Paper short abstract

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Downtown Cairo in 2024-25, this paper examines how the Egyptian state governs through an affective triangle of possibility, paranoia, and self-policing — rendering constant coercion unnecessary while inadvertently opening spaces for political memory to persist.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the affective dimensions of authoritarian governance in post-revolution Egypt. I draw on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in conducted in Downtown Cairo, between September 2024 and September 2025, and particularly on events that unfolded during the last months of my fieldwork, following the March for Gaza and overlapping with the remembrance of the Egyptian state's massacre of civilians in 2013. In this paper, I examine how the Egyptian security apparatus operates not primarily through disciplinary mechanisms or the constant deployment of coercive force, but through what I term an affective governance triangle of possibility, paranoia, and self-policing.

Possibility is rooted in the state's capacity for violence — detention, torture, enforced disappearance — entrenched through decades of emergency rule, military laws, and an unrestrained executive. This possibility materialises in everyday encounters through the figure of the reluctant informant: anyone could be one, but everyone might not be. The resulting uncertainty generates a paranoia that embeds itself in the rhythms of daily life, leading citizens to police themselves. The triangle is self-reproducing: self-policing reinforces the fear of what remains possible, sustaining the atmospheric conditions of its own perpetuation.

Yet, the very atmosphere the state cultivates generates conditions facilitating the emergence and of the collective and personal memories of the 2011 revolution and its violent aftermath, resisting the state's efforts at material erasure. I argue that ethnographic attention to atmosphere reveals both the quotidian workings of authoritarianism and the stubborn persistence of political memory.