Egypt and the Rise of Fluid Authoritarianism: Political Ecology, Power and the Crisis of Legitimacy

Egypt and the rise of fluid authoritarianism focuses on the sub-upgrade of the regime in Egypt and the struggle of political authorities for internal political legitimacy after 2013. It is an interdisciplinary work that develops a complex theoretical framework for exploring the microstructural and macrosystemic dynamics of leadership, power, political ecology, and the process of authority formation in illiberal systems that have undergone subsystemic transformations after shockwaves, also beyond Egypt. The book offers a complex, groundbreaking socio-political and economic analysis of how the forging of an internal claim to political legitimacy in Egypt eventually transformed the regime along the authoritarian spectrum, morphing into a fluid autocracy that approximates what the book defines as a 'non-exclusivist personalist regime', thereby fragmenting elites. In the second part, the book offers an economic analysis in which legitimacy and political ecology are closely intertwined. In this regard, the Social Development Goals are employed as a prism.