This Must Be The Podcast: Killian Clarke

This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, which for all the pain and suffering which followed still marks a momentous moment in Middle Eastern history and a model of social mobilization and protest organization that continues to inspire. For meaningful reflection on the extraordinary events of 2011, which many in the Egyptian regime and the rest of the region would prefer you forget, I highly recommend reading Mona el-Ghobashy's Bread and Freedom, which is probably the best single book on the turbulent, unpredictable course of the revolution and the tragedies which followed. Atef Said's recent Revolution Squared similarly emphasizes the contingency of events as he traces the revolutionary moment and movements through to the coup.

And the revolution did ultimately fail, the democratically elected president overturned by a military coup which foolishly supported by many of the same revolutionaries who had rallied to bring down Hosni Mubarak. The brutal authoritarian military regime which Sisi installed has Egypt on a road to nowhere, but many questions remain. This week's episode of the Middle East Political Science podcast features Killian Clarke's Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed (Cambridge 2025).

Listen to my conversation with Killian Clarke here:

Clarke sets out to understand why the Egyptian counterrevolution of 2013 succeeded – a subtly different starting point from the usual question of why the revolution (or at least the democratic transition) failed. Clarke points out that counterrevolution is understudied relative to revolution, not just in the Middle East but across the discipline of political science.  It isn't enough for revolutionaries to make mistakes. Powerful forces opposed to the revolution - usually, but not always, the military and old economic elites - need to take often risky actions to reverse it. Based on a unique dataset of counterrevolutions globally - successful and failed - Clarke identifies some fascinating trends about when counterrevolutions manifest and when they succeed, and then develops a theory based on critical choices made by successful revolutionary movements during the transitional period. One of the perhaps troubling implications of those findings is that more extreme and violent revolutionary movements are generally less vulnerable to counterrevolution, while more moderate and nonviolent movements – which tend to leave the old elite and state institutions in place – are the most likely to be overturned.

Clarke gives a detailed account of the Egyptian counterrevolution, arguing that it succeeded not only because of UAE assistance but because Morsi prioritized keeping the military happy over maintaining the revolutionary coalition and badly overestimated his support from the Obama administration.  Clarke shows how the military was able to take advantage of real polarization and the defection of key revolutionaries, as well as US reservations about Morsi (which they knew about but Morsi did not), shifting the balance of power such that the military no longer feared either the street or a cut off of American aid. It's a provocative reinterpretation of the transitional year of 2012-13 (I tend to put more stock in the role of the Gulf states in financing and promoting the coup than he does, and have less confidence in the organic nature of the Tamarrod movement). It should generate good theoretical and historical debate. This is a great book which uses multiple methods to develop its case, carefully considers alternative explanations, strikes a nice balance between the global and the regional, and should promote significant engagement across multiple disciplines. Listen here.

Clarke's book engages with a broad range of academic research on the Egyptian revolution and the coup which ended it. I give my own account of the coup in my 2016 book The New Arab Wars and in my more recent America's Middle East. Jason Brownlee's Democracy Prevention anticipated the American reversal on the Morsi experiment through a detailed analysis of decades of American support for autocracy in Egypt despite Washington's pretensions towards supporting democratization. Amy Austin Holmes's Coups and Revolutions is perhaps the most directly comparable book, with an Egypt-focused narrative which delved into the contradictions and complexities of the intersection of popular uprisings and coups. Neil Ketchley's Egypt in a Time of Revolution was one of the first books to really systematically study the emergence of protest ahead of the coup and the mobilization which followed it. Jannis Grimm's Contested Legitimacies sought to explain why so many Egyptians cheered on the overthrow of Morsi and the violence which followed. And, like most Egypt watchers, I eagerly await the publication this spring of Hossam el-Hamalawy's Counterrevolution in Egypt.

There are other critical relevant recent books that aren't specifically focused on the counterrevolution but provide important context. Elizabeth Nugent's After Repression tries to explain the polarization which facilitated the coup by focusing on the legacies of authoritarianism. Sharan Grewal's Soldiers of Democracy set out to explain the calculations of Egypt's military during the revolution, and again during the coup, a task also undertaken by Hicham Bou Nassif's Endgames. Zeineb Abul Magd's Militarizing the Nation gave a deep study of the culture, politics and economy of Egypt's military, while Maged Mandour's Egypt Under Sisi shows just how badly Sisi's autocratic restoration has been and how the military has evolved with its new power.

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