2016, the military-backed regime in Egypt showed increasingly institutional features of bureaucratic authoritarianism. An extremely narrow coalition made up of state coercive apparatuses, namely the military, security and the judiciary has been firmly established. A series of decisions imposing austerity under the auspices of the IMF, through subsidy cuts, indirect taxation, public-sector downsizing and devaluating the national currency suggested an intensified neoliberal orientation in economic policymaking. Paradoxically (and ironically), most austerity measures were directed against some of the very social constituencies that supported the military takeover three years earlier, namely the urban middle and low-middle classes and the vast workforce in the state bureaucracy (Adly, 2017). In the meantime, no institutionalized links were successfully established between the state and any significant societal groups (Springborg, 2016). Successful political and security stabilization after the 2013 takeover were hence not attributed to the institutionalization of power, which could have provided some normalization of public life under an authoritarian order. It rather resulted from the maintenance of a tight alliance among coercive bureaucratic bodies that could hitherto raise the cost of engaging in opposition or collective action in the public sphere (Bellin, 2012; Stacher, 2015). The regime could employ repression effectively in the service of different and shifting policy agendas ranging from curbing freedoms of expression and association 5

Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

A. Adly

90000 80000 70000 60000 50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0 2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

Net FDIs

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

Foreign debt

Fig. 1. Net FDIs and external debt (2006–2017). Source: Central Bank of Egypt, for Net FDIs: http://www.cbe.org.eg/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?id=/Time%20Series %20Documents/Net%20Foreign%20Direct%20Investment/Net_Foreign_Direct_Investment_In_Egypt_by_country_Annual.xls.xlsx&DefaultItemOpen=1 and; foreign debt: http://www.cbe.org.eg/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?id=/Time%20Series%20Documents/External%20Debt/External%20Debt%20and%20indicators/External_ Debt_Annual.xlsx&DefaultItemOpen=1.

optation could sustain the old authoritarian regime for three decades of gradual, and not so consistent, neoliberal measures with adverse longterm distributional impacts on considerable social constituencies (Beinin and Vairel, 2013; Hanieh, 2013; Kandil, 2012; Roccu, 2013).

to foreign policy (e.g. the conceding of the two islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia) and finally for economic restructuring. Despite the similarities with the historical cases in Latin America, the ultimate functions that authoritarianism has been performing in Egypt is completely different. Given the centrality of repression for accessing capital through foreign borrowing, Egypt’s current regime is more of a credit-rating authoritarianism (Archer et al., 2007). A creditrating authoritarianism shares a lot of institutional features with bureaucratic authoritarian regimes but repression is oriented toward the preservation of macroeconomic stability for the continued access to foreign borrowing on international markets. Unlike Latin American bureaucratic authoritarianisms in the 1960s and 1970s, Egypt’ authoritarian restitution has not been a response to challenges of industrial deepening under an import-substitution model. The regime’s use of repression in order to pass austerity measures happened in correspondence with the regime’s need to enforce the policies necessary for macroeconomic stabilization that would in turn facilitate accessing international finance rather than in response to a structural impasse due to the conflict between distribution and accumulation. The repressive capacities of the military-backed regime in Egypt were employed first after the coup, against the Brotherhood. This was motivated by ideological differences, competition over patronage distribution that could have displaced older beneficiaries and diverging stances on geopolitical policy. The struggle was neither strictly classbased nor was it -at least initially- directed against the working class or the popular sectors. Intense repression was used at later stages for the financial stabilization of the regime but it could hardly have been the case that the regime had earlier plans for economic transformation à la Pinochet in Chile in 1973 (Fischer, 2009). As a matter of fact, Egypt’s rough equivalent of the popular sectors, inherited from Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s times of state-led development and employment-related welfare to unionized labor and civil servants, had already undergone considerable erosion due to successive rounds of trade liberalization, privatization and divestiture of state-owned enterprises and austerity since the mid-1970s. Moreover, these sectors have never enjoyed any credible autonomous organizational capacity for collective action. Trade unions have been integrated into the state bureaucracy as early as Nasser’s statist experience itself (Posusney, 1997). It is true that some public sector workers were active in contesting decisions by Sadat and Mubarak to strip them of the privileges awarded to them earlier. However, a mixture of repression and co-

5.1. Neoliberalism and military-led developmentalism Following the takeover of July 2013, the military emerged as the single most dominant force in the political arena. This soon extended into the economy under some odd combination of neoliberal measures with military-led development schemes. The military and its affiliated agencies, companies and networks expanded their economic empire visibly, using their broad regulatory mandates over multiple areas of economic activity. The military had already inherited a huge civilian economy from the days of Mubarak (Abul-Magd, 2016; Springborg, 1989). However, it was far from being a dominant actor in any single economic sector. It rather evolved as one large economic actor among others, namely family-owned private conglomerates that maintained close political ties with the Mubarak regime (Barayez, 2016). With the toppling of Mubarak, the military changed its position from being one influential member of the ruling coalition into being the dominant force over all others including big private businesses and security apparatuses (Albrecht et al., 2016; Springborg, 2017; Taylor, 2014). This implied a significant expansion in the military’s economy that included a formal economy, referring to military agencies conducting for-profit activities as well as military-affiliated companies and organizations on the market. It also comprised an informal economy made up primarily of new cronies and retired officers that made use of their networks and connections (Sayigh, 2012). Networks and mechanisms of patronage and rent seeking were reconfigured ushering in these new actors at the expense of old members of Mubarak-time networks (Adly, 2017; Chams El-Dine, 2014). Military-led developmentalism served multiple purposes simultaneously. On the one hand, the military’s image as the sovereign actor, standing for the state and public order following the takeover of 2013, would be boosted by its direct presence in the implementation of national megaprojects. On the other, the leadership perceived the military and its affiliated bodies, companies and networks, to be more reliable in delivering badly-needed economic growth. This was especially the case with al-Sisi’s regime which lacked any dense connections with private businesses or the civilian bureaucracy that Mubarak had strengthened 6

Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

A. Adly

Kalin, 2015). In 2017, the investment code was revamped altogether and a new one was issued extending generous tax holidays, subsidized land plots and other facilities to lure in FDI (Bloomberg, 2018). Additionally, the massive depreciation that the Egyptian pound had undergone following the flotation decision of late 2016 (around 50 percent overnight) must have contributed to a significant undervaluation of assets for foreign investors (Bellofiore, 2011). In the same vein, after having been defunct since the 2011 revolution, the military-backed regime revived the privatization drive, by appointing a minister in charge of state-owned enterprises. It also passed a number of legislative and regulatory measures for future public-private partnerships, which were thought to serve as frames for FDI inflows into areas that were previously reserved for the public sector like oil and natural gas extraction and distribution, rail road services, electricity and other public utilities (International Finance Corporation, 2017) Some of the megaprojects, namely the new Suez Canal, launched in 2014, were aimed at strengthening Egypt’s preexisting links with the global economy. The Suez Canal has been a traditional trade route since the late 19th century linking Europe with Asia. Currently, about 8 percent of the world trade passes through it (Saleh, 2017). It has been a steady source of foreign currency earnings that accrued directly to the state treasury. In 2014, al-Sisi launched an 8 billion-dollar project aiming at digging a two-way passage along the canal course with the aim of increasing the traffic and hence the revenues generated by the canal. Even though fund raising for the project happened through issuing bond-like certificates to the public to be paid with interest, the whole endeavor was portrayed as a national megaproject that required unity and the collective mobilization of resources. Reportedly, the military played a significant role in the digging of the “new canal”. In the inauguration ceremony in August 2015, al-Sisi called the megaproject, “Egypt’s gift to the world” – hadiyat misr ila-l-‘alam-, which is quite expressive of how further integration into the global economy remained a core strategy of the nationalist regime (Salem, 2015). The central question was however the terms according to which Egypt was to be reintegrated and the configuration of the domestic ruling coalition running the process. Likewise, the military did not spare a chance in seeking partnerships with private foreign, and especially, GCC, investors. In February, for example, al-Sisi issued presidential decree no. 57 of 2016, which allocated 16,000 acres to the Armed Forces Land Project Organization (AFLPO). These massive plots of land are intended to be the site of Egypt’s new administrative capital, a plan launched by the president during the Sharm Esheikh conference in March 2015. The decree established a joint-stock company owned and run by the AFLPO and another economic arm of the military, the National Service Projects Organization. The company will be in charge of implementing the project in partnership with Arab and non-Arab foreign companies. Even though the use of repression in the service of foreign investors’ interests suggests that the military-backed regime may have been allied with some transnational capitalist classes, this would be far too functionalist and reminiscent of a mechanistic external dependency dynamic. Conversely, the military-backed regime was far from being a mere domestic agent of international capitalism. In fact, the regime has been acting on its own behalf, driven by its attempts at consolidating its power by overcoming the country’s crippling financial position and ushering the economy into recovery. In pursuit of this and in the light of Egypt’s utter and structural dependency on foreign capital resulting from its historic mode of insertion into the global division of labor, the regime took all the measures possible to invite foreign capital into the country (Nouehid and Feteha, 2017). These were initiatives taken by the regime rather than responses to strong influences of global capital, in the guise of multinational corporations or investment banks and funds. Historically, ever since the economic opening of the mid-1970s, the country has never been a large recipient of foreign direct investment.

in order to coordinate economic activities (Springborg, 2016). Beyond regime legitimation, military-led developmentalism provided a perfect pretext for the extension and consolidation of patronage networks within the military in a way that would enhance its internal institutional cohesion and loyalty to the leadership, and boost its position visà-vis other economic actors, that may not be as enthusiastically supportive of the new regime. Military-led developmentalism was received with skepticism by the IFIs and private investors for fears of crowding-out the private sector and not offering a level playfield for all market actors. However, it was hardly an alternative challenging or displacing neoliberalism as the predominant economic ideology. It rather signaled a change in the configuration of the dominant class and its implications for the economy (Joya, 2018). Already, rounds of neoliberal reforms in Egypt since the early 1990s have not led to the emergence of a free and competitive market economy (Adly, 2009, 2012; El-Tarouty, 2015; Roccu, 2013; Sfakianakis, 2004). Privatization and deregulation through the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century were politically manipulated in order to enrich certain circles within the regime (including the Mubaraks, crony businessmen and top military and security personnel) and so as not to undermine the stability of the authoritarian regime. It was within this context of economic liberalization that the military ended up with a huge civilian economy in the 1980s and 1990s, which was explicitly and legally profit-oriented and with a mandate to form partnerships with foreign and domestic private investors. In fact, since the 1980s the military’s civilian economy has grown hand-in-hand with the private sector’s expanding share of the national economy. This allowed the emergence of a division of labor between burgeoning large private businesses and the military civilian economy, both formal and informal (Joya, 2018). Market making that followed the open-door policy under Sadat (1970–1981) and especially the adoption of the structural adjustment program in 1990/1991 also accommodated the military’s, and more specifically top officers’, plans for revenue-generation (Springborg, 1989). Abul-Magd (2016) calls this category “military entrepreneurs” in reference to retired army officers and their families and cronies who were bent on exploring opportunities made available by the institutional influence of the military for their own benefit, leading to a growing class of neoliberal officers who were nevertheless “far from being believers in the free market” (AbulMagd, 2016, 116). Once again, this calls to attention the multi-scalar character of political-economic transformation. Neoliberal reforms, emanating from IFI conditionality and international market linkages, were largely shaped by domestic power dynamics that determined the pace, scope and extent of the liberalization and privatization processes in Egypt with the aim of accommodating the interests of the authoritarian elites (Bayart, 2008). The same dynamic persisted after the 2013 takeover, amid a change in the composition in the ruling elite, with the military assigning itself the central position, politically and economically. To be clear, post-2013 military-led developmentalism was never about autarky nor did it have implicit or explicit anti-neoliberal stances (Khalil and Dill, 2018). Rather, plans for economic recovery in Egypt have all been based on securing large inflows of foreign capital so as to tackle the country’s balance of payments problems and foreign currency shortages. Megaprojects were seen as measures to boost the country’s global competitiveness and to attract FDI. It was in this context that the military-led regime, even before adopting the IMF package in November 2016, undertook measures that would encourage foreign investors into coming in Egypt. In March 2015, a large international conference was held in Sharm Esheikh with an explicit reference to attracting foreign investments. The investment code was amended shortly before the conference. The geopolitical alliance with Saudi Arabia and the UAE was used to demonstrate their financial commitment to Egypt and hence to mitigate the fears that private investors had over the country’s macroeconomic situation back then (Georgy and 7

Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

A. Adly

6. Conclusion: supplying repression for the world

The ratio of net FDI inflows to GDP averaged 1 percent in the period between 1989 and 2004 (World Bank, 2017c). Even though the ratio soared to 5 percent between 2005 and 2009, this proved to be rather exceptional and short-lived as it quickly declined following the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2011 revolution. Moreover, more than two thirds of net FDI have been concentrated in extractive industries with minimal presence in other economic sectors like manufacturing, agriculture or tourism (Hanafy, 2015). The country alternatively depended on workers’ remittances in oilrich Gulf countries and Libya next to flows of geopolitical and geographical rents through aid, cheap credit and the Suez Canal revenues. Egypt received a massive cumulative sum of $166.56 billion in remittances during the period between 1989 and 2012, or an average of $5 billion annually, a sum far greater than that received by developing countries of similar or greater population sizes like Turkey or Brazil (World Bank, 2017d, author’s calculations). These long-standing features came to limit the chances for a recovery predicated almost completely on attracting mass inflows of FDI. Egypt lacked the networks and a positive track record. The only real room for expansion was foreign debt. This is the point of entry where the regime’s repressive policies would prove critical for re-inserting the Egyptian economy into the post-2008 international financial markets.

Ultimately, the narrow coalition of bureaucratic coercive apparatuses was economically sustained by supplying “repression” to the world as a precondition for its re-insertion into global financial markets through debt. This is what enabled it to secure the IMF stabilization package first, and to subsequently enjoy access to relatively cheap credit on the market in times of financial turbulence. This is the position that Egypt has come to occupy in the global division of labor after 2011 and the upheaval that followed it. Economics intersected considerably with geopolitics in shaping such mode of re-insertion, as strong Egyptian-GCC relations served as an implicit guarantee to Egypt’s solvency. The main problem with this was that such intense repression and the lack of a semblance of authoritarian institutionalization raised risks for those interested in investing in the real economy rather than financing the government’s debts, with the notable exception of extractive industries, which have always been subject to special dynamics thanks to their enclave-like character being physically and economically removed from the rest of the economy and society in the host country. Thus, the ambitious plans for undertaking regulatory and policy reforms with the aim of luring foreign direct investments into the country (rather than investment in sovereign debt), as the long-term solution to its balance of payments ills, have hardly materialized. Even though sustained and effective repression served economic functions since 2015 and enabled the military-backed regime in Egypt to find a place for itself in the world economic and geopolitical orders, this did not come free of contradictions. Sustained repression undermined the ability of the new regime to institutionalize its rule and hence to normalize public life in Egypt following the 2013 takeover, the economy included (Springborg, 2016). It rather implied the heavy investment by the leadership in maintaining a tight coalition of the state coercive agencies: the military, security agencies and the judiciary through distributional gestures and side-payments that precluded further regime institutionalization in two ways: On the one hand, the regime could not risk tolerating any margins of freedom of expression, association or action in the public sphere and space, lest it loses its grip and hence its capacity to follow through with unpopular economic measures; and on the other, the regime could not afford the extension of patronage and crony networks to fairly large constituencies within society, as was the case under Mubarak, in order to build a broader base of support and to cultivate intermediaries through clientelism (Soliman, 2011). Instead, the tightening of the narrow coalition of coercive apparatuses in the post-2013 period, required an economy of privilege for these relatively limited groups, namely in the form of an expanded military civilian economy, which went in harmony with the rising model of military-led developmentalism (Marshall, 2015; Sayigh, 2012; 2019). Additionally, the odd position of military-affiliated businesses in key sectors, especially accessing desert land in prime investment areas, have hardly been inviting for foreign private investors (or domestic for that matter). This repression-enabled mode of re-insertion has hence come at a long-term cost of allowing a largely debt-dependent path that will likely put considerable strain on the Egyptian economy as a whole in the coming few years, especially in the context of shaky financial markets and stifled global trade.

5.2. Contraditions in military-led development Even though state developmentalism and neoliberalism in the age of crisis can be compatible in principle, Egypt’s special brand of militaryled developmentalism, appears to bear too many contradictions to function smoothly (Chams El-Dine, 2014). On the one hand, with the military infiltrating too many economic sectors and holding the regulatory keys, partnering with them may be intimidating for many foreign investors. Under such settings, property rights are by definition unclear, especially that most projects are capital-intensive and of a long-term nature in infrastructure and utilities. In case a dispute erupts, the military has its own special courts system that has thus far covered its ventures into the civilian economy. Whether such a “sovereign” partner can be taken to international arbitration, not to mention local administrative courts, is dubious in the current political context. On the other, most foreign investors, given the past experience of FDI under Mubarak, have not had the chance to develop informal mechanisms of coordination with the military and its affiliated regulatory and economic bodies (Adly, 2017; Springborg, 2016). There isn’t hence much trust cultivated from pervious transactions. These problems, generated by the very model of military-led developmentalism and the reconfiguration of the ruling coalition, might stand as good explanations for the rather humble FDI record compared to external debt incurring since 2015 onwards, despite seemingly improving macroeconomic indicators. The figure below demonstrates the development of net FDI and foreign debt between 2006 and 2017. It is completely based on the official Central Bank. It shows that FDI has hardly recovered to pre2008 levels. Moreover, they reveal that foreign debt has been growing at significantly higher rates (compared to the pre-2011 figures) and hence re-defining Egypt’s insertion into global capital markets. Conversely, net FDI inflows have barely recovered to pre-2011 levels. These limitations suggest that military-led developmentalism can hardly serve as a long-term fix to Egypt’s long-standing problems. It is unlikely to establish a firm hegemony for the reconfigured ruling classes after the 2013 takeover either. Rather, it will serve as a political pretext for more access to local and foreign resources in order to cement an inherently narrow coalition of state actors, that are more preoccupied with rent seeking and patronage distribution than with any organization of production as a genuine developmental state would do (Amsden, 2001; Evans, 2012).

References Abdelrahman, M.M., 2004. Civil society exposed: The politics of NGOs in Egypt. IB Tauris, London. Abrams, E., 24 April 2015. Sisi is no Pinochet. The Washington Post. [Online] Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hes-no-pinochet/2015/04/24/ 8c8d642e-e212-11e4-905f-cc896d379a32_story.html. [Accessed 26th November 2018]. Abul-Magd, Z., 2016. Militarizing the Nation: The Army, Business, and Revolution in Egypt. Columbia University Press, New York.

8

Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

A. Adly

Enterprise, 25 September 2018. Praise from IMF, World Bank on Egypt’s economic reforms. https://enterprise.press/stories/2018/09/25/praise-from-imf-world-bankonegypts-economic-reforms/ [Accessed 19 November 2018]. Evans, P., 2012. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton University Press, New Jersey. Evenett, S.J., Fritz, J., 2015. 15 Crisis-era trade distortions cut LDC export growth by 5.5% per annum. In: Hoekman, B. (Ed.), The Global Trade Slowdown: A New Normal? Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London. Fardoust, S., 2016. Economic integration in the Middle East: prospects for development and stability. Middle East Institute. Fischer, K., 2009. The Influence of Neoliberals in Chile before, during, and after Pinochet. In: Mirowski, P., Plehwe, D. (Eds.), The road from Mont Pelerin: The making of the neoliberal thought collective. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Freedom House, 2019. Freedom House in the World 2019, Egypt. Freedom House In press. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2019/egypt. Gat, A., 2007. The return of authoritarian great powers. Foreign Affairs 86 (4), 59–69. Georgy, M., Kalin, S., 13 March 2015. Gulf Arab Allies Pledge $12 Billion to Egypt at Summit. Reuters. https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-egypt-economy-investment idUKKBN0M91XQ20150313 [Accessed 19 November 2018]. Gibson, T.T., R.Q., 2017. Extreme right-wing ideologies, conservative secession and terrorism. Foundations Homeland Security Law Policy 79–94. Haddad, B.S., 2011. Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience. Stanford University Press, California. Haggard, S., Kaufman, R.R., 1997. The political economy of democratic transitions. Comparative Politics 29, 263–284. Hanafy, S., 2015. Sectoral FDI and economic growth: evidence from egyptian governorates. Joint Discussion Paper Series Econ. 27. Hanieh, A., 2013. Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East. Haymarket Books, Illinois. Hanieh, A., 2016. Absent regions: spaces of financialisation in the arab world. Antipode 48 (5), 1228–1248. Hassan, H.A., 2011. Civil society in Egypt under the Mubarak regime. Afro Asian J. Soc. Sci. 2 (2.2). Heydemann, S., 2004. Networks of Privilege in the Middle East: The Politics of Economic Reform Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. International Finance Corporation, 2017. Egypt’s First PPP Offers Relief to a Fast-Growing Population. https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/news_ext_content/ifc_external_ corporate_site/ news+a nd+events/news/impact-stories/egypt-first-ppp [Accessed 20 December 2018]. International Monetary Fund (IMF), April, 2019. Arab Republic of Egypt: Fourth Review Under the Extended Arrangement Under the Extended Fund Facility. https://www. imf.org/en/Publications/CR/Issues/2019/04/05/Arab-Republic-of-Egypt-FourthReview-Under-the-Extended-Arrangement-Under-the -Extended-Fund-46738 [Accessed 1 May 2019]. Jakobsen, J., 2006. Does democracy moderate the obsolescing bargain mechanism? An empirical analysis, 1983–2001. Trans. Corporat. 15 (3), 65. Jensen, N., 2008. Political risk, democratic institutions, and foreign direct investment. J. Politics 70 (4), 1040–1052. Joya, A., 2017. Neoliberalism, the state and economic policy outcomes in the post-Arab uprisings: the case of Egypt. Mediterranean Politics 22 (3), 339–361. Joya, A., 2018. The military and the state in Egypt: class formation in the post-Arab uprisings. Br. J. Middle Eastern Stud. 1–21. Kandil, H., 2012. Why did the egyptian middle class march to tahrir square? Mediterranean Pol. 17 (2), 197–215. King, S.J., 2009. The New Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa. Indiana University Press, USA, USA. Khalil, H., Dill, B., 2018. Negotiating statist neoliberalism: the political economy of postrevolution Egypt. Rev. Afr. Political Econ. 45 (158), 574–591. Klapsis, A., 2014. Economic crisis and political extremism in Europe: from the 1930s to the present. Eur. View 13 (2), 189–198. Kraetzschmar, H., Revitt, P., 2018. Political Parties and Secular-Islamist Polarisation in Post-Mubarak Egypt. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Leitner, H., Sheppard, E., Sziarto, K.M., 2008. The Spatialities of Contentious Politics. Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. 33 (2), 157–172. Linz, J.J., 1964. An authoritarian regime: Spain. In: Linz, J.J., Allardt, E., Littunen, Y. (Eds.), Cleavages, Ideologies, and Party Systems. Tidnings och Tryckeri Aktiebolag, Stockholm, pp. 291–341. Mansour, S., 2016. Stifling the Public Sphere: Media and Civil Society in Egypt. Media and Civil Society in Egypt, Russia, and Vietnam. Washington, D.C. The International Forum for Democratic Studies. http://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/ Stifling-the-Public-Sphere-Media-Civil-Society-Egypt Forum-NED.pdf [Accessed 20 March 2019]. Mason, R. (Ed.), 2017. Reassessing Order and Disorder in the Middle East: Regional Imbalance or Disintegration? Rowman & Littlefield, USA. Marshall, S., 2015. The Egyptian armed forces and the remaking of an economic empire 15. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC. Miller, B., 2016. Spaces of Contention: Spatialities and Social Movements. Routledge. Mitchell, T., 1999. Dreamland: The Neoliberalism of Your Desires. Middle East Report 29 (1, 210), 28–33. El-Nawawy, M., Elmasry, M.H., 2016. The signs of a strongman: a semiotic and discourse analysis of Abdelfattah Al-Sisi’s Egyptian presidential campaign. Int. J. Commun. 10, 22. Nouehid, L., Feteha, A. 8 January 2017. Egypt to Top $10 Billion FDI Target This Year, Minister Says. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-01/ egypt-may-exceed-10-billion-fdi-target-this-year-minister-says [Accessed on 21 December 2018].

Achcar, G., 2013. The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising. University of California Press, Berkeley. Adly, A., 2009. Politically-embedded Cronyism: the Case of Post-liberalization Egypt. Business Politics 11 (4), 1–26. Adly, 2012. Mubarak (1990-2011): The State of Corruption. Amman, Arab Reform Initiative. http://www. arab-reform. net/sites/default/files/Mubarak_1990-2011_ The_State_of_Corruption (Accessed 10th January 2013). [Accessed 8th July 2018]. Adly, 2017. Too Big to Fail: Egypt's Large Enterprises After the 2011 Uprising. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. https://carnegie- mec.org/2017/03/02/too-bigto-fail-egypt-s-large-enterprises-after-2011-uprising-pub-68154 [Accessed 8th July 2018]. Ahram Online, 3 May 2016. Western Perspective on Human Rights Not Applicable in Egypt, Sisi Tells US Delegation. Ahram Online. http://english.ahram.org.eg/ NewsContent/1/64/206988/Egypt/Politics-/Western perspective-on-human-rightsnot-applicable.aspx. [Accessed 11th November 2018]. Ahram Online, 3 July 2018. IMF praises Egypt's economic reforms in 3rd review; calls for more private sector-led growth. Ahram Online. http://english.ahram.org.eg/ NewsContent/3/12/306126/Business/Economy/IMF-praises-Egypts-economicreforms-in-rd-review;-.aspx [Accessed 11th November 2018]. Albrecht, H., Croissant, A., Lawson, F.H. (Eds.), 2016. Armies and Insurgencies in the Arab Spring. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Ali, W., 2018. 2 September 2018. Sisi asserts Egypt's keenness to enhance cooperation with China. Egypt Today http://www.egypttoday.com/Article/2/56988/Sisi-assertsEgypt-s-keenness-to-enhance-cooperation-with-China). [Accessed 12th November 2018]. Amsden, A.H., 2001. The Rise of “The Rest”: Challenges to the West from LateIndustrializing Economies. Oxford University Press, New York. Archer, C.C., Biglaiser, G., DeRouen, K., 2007. Sovereign bonds and the “democratic advantage”: Does regime type affect credit rating agency ratings in the developing world? Int. Org. 61 (2), 341–365. Bader, J., Grävingholt, J., Kästner, A., 2010. Would autocracies promote autocracy? A political economy perspective on regime-type export in regional neighbourhoods. Contemporary Politics 16 (1), 81–100. Barayez, A., 25 January 2016. This Land is Their Land: Egypt’s Military and the Economy. Jadaliyya. http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32898 [Accessed 17th May 2017]. Bayart, J.F., 2008. The Concept of the Thermidorian Situation: Neo-revolutionary Regimes and Economic Liberalization (Le concept de situation thermidorienne: régimes néo-révolutionnaires et libéralisation économique). Questions de recherche 24, 1–77. El-Bediwi, Abdel-tawab, 3 October 2018. According to Everyone… Egypt is on the Right Path… the IMF Praises the Reform Program (bi-shahadat al-jamee’…misr ‘ala- ltareeq al-sahih… sandouq al-naqd yosheed bi-barnameg al-islah). Youm7. https:// www.youm7.com/story/2018/10/3/%D8%A8%D8%B4%D9%87%D8%A7%D 8% AF%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%B9-%D9%85% D8%B5%D8%B1-%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%89-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B7%D8% B1%D9%8A%D9%82-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B5%D8%AD%D9%8A%D8%AD-% D8%B5%D9%86%D8%AF%D9%88%D9%82-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D9% 82%D8%AF-%D9%8A%D8%B4%D9%8A%D8%AF-%D8%A8%D8%A8%D8%B1% D9%86%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%AC/3975123 [Accessed 16th November 2018]. Beinin, J., Vairel, F. (Eds.), 2013. Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa. Stanford University Press, California. Bellin, E., 2012. Reconsidering the robustness of authoritarianism in the Middle East: lessons from the Arab Spring. Comparative Politics 44 (2), 127–149. Bellofiore, R., 2011. Crisis theory and the Great Recession: a personal journey, from Marx to Minsky. In: Zarembka, P., Desai, R. (Eds.), Revitalizing Marxist Theory for Today's Capitalism. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 81–120. Bloomberg, 26 September 2018. Pleasing Investors Is Getting Expensive for IMF-Backed Egypt. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-26/ pleasing-investors-is-getting expensive-for-imf-backed-egypt [Accessed 16th November 2018]. Bromhead, A., Eichengreen, B., O'Rourke, K.H., 2013. Political extremism in the 1920s and 1930s: Do German lessons generalize? J. Econ. Hist. 73 (2), 371–406. Bruff, I., 2014. The rise of authoritarian neoliberalism. Rethinking Marxism 26 (1), 113–129. Central Bank of Egypt, December 2015. Net foreign reserves. https://www.cbe.org.eg/ en/Pages/HighlightsPages/NIR_DEC2015.aspx [Accessed 19th September, 2019]. Central Bank of Egypt, August 2018. Net foreign reserves. https://www.cbe.org.eg/en/ Pages/HighlightsPages/-Net-International-Reserves-reached-US$-44419-3-mn-atthe-end-of-August,-2018-(Provisional).aspx [Accessed 19th September, 2019]. Comaroff, J., 2011. The end of neoliberalism? What is left of the left. Ann. Am. Acad. Political Soc. Sci. 637 (1), 141–147. Chams El-Dine, C., 2014. Fragile alliances in Egypt's post-revolutionary order: the military and its partners. German Institute for International and Security Affairs: SWP Comments 1–6. Chekir, H., Diwan, I., 2014. Crony Capitalism in Egypt. J. Globalization Dev. 5 (2), 177–211. Colonna, J., 12 March 2018. SIPRI: Egypt’s arms imports skyrocket amidst greater security threats. Egypt Today. http://www.egypttoday.com/Article/1/45059/SIPRIEgypt’s-arms-imports-skyrocket amidst-greater-security-threats. [Accessed 27 November 2018]. Davenport, C., 2007. State repression and the domestic democratic peace. Cambridge University Press. Diamond, L., 2008. The democratic rollback-the resurgence of the predatory state. Foreign Affairs 87 (2), 36–49. Diwan, I., 2013. Understanding revolution in the middle east: the central role of the middle class. Middle East Dev. J. 5 (1), 1–30.

9

Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

A. Adly

Press, Boulder CO. Springborg, R., 2016. Caudillismo along the Nile. Int. Spectator 51 (1), 74–85. Springborg, R., 2017. The rewards of failure: persisting military rule in Egypt. Br. J. Middle Eastern Studies 44 (4), 478–496. Soliman, S., 2011. The Autumn of Dictatorship: Fiscal Crisis and Political Change in Egypt Under Mubarak. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Stallings, B., Haggard, S., Kaufman, R., 1992. The Politics of Economic Adjustment. Princeton University Press, New Jersey. Stacher, J., 2015. Fragmenting states, new regimes: militarized state violence and transition in the Middle East. Democratization 22 (2), 259–275. Steinmo, S., Thelen, K., Longstreth, F. (Eds.), 1992. Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Streeck, W., 2014. Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. Verso Books. El-Tarouty, S., 2015. Businessmen, Clientelism, and Authoritarianism in Egypt. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Tarrow, S., 2006. Contentious politics. The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements. Oxford University Press. Taylor, W., 2014. Military responses to the Arab Uprisings and the future of civil-military relations in the middle east: Analysis from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria. Springer, New York. Al-Thani, S., 2017. The Qatari-Saudi-Egyptian Triangle After the Arab Spring. In: Mason, R. (Ed.), Egypt and the Gulf: A Renewed Regional Policy Alliance. Gerlach Press, Berlin. Trading Economics, 2018. Egypt public debt rate 2002–2018. https://tradingeconomics. com/egypt/government-debt-to-gdp. [Accessed 27 November 2018]. World Bank, 2017a., GDP Growth (annual %) 1961–2017, Egypt. https://data.worldbank. org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=EG-TN. [Accessed 27 November 2018]. World Bank, 2017b. Foreign direct investment, net inflows (% of GDP) 1976–2017. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.KLT.DINV.WD.GD.ZS?locations=TN-EG& name_desc=true&view=chart. [Accessed 27 November 2018]. World Bank, 2017c. Foreign Direct Investment Net Inflows (BoP, current US dollars): Brazil, China, Chile, Czech, Egypt, India, Mexico and Turkey. World Bank. [Online] Available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.KLT.DINV.CD.WD? locations=EG-BR-CN-CL-CZ-IN-MX-TR [Accessed 16th November 2018]. World Bank, 2017d. Personal Remittances Received: Brazil, Egypt and Turkey (current US dollars). World Bank. [Online] Available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT?locations=EG [Accessed 12th November 2018].

O'Donnell, G.A., 1988. Bureaucratic authoritarianism: Argentina, 1966–1973, in Comparative Perspective. University of California Press, Berkeley. Panitch, L., Gindin, S., 2012. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. Verso Books, United Kingdom. Pepinsky, T.B., 2012. The global economic crisis and the politics of non-transitions. Government Opposition 47 (2), 135–161. Pinfari, M., 2013. The EU, Egypt and Morsi's Rise and Fall: ‘Strategic Patience’ and Its Discontents. Mediterranean Politics 18 (3), 460–466. Podeh, E., 2017. Saudi-Egyptian Relations in Historical Perspective: The Foundations of a Solid Entente. In: Mason, R. (Ed.), Egypt and the Gulf: A Renewed Regional Policy Alliance. Gerlach Press, Berlin. Posusney, M.P., 1997. Labor and the State in Egypt 1952–1994: Workers, Unions, and Economic Restructuring. Columbia University Press, New York. Reuters, 2 March 2015. Egypt got $23 billion in aid from Gulf in 18 months-minister. https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-egypt-investment-gulf/egypt-got-23-billion-in-aidfrom-gulf-in-18-months-minister-idUKKBN0LY0UT20150302 [Accessed on 21 December 2018]. Robinson, R., 2004. Neoliberalism and the future world: Markets and the end of politics. Critical Asian Studies 36, no. 3, 405–423. In press. Roccu, R., 2013. The Political Economy of the Egyptian Revolution: Mubarak, Economic Reforms and Failed Hegemony. Palgrave McMillan, UK. Rutherford, B.K., 2013. Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Saleh, H., 29 May 2017. Egypt Aims to Profit from the Suez Canal. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/2f6a3d18-1ae0-11e7-a266-12672483791a. [Accessed on 22 December 2018]. Salem, M., 18 August 2015. Egypt’s gift to the world. Politico. https://www.politico.eu/ article/egypt-suez-canal-sisi-regime-cairo-government-trade/) [Accessed on 22 December 2018]. Sayigh, Y., 2012. Above the State: The Officers' Republic in Egypt. Carnegie Middle East Center, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Sayigh, Y., 2019. Owners of the Republic: An Anatomy of Egypt’s Military Economy. Carnegie Middle East Center, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Schielke, S., 2015. Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Sfakianakis, J., 2004. The Whales of the Nile: Networks, Businessmen, and Bureaucrats During the Era of Privatization in Egypt. In: Heydemann, S. (Ed.), Networks of Privilege in the Middle East: The Politics of Economic Reform Revisited. Palgrave Mcmillan, United States, pp. 77–100. Springborg, R., 1989. Mubarak's Egypt: Fragmentation of the Political Order. Westview

10