Today, as international cooperation around “Third World governance” focuses more on questions of militarized security than economic development, Julia Elyachar's superb book arrives at the right moment, revealing how seeds of today's insecurities were sewn by contradictory market liberalization projects as they reshaped urban spaces and male social identities. This street-level study of urban Cairo's youth entrepreneurs, master craftsmen, state officials, and development bankers traces the deployment of a “second wave” of neoliberal policies in the 1990s, when first-wave structural adjustments failed to deliver any uplift for those hardest hit by privatization and liberalization.

Elyachar conducted her field research in the 1990s in the popular community of Al-Hirafiyeen, a new peripheral Cairo neighborhood erected by the state and other speculators in order to receive workshops kicked out of President Mubarak's gentrified home neighborhood of Heliopolis. Al-Hirafiyeen became a home for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) run by the Egyptian government in league with international financial institutions; the new community attracted master craftsmen and their workshops and drew in “youth entrepreneurs” as they struggled to follow World Bank instruction brochures on how to launch businesses and spin off competitive marketing plans. Elyachar tells the story of how the Egyptian state struggled to appropriate the power and legitimacy of these craftsmen's successful practices, smooth over the gross failures of the model entrepreneurs, and maintain façade compliance with the international agenda.

We learn that the neoliberal state increasingly centers its “market-making” power in that which it simultaneously proclaims its own “other”—that is to say, the nonstate, the unregulated, the informal—creating power by criminalizing, indebting, and microsizing what it has just excised, privatized, and defunded in the context of structural adjustment. In particular, the state has seized upon “economic informality.” This realm of threatening black markets has been mapped, annexed, and recategorized as a sphere of empowerment, “survival strategies,” and development potential.

One of Elyachar's most fascinating contributions is her linking of colonial “space making” in Egypt to the contemporary practices of “market making” in Cairo. In 1920s Cairo, designers of suburbs tailored neighborhoods so that European workers would live in more open, “rationalized” blocks while “native” workers and small businesses would be directed to new housing projects full of meandering streets and close quarters, characterized by noisy, promiscuous mingling of commercial and residential uses. Similarly, in the construction of new peripheral towns in the 1990s, this “urban-planning orientalism” returned to Cairo. The state designed “home[s] for noise and disorder” to meet the native values of a class it identified with messy informality (p. 40).

As a neoliberal state, Egypt and its international partners built infrastructure and a bank branch and empowered NGOs to strictly police loan recipients, but it built no health clinic, school, or post office in the new settlement. NGOs, prominently featured in the brochures of the Egyptian government's/World Bank's Social Fund for Development, provide crucial legitimizing and coercive functions for the state. As analyzed here, NGOs act as collection agencies, bringing cash back to the banks and state agencies, generating photo opportunities for officials, and providing consulting jobs for out-of-work entrepreneurs. However, the “nongovernmental organization” that serves as the core research object here is the master craftsman's network of relationships with apprentices, customers, officials, and community. This master craftsman is not concerned with legality or economic formality so much as “gaining access to the means to change the rules. . .to get the state to work for him. . .To become a real capitalist, he had to become part of the NGO” (p. 169). In addition, because the NGOs were founded and controlled by the state, the master plays a contradictory game—becoming part of the state apparatus in order to become a legitimate private-sector capitalist, linking himself to international development projects in order to become an authentic local street-corner craftsman.

Relations, cultivated in the body of the master, in his gadʾana, his nobility and manliness, weave through the shop floor, community streets, and customer networks, acting to consolidate and maintain a market and a sense of social solidarity that no entrepreneur's business plan or website can replicate. The Egyptian state and its international financial allies and development agencies accept, and even depend on, the success of the craftsmen (who provide jobs and keep the young male population from erupting in violence). In this context, agencies and officials kept plodding forward with their plans for empowering new enterprises through debt and training seminars, even paying off craftsmen to create fake photo opportunities staged with their wives and sons so as to give the impression that women and youth-based enterprises were succeeding in turning those seed loans into a new, dynamic small-business economy.

Why does this highly contradictory form of neoliberal state power—so new, so staged, so “fake”—seem so natural on the streets of Cairo? This question may require further research on gender and masculinity and on masculinized power in the context of neoliberalism. Elyachar focuses on street-level shops rather than the workshops on the third and fourth floors, where women are more likely to work and be in charge.

Also, what about violence? Elyachar argues that “expansion of the neo-liberal market rarely involves the overt use of violence. . .But even when arms don't speak, policies like forced privatization and structural adjustment are a form of violence perpetrated against those who pay a real price in their health and very lives” (p. 214). Seeing economic violence as an abstract threat to health and lives is valid. However, it would also be helpful to examine how the neoliberal state in Egypt, facing the failures of “trickle-down adjustment,” has increasingly deployed overt violence—torture, humiliation, and terrorization—to police sexuality, youth, and gendered identities. How do these forms of state violence relate to and reinforce Elyachar's conclusions about the male subjects of economic development and how they regulate bodies, spaces, communities, and markets in this new political-economic order?

Further research on gender naturalization and state violence would enhance this project. There is no doubt, however, that Elyachar has written a landmark analysis of how the so-called “free market” trains the men of the popular classes to perform the most destructive forms of entrepreneurial subjectivity, previously associated only with a small island of rich barons. “[H]ere the poor were empowered to act like the rich of Adam Smith. They too were taught to display selfishness and rapacity. The market that empowerment debt helped unleash was like a wild west of private appropriation without productive investment” (p. 217).

The poor were not merely trained to act like the rapacious rich; they also started to think like neoclassical economists. Elyachar helps to make sure that we social scientists and Middle East specialists do not repeat their mistake.