In English the terms “political system” and “political regime” are used to distinguish different constructs. The first was initially developed by behavioralists such as David Easton and Gabriel Almond to replace the older, institutionalist term, the “state”; the second typically designates the arrangements for producing a government. In Arabic, though, the words “system” and “regime” both translate as niẓām. This piece argues that when millions of citizens across the Arab region came out in 2011 chanting al-shaʿb yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām, those chants marked a critical juncture in a long process reflecting the end of not just the existing regimes, but also the states as we knew them. Whether defined in terms of governing institutions and capabilities, as Lisa Anderson, Ellen Lust, and Ariel Ahram do, or in terms of discourse, imagination, and symbolic power, as Ellis Goldberg and Charles Tripp do, the state was withering away long before the uprising. Concomitantly, the heightened levels of repression and shifts within official discourse by the changing ruling elite after the uprisings signal a perceived threat to the state itself, and not just to a particular regime. And while this piece focuses on Egypt, unlike some of the other contributions in this collection, I argue that the nation-state, as a conceptual and material construct, is being challenged.

Looking at Egypt as a case in point, from the loud encroachment of the informal and the illegal into the physical center of the state's territory to the subsequent use of repression both as spectacle and in forced “disappearance,” the state in Egypt, like many of its counterparts in the region, is eroding. Antonio Gramsci defined the state as “the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules.”Footnote ¹ From this perspective, I argue that the perpetual use of repression by the Egyptian state to foster its domination and its repeated discourse insisting on prestige and respect to legitimate its hegemony, is a sign of weakness more than established domination. In a setting where the state is synonymous with the regime or what in the context of Latin America Douglas Chalmers rightly dubbed “the politicized state,”Footnote ² any threat to the ruling regime is in essence a threat to the state. Hence, while the demands of the uprising were not targeting the downfall of the state per se, they were aiming at changing the logic and mechanics of the social contract of the state since1952. Although the apparent failure of a so-called “democratic transition” in the region, and the increased levels of repression in places such as Egypt, have prompted many to return to arguing for an affinity of Arab countries to authoritarianism—“the persistence of authoritarianism” argument—this re-creation of heightened repression and emphasis on amorphous terminology such as haybat al-dawla (the prestige or awe of the stateFootnote ³) is less a reaction of a particular regime than a reflection of a threatened political order, that of the state itself.

Questioning the capabilities of seemingly “fierce” states to show that they are masking considerable weakness is not new. Nazih Ayubi and Joel Migdal established the frailty of the “fierce” state in their seminal workFootnote ⁴ and, as Charles Tripp shows in his contribution to this roundtable, violence, both explicit and implicit, has been integral to state-making performances in the Arab region. In Egypt the modus operandi of physical violence and repression has long been hidden behind “closed doors.” In prisons, police stations, and even schools, homes, and hospitals, the bodies and minds of Egyptians have been disciplined to produce ways of being, thinking, and imagining consistent with ideal “state subjects.” The use of violence in the public arena remained subtle and symbolic, even when structural. Even at the peak of the 2011 uprising, during the eighteen-day sit-in at Tahrir Square, the state's use of physical repression was relatively constrained and focused on peripheries far from the spotlight.

But by the early morning of 14 August 2013 when Egyptian security forces raided the sit-ins of protesters in Raʿa al-ʿAdawiya and al-Nahda, in the center of the capital and in broad daylight, killing more than 600 protesters in a span of few hours, this modus operandi had evidently changed.Footnote ⁵ This attack was not just an act of extreme coercion and an unnecessary use of violence by a “fierce” state or untrained security forces. It was also a spectacle, a performative act of violence that created a show of force and canonized the “state of exception,” hence qualitatively changing the existing modus operandi. Under this state of exception, “there is the force of law, without the rule of law,” and one element of the state apparatus—in this case the repressive arm—becomes omnipotent.Footnote ⁶ Rules become permanently suspended and the exceptional and extralegal become the norm. Rather than inadvertent, this shift was preceded by a long process of normalizing repression both through systematic use of torture under the Mubarak regime and in occasional confrontations with protesters before and after the uprising, as Ellis Goldberg shows. However, the clampdown on the Rabʿa al-ʿAdawiya sit-in was different. This clampdown was not just targeting the protestors, or the Islamists at large, but was an indicator of what has been called a “maddening state.” As Begoña Aretxaga argued,

A state that senses a threat to its control and the erosion of its legitimacy starts to use violence as a tool not just for physical domination but also for ideological hegemony. The sharp dichotomy and dividing lines between repression and hegemony are both blurred and mutually reinforcing.

Outright violence is not usually considered part of the state's “symbolic power.” As a tool of clear physical coercion, it is hardly subtle. But given the context of the Raʿa al-ʿAdawiya massacre, with the protesters already quarantined both physically in a sit-in and emotionally through lack of wide popular support for their cause, state use of that scale of violence was in every way as symbolic as it was literal. The level of violence, its timing, and its locations were intended to produce ways of being, imagining, and thinking among the state's subjects far beyond merely constraining or promoting particular actions or behaviors.Footnote ⁸ The spectacle of Rabʿa al-ʿAdawiya in 2013 was meant to replace the earlier spectacle of Tahrir in 2011, with its protestors literally and symbolically taking over the state, occupying the central square of its capital, closing down of the Mugammaʿ, the shrine of the state bureaucracy, breaking down the police, and riding military tanks (the symbol of the state's most revered asset, the army).

Rabʿa al-ʿAdawiya was also preceded by another spectacle on Friday 26 July 2013 when Field Marshal ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi, then minister of defense, called on Egyptians to show their support for him in the “fight against terrorism” by demonstrating in Tahrir that day. What came to known as the Gumaʿat al-Tafwid (Friday of Delegation) was the first time the state officially called for mass demonstrations. The two performative acts are related not only in that the “delegation” was a prerequisite for legitimizing the massacre a couple of weeks later, but also in indicating a changing pattern of state legitimation. In the absence of a clear mandate, the state must validate itself, even for outside viewers. To do so by calling for mass demonstrations followed by the extreme use of violence, not behind closed doors as before but outright on the streets, was an attempt to counter waning power.

The state of exception did not stop at the Rabʿa al-ʿAdawiya spectacle, but continued to be reinforced by the use of forced disappearances of individuals, a notorious practice under many totalitarian regimes, but one that is novel to the Egyptian state. Between 2013 and 2017, several hundred people were reported missing and identified as “enforced disappearances.”Footnote ⁹ This practice contributes to the spectacle of collective repression in quieter and more sustained ways, and as a marker of its limitless boundaries. The profile of the “disappeared,” who are not public figures but just ordinary citizens who might have occasionally expressed undesirable views, makes every subject a possible target and hence internalizes and normalizes the foundational fear that comes with the state of exception. It is an enactment of the “fear of the vengeance of magical-powers within the power-holder,”Footnote ¹⁰ the “magic” of making someone disappear to highlight an almost supernatural power of the state.

The change in tactics of physical repression was complemented by a shift in state discourse. Individuals’ experiences of being state subjects are ordered through language; by telling people who they are and how they are supposed to behave as a member of that polity, the state helps create its subjects. In the aftermath of the military takeover and massacres of 2013, the Egyptian state began to portray itself as a threatened entity, in stark contrast to its prior self-image as the “protector” of the nation and the people, or the grand Leviathan. In her essay, Lisa Anderson suggests that Arab states are a product of the international regime but, in fact, the “state” in the region was also a product of the popular imaginaries of (anti)colonial modernity—synonymous with independence and national pride. Hence, a fetishization of the state apparatus has been predominant since at least the 19th century. The discourse surrounding and creating the state reified it as the masculine saviour and protector as Beth Baron and others have compellingly showed.Footnote ¹¹

Since the 2011 uprising, however, the official discourse, as reflected in public statements and mainstream media, started emphasizing new amorphous terms such as haybat al-dawla. These came to replace the earlier terms, such as national security and state security (amn al-dawla, al-amn al-qawmī), which while equally amorphous, imply a very different imagery of strength and potency. What started in the early days of the uprising as a discourse to protect state buildings, al-ḥifādh ʿala mushaʾat al-dawla, soon transformed to the protection of the state itself. The emphasis on terms such as “stability,” “building,” and “production” as a counternarrative to “revolution,” “demonstrations,” and “change,” was a predictable reaction by a ruling class facing the ongoing threat of uprising, but the emergence of a discourse calling for the protection of the state per se was remarkable. As much as the concept of haybat al-dawla is deployed to allow for and consolidate the state of exception by making everything a possible threat (hence a punishable threat) to this hayba, it also reveals a state of fragility.

Every narrative has a story providing the content and a discourse by which the content is communicated. In the “official” story of the Egyptian uprising, the “state” was targeted by unknown and multiple entities, a potential victim who needs saving. The adversaries can be the protestors, the Islamists in power, foreign powers, or even cyberspace waves. In the face of these cumulative “threats,” the discourse changed from one in which the state is in control to one in which it is seeking allegiance from its subjects based on its weakness, emphasizing the need to protect its “prestige” and not allow for its collapse. This decoupling of annihilating violence and paternalistic protection, which have long been a feature of the maddening states, reconfigures the state as we know it in the region. This perception of threat is compounded by how the state is being challenged, replaced, and displaced by multiple forms of social authority and informality, as Ellen Lust shows in her contribution. And it reflects the “emotional ties” to the nation-state being challenged by different forms of allegiances, as Ellis Goldberg shows in his.

These ongoing shifts suggest that the uprisings in Egypt and other Arab countries cannot be seen as isolated eruptions of popular anger. Rather, they are an expression of and a reaction to a crumbling order, well beyond the boundaries of regime change and the deep structures of the state. As Eric Hobsbawm correctly warns, the danger in studying revolutions and uprisings “lies in the temptation to isolate the phenomenon of overt crisis from the wider context of a society undergoing transformation,”Footnote ¹² which is precisely the main shortcoming of many accounts of the Egyptian and Arab uprisings. Although the uprisings of 2011 were an overt episode of crisis, imbued with a sense of anxiety (and opportunity) inherent to the impending succession within many regimes and a delayed reaction to neoliberal austerities, its foundation lays in much deeper global structural changes. Economic and technological change is affecting the configuration of societies and human constellations and accordingly the political systems at large. Changes in the use of repression (domination) and discourse (hegemony), rather than an indication of the state's reproduction as an omnipotent sovereign, signal an existential threat to the state as an entity. In this understanding, the uprisings of 2011 are an episode in a longer unfolding process of changing imaginaries, subjectivities, and power dynamics from which the nation-state is not immune.