Cairo Securitized: reconceiving urban justice and social resilience, edited by Paul Amar, presents a timely and interdisciplinary contribution to various areas of research against the backdrop of Cairo’s urban transformation. Dismantling the narrative that the state apparatus upholds ‘security’ against ‘criminality’, a vast array of scholars in this volume explore how state control is itself perpetuating structural violence and reshaping multiple aspects of life in contemporary Cairo. This manifests in distinct ways, be it through heightened police presence in certain areas of the city, the monitoring of online spheres and media, the expulsion and resettlement of the urban poor and construction of securitized gated communities, the management of public spaces through (military-run) mass road construction, or megaprojects that serve the broader objective of hindering public dissent.
The interdisciplinary approaches of the volume’s sections emphasize that securitization cannot be confined to a single field. Rather, it encapsulates interconnected forms of reality, with many chapters also offering insights from social actors who experience them first hand. Specifically, topics include the state’s crackdown on ‘TikTok women’ (Abed), ecological sanitization of the city landscape (Elshahed), the functions of the new administrative capital in advancing military capitalism (Duffield), the surveillance of racialization, class and queerness (Saleh), neoliberal encroachments on urban poor living (Khalil), the use of thuggery as a political tool (El Raggal), and the ways in which urban militarization is perceived and navigated by revolutionary Cairenes (Monfleur). The plethora of chapters in Cairo Securitized provides a detailed depiction of how the city is experiencing an urban crisis, manifested in growing inequality, the dismantling of public infrastructure, and looming state surveillance.
The volume highlights that these developments stem from state-driven policies, particularly in light of the consolidation of power through the counter-revolution, which seek to control the public sphere as well as the wider flow of information and public discourse. The experience of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution looms large in the volume, at times explicitly referenced and at others subtly invoked as a backdrop or caesura – a moment of rupture that conveys a collective melancholia considering the crushing counter-revolution that ensued. For those revolutionaries who were involved in the protest waves that rocked the country in 2011, the revolution lingers as a memory of unfulfilled hope – of what could have been. At the same time, the volume illustrates how 2011 remains a scathing memory for the military state apparatus: a warning of what it seeks to suppress and prevent from recurring at all costs. It is the masses rising up against the status quo that the state fears most and has sought to obliterate through its securitization agenda, among other means. Yet, as the vivid descriptions of the various chapters outline, the very scope of state repression appears to cultivate its own gravediggers.
Each of the seven sections of Cairo Securitized is framed around breaking a specific binary, with the aim of offering non-binary perspectives on the issues at hand. The volume advocates for critical and solution-oriented research, even though ‘when critical scholars do propose new concepts or solutions, they are dismissed once again, accused of trafficking in jargon or neologisms’ (Amar, p. 9). This premise showcases a fundamental debate around the role of engaged and critical scholarship. In a world marked by binaries produced through capitalist accumulation and the oppression it thrives on, perhaps a shift in the debate could be fruitful, albeit contentious, from breaking binaries to asking what should be done in response to, and to overcome, state encroachments and the securitization and repressions they feed on.
One aspect that several chapters raise questions about is how to understand differing forms of (mainly racialized or gender-based) oppression in relation to economic class exploitation. These questions, which carry theoretical weight, both within and well beyond Cairo’s context, offer content for further critical discussions. Simultaneously, many chapters consider what everyday forms of resilience and resistance to an oppressive and exploitative status quo can mean. However, if particular and singular modes of agency are thought together in a larger social totality,Footnote 1 the limitations of individual acts can be better conceptualized, allowing for scrutiny of the modes of possible collective resistance. Solutions for specific issues are important, yet solution-oriented scholarship should also ponder overarching questions of how state power is to be confronted, by whose agency, and to be replaced by what. Beyond mechanical or schematic thinking, the experience of 2011 offers an opportunity for rich debate that digs into the crux of underlying solution-oriented questions on reform versus revolution, state power, class consciousness, forms of organization, agents of change, etc.
The richly detailed studies of Cairo Securitized erode top-down neoliberal narratives of securitization, while inviting further reflection on the role and potential of engaged scholarship in an era of heightened surveillance, securitization and authoritarianism globally. Thus, the volume should be of interest not only to those delving into the matter of securitization in the context of Cairo, but also for those grappling with questions of agency, urban control, militarization, structural violence, migration, gentrification, digital securitization and beyond.
