Under President al-Sisi, Egypt has revealed itself to be less tolerant of dissent and more successful at cloaking itself in nationalist sentiment than under either the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or Husni Mubarak. The massacre at Rabʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, the arrests, detention, and torture of youth and prominent activists, the proliferation of criminal and treason charges against journalists, nongovernmental organizations, and Muslim Brotherhood figures, the banning of various organizations, and the passage of restrictive laws on basic civil rights—these practices make clear that the regime has no commitment to democratization understood either as substantive participation or the safeguarding of basic civil liberties. Indeed, the public statement put forward by a group of human rights organizations, issued in July 2014 in response to the al-Sisi government's draconian draft law on civil organizations, pithily captured these limitations:

Over the last two decades of the Mubarak era, an array of parallel private, informal, local, and religious organizations sought to provide desperately needed social services and sustained networks of charitable and local development initiatives. In its quest to shut down the Muslim Brotherhood and several other Islamic organizations, the new regime has proved less tolerant than the old, arbitrarily freezing funds and closing down charities and clinics of numerous organizations.

In Egypt's peripheries and its provinces, particularly Sinai and Upper Egypt, where there is less media coverage than in Cairo and where old tropes about terrorism are easily deployed, the repressive state acts with even greater impunity. While coverage of the 2011 uprising often focused on cities, rural areas also saw extensive protest, new forms of civic engagement, and renewed claims for basic services and access to land and water.Footnote ² The new draft NGO law of July 2014 prohibits, just as the Mubarak-era laws did, scholars from conducting field research and public opinion polls without governmental permission. While individuals quietly flouted these in the past, the al-Sisi government's crackdown on civic associations and charities raises new concerns about the risks that outside researchers bring by reporting on local activities and organizations.

The resurgence of the military-security state has induced activists to adapt accordingly, reviving Mubarak-era tactics even as they pursue new strategies. The April 6 Movement, famous for its early involvement in anti-Mubarak protests, recently announced a new campaign, Porto al-Shaʿb (the People's Porto), launched across social media platforms.Footnote ³ Satirizing advertising campaigns intended to induce wealthy Egyptians to buy into the luxury “Porto” resorts built by the Amer Group along Egypt's coasts, the campaign posted photographs of inadequate sewage, flooded and garbage-strewn streets, electricity shortages, and the dismal conditions of state-run hospitals, paired with satirical captions. The movement invited citizens to do the same.

The April 6 movement was banned in the spring of 2014, and founder Ahmed Maher and member Muhammed ʿAdel were sentenced to three years in prison for protesting the new law criminalizing protest. The April 6 media spokesperson told the privately owned daily al-Masry al-Youm that the Porto al-Shaʿb campaign was “not political” but designed to highlight the poor conditions and corruption plaguing popular and informal areas.Footnote ⁴ These concerns are, of course, intrinsically political, but the rhetorical feint of disavowing political claims while actually revealing local mismanagement has long been employed by activists in Egypt. The Mubarak regime tolerated some activist campaigns, viewing them as a “safety valve” of sorts for popular grievances and allowing the regime to distance itself from officials perceived as particularly corrupt or inefficient. These sporadic and localized campaigns, however, could not induce broader reform of the state.

The Porto al-Shaʿb campaign riffs on advertising for integrated resort developments that include exclusive residences, malls, hotels, and Disney-style entertainment offerings far out of reach of the vast majority of Egyptians. While advertisements for these real estate ventures often emphasize cleanliness, greenery, and luxury consumerism, Porto al-Shaʿb promises a life of “fatigue and misery” with “garbage everywhere,” a place where children play in a rusted-out auto rickshaw rather than amusement parks, and push heavy carts along trafficked motorways. The campaign reflects Egyptian activists’ ongoing creative use of social media; its over 14,000 “likes” in its first month online reveal the ripple effects across other media platforms as the story has been quickly picked up by other outlets.

Yet whether such campaigns will gain traction among communities or influence decision-makers is another question. In Environmental Politics in Egypt: Activists, Experts, and the State, I asked under what conditions environmental campaigns proved effective in influencing policy outcomes or practices on the ground.Footnote ⁵ A campaign to stop the Amer Group from building an actual Porto on the shores of Lake Qarun in the Fayoum illustrated some of the challenges as well as opportunities opened by the 2011 uprising. Organized by a small network of conservation activists on Facebook, the “No Porto Fayoum” campaign quickly gained publicity and traction. For the international media, the No Porto Fayoum campaign emphasized the threats to biodiversity, unique fossil records, and the Wadi al-Hitan UNESCO world heritage site. In local media, organizers instead drew upon populist outrage and concern about Mubarak-era corruption, exemplified by state allocations of large land parcels to wealthy private business groups.

In postuprising 2011, popular backlash against these land allocations was significant, prompting media criticism, the selective prosecution of big businessmen on grounds of illegally obtaining state land, and state prosecutors’ announcing that old land deals would be reviewed. The Tourism Development Authority (TDA), charged with allocating land, temporarily halted land sales and announced it would review Porto Fayoum and other projects. In 2013, TDA reaffirmed that it was canceling the Fayoum concession. This particular setback, however, was insignificant to the Amer Group as whole, which reported net profits of $6.2 million for the first six months of 2014 and has thirteen large Porto projects in various stages of development in Egypt and the Middle East.

A focus on individual cases of corrupt land deals obscures the legal mechanisms and institutions that fostered “crony capitalism” under Mubarak and continue to do so today. For example, the TDA, from its legal structure to its regulations, was initially proposed by the United States Agency for International Development as part of a set of broader initiatives to encourage rapid private sector investment in tourism. Because land was legally priced cheaply, the ensuing land rush was not limited to big business conglomerates. Instead, initial allocations often went to current and former higher-ups in the military and security services, who then re-sold land to tourism developers. Egypt's push for tourism thus created a legal regime for selling coastal land cheaply, without adequate provisions for public access to beaches, wadis, or customary use by local communities; without provision for low and moderate-income housing and towns; and with little attention to creating diversified and locally beneficial tourism economies.

By 2014, most state prosecutions of big businessmen had been dismissed. The al-Sisi regime had clearly reverted to the top-down “development” plans of the late Mubarak years, in tourism as in other sectors of the economy. The government reactivated the same institutions with similar rules in place since these had never been substantively challenged, let alone reformed. An obvious parallel can be drawn to the lack of substantive reform among the police and central security forces. For land development, the TDA began again allocating large tracts to luxury tourism developers. The government also promoted new megaprojects with little review, including a parallel Suez Canal that may cost more than the new canal will generate through additional shipping traffic. Portraying the canal as a national project through a blitz of media propaganda recalls Mubarak's promotion of the Toshka canal as the solution to Egypt's developmental problems.Footnote ⁶ Meanwhile, cash infusions from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait have served as the principal means to keep the Egyptian budget afloat.

There are no simple solutions to Egypt's structural economic problems, but the government's reversion to its typical approach to “development,” particularly in sharply limiting the rights to “social debate” sought by activists, offers little grounds for optimism. The first few years after the January 2011 uprising were marked by a proliferation of innovative, small-scale ideas to address all sorts of challenges, while the newly enlarged public sphere saw a radical interchange of ideas and intermixing of networks and groups. Some participants were new to these debates, while others were long-term public servants frustrated with the inefficiencies and lack of transparency in their ministries and agencies. In sharp contrast to this ferment among networks and organizations, the executive under Mursi and then al-Sisi showed little willingness to rethink the fundamental premises of Egypt's political economy. Such rethinking would require the state and the regime to engage with precisely those spatial areas and economic activities in which contentious politics cannot be avoided.

The worsening situation of many Egyptians, however, means that the current path is politically as well as economically unsustainable. Widespread cuts in electricity and shortages of fuel have made daily life extremely difficult, not only in cities but also in rural areas where lack of pumps makes drinking water as well as irrigation water scarce. In the last quarter of 2013, the Egyptian Food Observatory reported that 79.1 percent of households classified as vulnerable did not have enough income to meet their monthly food needs.Footnote ⁷ For poor Egyptians, the most common coping strategy is to limit intake of expensive, nutrient-rich foods and to rely on subsidized baladī bread. The lack of dietary diversity produces the same perverse outcome as among the hungry in the United States: malnutrition and stunting combined with obesity and weight gain. In 2008, the World Health Organization reported that 29 percent of Egyptian children under 5 were stunted while 19 percent were overweight; the report noted that the WHO worsened with rising food prices and high unemployment.Footnote ⁸

The regime is aware that shortages of electricity and water, combined with eroding real incomes and rising costs of food and other basic commodities, constitute serious challenges. When al-Sisi addressed the nation in early September 2014 to respond to the fuel crisis, however, he could only argue that Egypt was in a battle for its existence and that large-scale investment was needed. Although upgrading the energy and electricity infrastructure is essential, the government made no indication that it is willing to explore innovative measures that combine tackling poverty alleviation and energy insecurity. As pioneered in Bangladesh and piloted in Tunisia, these can include supporting the rapid deployment of decentralized renewable energy systems that particularly benefit rural and poor households. The al-Sisi government's return to old scripts that offer little progress on political or economic inclusion is a dismal outcome for the sacrifices made by so many Egyptians.