Taking as its point of departure the premise that “no political leader or elite, even in authoritarian states, rules solely through the threat of coercive violence,” Laurie Brand offers in this book a thorough account of the role of official narratives in supporting authoritarian regimes and contributing to their adaptability over time (p. 5). Against the backdrop of postcolonial Algeria and Egypt, Brand works to show how regime elites use official texts to communicate foundational stories, forms of identity, and notions of unity that work to undermine threats to regime stability, even as the substantive aims of each regime shift over time. Throughout, Brand treats such narratives as stories in motion, responding to a range of economic, political, and social crises through a process of “rescripting.”

Brand is clear that this book is not intended as an extension of the well-developed literatures on collective memory or nationalism, but is intended primarily to address questions of authoritarian resilience. In this regard, it is concerned with how elites use official narratives to respond to crises that threaten to undermine their legitimacy. In particular, the book asks “what types of crises may trigger leaderships to introduce narrative reconfigurations, and what forms/content will the changes assume?” Brand argues that some themes in official narratives have more or less sticking power than others, and thus wonders “which elements may be appropriated for construction, reinterpretation, introduction, or inclusion, and which will remain intact?” (p. 17). These are questions with substantial reach, and while Brand explores them with regard to case studies from Egypt and Algeria that will be most accessible to those with some familiarity with 19th- and 20th-century regional history, it is clear that the book aspires to participate in a broader theoretical conversation in political science and beyond.

Before she can explore the narrative rescripting that is at the heart of the book's central questions and theoretical aims, Brand must first establish the basic parameters of “the official narrative” in each case. Against this backdrop, she then sets out to map (and explain) change in the meaning of different aspects of each narrative. While she presents these as narrative baselines, the material that Brand presents suggests that there is no neat moment of origin for official narratives. By the time the reader recognizes, for example, the key contours of the Nasserist narrative, several elements (the meaning of revolution, the role of socialism, etc.) have already changed somewhat during the earliest period of regime consolidation, while others have been carried over from pre-1952 Egyptian nationalist discourses. It is thus hard to consider any official narrative as having a clear starting point against which later shifts can be measured.

What is convincingly clear, however, is that the meaning of many of the constitutive elements of each official narrative does indeed shift over time. This focus on meaning is the most engaging aspect of Brand's theoretical approach and careful empirical work. It is most profitably explored through her attention to textbooks and other educational materials, including those official statements that assume a place in the state's pedagogy. Noting, for example, that the text of Nasir's al-Mithaq al-Watani was printed in greater volume than the Qurʾan and taught in classrooms throughout the country (p. 57), Brand makes clear one way in which the state speaks to its citizens. It is in her careful reading of these educational texts, in particular, that one is able to most fully appreciate the shifting meaning and emphasis of elements of the official narrative, precisely because they reflect an effort to teach (meaning). This also makes textbooks and educational materials useful for exploring narrative strain and breakdown, as she does in later chapters. While Brand maintains that detailed analysis of the effects of this pedagogy are outside of the scope of the book, at the very least she provides support for the claim that “the official narrative establishes the bases of responsibility to the country and the nation (and by implication the leadership), exhorting the people to serve, protect, and even die for them” (pp. 14–15).

What is never fully clear, however, is how official narratives are received, challenged, or reworked by those whom they exhort. Brand identifies moments of leadership change, war, and episodes of internal stability as the primary drivers of narrative rescripting, but each of these function as exogenous factors in regime strategizing, not moments in which regime actors and their critics engage in a negotiation over elements of the narrative. If Brand had adopted a poststructuralist skepticism regarding agency more generally, this might make more sense. But the regime actors who figure in her account are fully agentive—indeed, they are portrayed throughout as working to shore up their legitimacy and stave off crises. In this way, the absence of equally agentive interlocutors is problematic.

This emphasis on the agency of regime actors (but not others) may be an artifact of relying upon official texts (constitutional documents, national charters, textbooks, even postage stamps) at the expense of other forms of cultural production. Part of this is necessary: Brand is exploring a time period when many other forms of cultural production might not have been well recorded. But some attention to the ways in which the official narrative was adopted, reproduced, challenged, mocked, or undermined by the regime's primary interlocutors could provide an account of rescripting in which agency was more evenly apportioned. Resilient regimes are responsive to their critics (in any number of ways), so mapping those critiques would make Brand's account of rescripting even more compelling. This becomes particularly important when readers consider the events of 2011 and their aftermath, discussed in the epilogue. It is here that the uneasy conflation of “official narrative” and “national narrative” throughout the book stands out, as the two appear to have been in some tension in this crucial moment and contestation by those outside of the regime elite was significant. Elements of the official narrative could only be appropriated and reworked by protesters and used against the regime in the ways that they were if they were also available as part of some broader national narrative, which stands in relation to but is not coequal with the official narrative.

This limitation notwithstanding, Official Stories makes a substantial contribution to our collective understanding of the ways in which authoritarian regimes work to legitimize their rule. The book will prove useful to scholars of the region, as well as a broader audience interested in the nonmaterial bases of legitimacy and compliance in authoritarian regimes.