Read more
"Until the year 2000, Cairo had been a model megacity, relatively crime free, safe, and public facing. It featured a thriving public culture and vibrant street life. In recent decades, however, the Egyptian state has accelerated a wholesale dismantlement of public education and public sector jobs and reversed the modest land reforms of the Nasser era. As a result, the vast majority of Cairo's people have been forcibly deprived of their social rights, social goods, and educational capital. Eschewing the traditional focus on top-down regime and state security, the contributors to this volume, who represent a wide array of academics, activists, artists, and journalists, explore how repressive policies affect the everyday lives of citizens. They show the ways in which urban security crises are politically fashioned and do not emanate from the urban social fabric on their own: city crime, violence, and fear are created by specific means of extraction, production, and control. Another kind of city can live again. But how? By tackling a range of issues, including public health, transportation, labor safety, and housing and property distribution, Cairo Securitized unsettles simplistic binaries of thug and police, public versus private, and slum versus enclave, and proposes compelling new ways in which securitizing processes can be reversed, reengineered, and replaced with a participatory and equitable urban order."--
List of contents
Contents
ContributorsIntroduction: "Cairo Securitized: Can Another World be Made?"Paul AmarSection I: Vernacular MediascapingBeyond the binary of digital/virtual space versus street/real space
1. The Crime of Shamelessness: TikTok Women, the Principle of Bodily Integrity, and Independence without Regrets
Sara Soumaya Abed2. Securitized Consolidation, or How the State Co-opted Private Media
Mohamed Elmeshad3. The City and the Jungle: Africa and Blackness in the Egyptian Interwar Cinematic Imagination
Ifdal Elsaket4. Viral Visualities, Image Cycles, and Mosireen's Revolutionary Archives
Mark Westmoreland5. Queer Digital Activism: Street Media and Subversion of Digital Securitization
Afsaneh Rigot and
Nora NorallaSection II: Reversing Social Cleansing and Depathologizing JusticeBeyond the binaries of sociability versus social cleansing, value versus waste, abled versus
debilitated, medicine versus magic
6. Toilets for the People? Hygiene in the City and Depathologizing Popular Sanitation
Tina Guirguis7. Cairo's Sexuality Infrastructures: Securitizing Abortion, HIV, and Gender Affirming
Surgery
Miguel A. Fuentes Carreño8. Road to the Future: Infrastructure and Landscape Sanitized of Trees and People, Viewed
from 'God's Eyes'
Mohamed elShahed9. The Khaki Color of Football: Digitized Militarization of Egypt's Most Popular Game
Rania AhmedSection III: Anti-enclave DensityphiliaBeyond the binary of working-class slum versus elite gated city
10. Urban (Counter) Revolution Against Gentrification: Shadow Security Networks, Baltagiyya Subjectivities, and Urban Densities
Omnia Khalil11. Urbanizing Dreams: The Struggles of Attaining 'New' Social Contracts for Middle- and
Upper-Middle Classes at Cairo's Desert Edge
Momen ElHusseiny12. Military Capitalism: Economic and Security Logics of Egypt's New Administrative Capital
Roberta Duffield13. Gulf Investments, Megacontractor Projects, and Urban Isomorphism: The Imposition of a
New Way of Life
Maïa SinnoSection IV: Convivial SociabilitiesBeyond the binaries of street mobility versus family domesticity, public versus private
14. Cairo Up! Infrastructures of Security and Desire
Aya Nassar15. The Curious Cases of the Disappearing Maids: Mobilization and Precarity Among Foreign
Domestic Workers in Cairo
Sabrina Lilleby16. Cruising Ethics in Cairo: Queer Street Socialities against Fear Regimes
Ahmed Awadalla17. South Sudanese Refugees and Community Schools in Cairo: A Home Away from Home
Amira Hetaba and
Elena Habersky18. Entangled in the City: Interstitial and Queer Urbanism through the Eyes of a Second-
Generation Nubian
Yahia SalehSection V: Participatory FuturityBeyond the binary of informal versus planned
19. Seeing Like a City-State: Behavioral Planning and Governance in Egypt's First Affordable
Gated Community
Nicholas Simcik Arese20. Peripheralization and Infrastructural Violence: "Haussmanization" in Managua, Nicaragua and Cairo, Egypt
Ahmad Borham21. Statizing Informality and Unbundling Rights: Neoliberal Infrastructure in Cairo's 'Ashwa'iyyat
Deena Khalil22. Al-Asmarat: Managing Informality, Reproducing Precarity, and Dislocating Workers
Mostafa Mohie23. Pacta Sunt Servanda? Exercising Possession in an Informalized Cairo
Yahia Shawkat
Section VI: Enforcement SovereigntiesBeyond the binary of thugs versus police
24. Gestures of Territorialism: Baltagiyya, Land Anxieties, and Securitizing Squatting
Hatem Hassan25. Cairo Militarized: Army Economies, Security Industries, and Surveillance Geographies
Zeinab Abul-Magd26. Thuggery, Urbanity, and Enforced Sovereignties: Competing Universes of the Baltaga
Aly el Raggal27. Deconstructing Thuggery: Riots, Prison Breaks, and the Criminal Subject of (Non)Violent
Street Politics
Mohamed Ahmed28. Sectarian Politics? Securitization, Urban Development, and Coptic Advocacy in Cairo
Amy FallasSection VII: Abolitionist DesecuritizationBeyond the binary of "crime from below" versus "security from above"
29. Security from Within: The Case of Informal Policing of Al-Mataria Neighborhood
Bassem al-Samragy30. Challenging Urban Militarization in Post-2011 Downtown Cairo: Walls and Checkpoints
Laura Monfleur31. Becoming a Man in Cairo: Sudanese and South Sudanese Refugees, Gangs, and Structural
Violence
Paul Miranda32. Policing Women's Sexual Economies in Downtown Cairo: Students and their Brothel
Friends in Colonial Times
Hanan HammadIndex
About the author
Paul Amar (Edited by) is professor in the Global Studies Department and director of the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before his academic career, he worked as a journalist in Cairo, a police reformer and sexuality-rights activist in Rio de Janeiro, and as a conflict resolution and economic development specialist at the United Nations. He is co-editor of
Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East (AUC Press, 2006) and author of the award-winning
The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (2013), among several publications.