Over a decade ago mass protests and elite machinations ejected longtime Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Two years of intense political contestation ensued as fractious state institutions, opposition veterans, political neophytes, and anxious international actors all jockeyed to shape the country’s political path. In the summer of 2013, amidst political polarization, economic strain, and an erosion of public order, the Egyptian military intervened to remove elected president Mohammed Morsi from office. Brushing aside civilians who had pinned their hopes on a quick military “reset” of the transition, Defense Minister Abdel Fattah El-Sisi assumed the presidency. Since then, he has cemented his rule through systematic violence, powerful external patrons, and a revitalized coercive apparatus.

Two recent books provide keen new insights into this period. In Restless State, Lumbering Society: Egypt in the Modern Era, Nathan Brown, Shimaa Hatab, and Amr Adly offer a compelling reinterpretation of Egypt’s post–World War II political history. The authors tie together major empirical sections describing the evolution of Egyptian state institutions, society, and the economy by emphasizing the varying degrees to which these different components have aligned. At certain points, for example in the decade or so following the Free Officers’ seizure of power in 1952, there was considerable harmony: an energetic, ideologically coherent regime harnessed and expanded state institutions, a cohesive top-down system of corporatism corralled popular mobilization into formal channels, and the economy was oriented toward broad national development goals. Since that point, however, these constituent parts have slowly fallen out of sync: state institutions, best exemplified by the judiciary, began to develop their own autonomy and worked toward regime ends only intermittently. Corporatist arrangements designed to manage social trends broke down, leaving state-appointed leaders to preside over frustrated memberships tempted by an increasingly restive and independent civil sector. Economic development moved superficially toward liberalization and the free market, but the lack of formal institutional support for the private sector pushed many into the informal sector and a “habitus economy” underpinned by social capital, religious norms, and other informal institutions. The coda to these developments was the uprising in 2011.

Mona El-Ghobashy’s Bread and Freedom is a richly detailed and theoretically deft unsettling of arguments that Egypt’s Arab Spring trajectory was linear or preordained. Adopting the concept of a “revolutionary situation,” she highlights how circumstance, uncertainty, and reaction interacted to drive forward events on the ground. Reading these events in hindsight, she argues, transforms complicated and contingent interactions into clean but ultimately misleading conclusions. By way of example, two commonly heard diagnoses of why Egypt’s transition “failed” come out of Bread and Freedom considerably worse for wear. First, El-Ghobashy counters arguments that the Egyptian military’s skillful, behind-the-scenes determination to hold power doomed the democratic transition from the start. Instead, she marks multiple moments during the period 2011–13 when the civilian politicians, rowdy protestors, or external shocks (sometimes all three) left the generals spinning and opened meaningful opportunities for change. Second is the claim, helped to congeal by the current regime, that it was the Muslim Brotherhood’s fanaticism and political intransigence that drove the democratic transition into the ground. In its place, El-Ghobashy convincingly documents how the high-stakes/low-information interaction of already suspicious actors left little room for error. Many Brotherhood actions only become errors in retrospect, after they are tidily mapped forward to specific outcomes (the “transition’s failure”) and the mechanisms backfilled by reference to the Brotherhood’s timeless ideology or omnipresent will to power. In El-Ghobashy’s reconstructed narratives, however, these mistakes say less about the Brotherhood and more about the complexity and difficulty of the situation.

There is a great deal to recommend these books. Both share a serious and deep knowledge of the case that underpins the arguments (Lumbering State, Restless Society is also commendable for revising a primarily American-driven debate about the political science of Egypt through collaboration with Egyptian political scientists). These books are also well-informed by cross-regional comparison and motivated by relevant theory, but they each steer clear of abstraction, clean statements of causality, and structured hypothesis testing. Instead, they are motivated by a desire to use the empirical details to rethink, and indeed complicate, both specific understandings of Egyptian politics and broader theories of comparative politics. For the authors of Restless State, Lumbering Society, one conclusion is that contemporary understandings of authoritarianism overrate the cohesion, agility, and strategic sense of successive Egyptian regimes. In Bread and Freedom, it is that arguments offering neat explanations for the Arab Spring’s “success” or “failure” run the serious risk of overlooking the unpredictability inherent to the period and, by extension, other “revolutionary situations.”

There are also areas where both books might be pushed further. For example, Lumbering State, Restless Society is a sweeping book not primarily about the uprisings, yet these critical events can’t help but to impart a gravitational pull on the rest of the volume. At some points, they tempt the authors to interpret particular historical events or trends in light of how they “facilitated” or “culminat[ed] in” the uprisings to come (pp. 93, 110). It is natural to come to these conclusions in retrospect, but more precisely sketching out the connections between these episodes would only strengthen the contribution. Bread and Freedom narrates Egypt’s “revolutionary situation” as a series of critical junctures, each produced by some prior interaction, and in turn generative of a new one. At the risk of imposing structure on a fluid situation, in spots it is worth wondering whether an alternative outcome was possible. For example, chronicling Mohammed Morsi’s battle with the bureaucracy, El-Ghobashy reasons that “any civilian president of any ideological hue would have faced similar obstruction” (p. 204). Yet as she also notes, the situation was rendered considerably more difficult because an Islamist president was attempting to reform an institution that “had built their professional esprit de corps on the exclusion of Islamists” (p. 172). Differentiating moments when realistic alternatives were truly in the offing versus those where choices were far more constrained could help establish key moments in sharper relief.

Reading these books alongside each other is a fruitful exercise. Most obviously, they differ in terms of their aperture: Bread and Freedom richly documents the years shortly preceding the 2011 uprising through to 2020, while Lumbering State, Restless Society provides a broader and more sweeping synthesis of postindependence Egypt. One benefit of these different perspectives is how it allows us to anchor the specific dynamics Bread and Freedom identifies in the longer-term trends from Lumbering State, Restless Society. For example, the judiciary’s conspicuous muscle-flexing during Egypt’s revolutionary situation can be partly understood as a continuation of their increasing assertiveness and corporate identity that began to develop over the prior decades. And likewise, the willingness of actors on the outs—non-Islamists prior to 2013, civilian opponents post-2013—to use (and be used by) the courts to gum up contentious political processes, induce uncertainty, and render the hidden visible, was in many ways an evolution of successful opposition tactics pioneered during the Mubarak era.

These combined insights also help to make sense of Egypt’s post-2013 political order. For the authors of Lumbering State, Restless Society, Egypt’s recent political history is one of uneven but unmistakable fraying of the sinews between state, regime, and society to the point that, in 2011, they went slack or snapped. El-Ghobashy views this moment through the eyes of the counterrevolutionaries, who saw the interregnum as a traumatic period of collapsing public order, political dysfunction, and moral decay. She reads their justification for seizing power as the necessity of rebuilding “heybat al-dawla” (prestige or awe of the state), which subjugates all actors to the state and evacuates them of any claim to political authority. In her words, “Haybat al-dawla puts an end to this riot of competing supremacy claims, gathering up sovereignties in a unitary conception of the state to suppress the diversity of their manifestations” (p. 261). Under this aegis did the new regime set out to right the mistakes of the old.

At the same time the continuities should not be overstated; both books are clear that Egypt’s post-2013 political order is much more than a retooled version of what obtained immediately prior to 2011, or even in the heyday of Nasserist control and unity. One key difference is that these earlier regimes managed their ties to society and various interest groups through a multiplicity of shifting (and sometimes competing) practices and mechanisms. They expected compliance but in turn doled out benefits, fostered predictability, offered an ideology of development at home and confidence abroad, and allowed citizens some degree of feedback through a network of intermediaries. Even as they came apart in the years leading up to 2011, these mechanisms still somewhat connected the state, regime, and ordinary Egyptians. But a core characteristic of Egypt’s current regime, and perhaps the organizing principle of “haybat al-dawla,” is the extreme suspicion of any type of social mobilization or organization. In this way the regime is, as the authors of Lumbering State, Restless Society describe it, “antipolitical” (p. 230). With these connections absent, what’s on offer to Egyptians today seems to be a thin gruel of intimidation, violence, surveillance, austerity, spectacle, paternalism, and xenophobia. Perhaps for some willing to prioritize stability over accountability this may be enough to keep the regime upright. But as these books tell us, uprisings are often unpredictable things.