The draft presented to amend the Civil Service Law in Egypt, which provides for the dismissal of employees of state-affiliated bodies, who prove their affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood or sympathizers with it or who embrace anti-state ideas, has not been adequately analyzed. It was not discussed in relation to other phenomena. There is a link between them.
At the same time, death sentences were issued in the "Rabaa dispersal" case, which is a general trend on the rise by the regime. A decision was also issued to limit the sale of land to real estate developers, and many state assets were included in the Sovereign Fund, which has a legal personality that is immune from the legal restrictions that governed the various state institutions in their financial dealings. We can add a long list of decisions and laws that were issued, such as reconciliation (in cases) of real estate buildings, amendments to the real estate registration law, and the escalation of the use of information technology in many fields.
Therefore, the search for a formula that governs all of this becomes a duty that the Egyptian elite operates on, and for me it is based on three concepts: the contemporary state and the logic of war, which in our case is a “war on terror” and political assessment and building a “predatory” state, that concept formulated by political economy and called the The state that promotes the special interests of the dominant groups within it or the influential private groups that enjoy strong pressure powers, and finally, all of this has to do with the dissolution of the Egyptian state apparatus.
One of the important observations that I made with prison experience is that whoever possesses power in the contemporary state produces legal illegitimacy, which includes social, intellectual, political and ethnic marginalization.
The Egyptian state and the logic of war
In the "war on terror" as well as in the war on illegal immigration, the war on organized crime, and the war on the epidemic, the contemporary state - in its wars - uses similar mechanisms to achieve victory over an enemy whose borders and borders are not clear, and it is defined according to the interests of each state, and in Wars are everything that is legitimate or can be legitimized for the victory that never comes.
The state moves towards the ethnically, culturally, or religiously different, the terrorist, the illegal immigrant, or the legal criminal, in multiple paths, beginning with dehumanization and ending with stripping citizenship from the targeted person or groups, and it uses the following mechanisms for this:
Dehumanization, black Americans, immigrants and terrorists are dehumanized, and therefore those who have been dehumanized should not be treated equally because they are considered less valuable, and the lives of these groups are completely attacked by turning them into meaningless stereotypes or numbers [Contemplate how the conversation is omitted on the humanitarian consequences of law amendments on the families of the separated] and then begins the justified or “legitimate” systemic violence.
The observer of human rights reports on Egypt is aware of this fact. The abuses of law enforcement institutions cannot continue their organized violence against prisoners for all these years and with this degree of breadth and strength, and their followers cannot maintain the degree of these abuses and their continuation without dehumanizing the opposite party who Turns into an enemy in wars with unclear goals and objectives.
Criminalization, the criminal is created according to the legal imagination using the tools of the state, and its monopoly on violence comes through law enforcement institutions to ensure the implementation and application of criminalization to specific groups, and it develops through the use of legislative techniques and bureaucratic procedures to manufacture criminal groups, and the propaganda, ideologies and ideas to give moral legitimacy to legal criminalization.
The criminal/non-criminal dichotomy creates moral and operational normativeness—that is, right and wrong, good and ugly—for both the public and private spheres.
The state uses the concepts of war/national security and sovereignty to enhance the scope of this legality, and to identify the groups/individuals involved in it and those who are outside it, and many legal procedures in the multiple wars waged by the state are based on exceptional procedures of no presumption of innocence (the terrorist) or the right to a fair trial (Guantanamo ) or not to convict police personnel in incidents in which they are bypassed because they are in a legitimate state of self-defense.
One of the important observations that I made with prison experience is that whoever possesses power in the contemporary state produces legal illegitimacy, which includes social, intellectual, political and ethnic marginalization. 2013 He took all legal measures that guarantee the desertification of the public sphere, but his commitment to the legitimacy that he produced remains limited in the field of human rights. In many cases, pre-trial detention continued for long periods, although the maximum period of pre-trial detention - according to the law that was amended by the same system - is two years. Only, can this be done except by delegitimizing the prisoner after dehumanizing it.
Discrimination has evolved to be cultural, as the conditions of the poor, vulnerable groups and terrorists are a product of their nature or culture, and not the product of the neoliberal state abandoning the policies of economic and social support for the most vulnerable groups in society, and all Muslims - in the policies of the war on terrorism - a threat to civilization by virtue of their culture/religion, and the poor have become as well Because they do not want to work, and not because of the structural readjustment policies that made them more vulnerable, and the terrorist has become so not because of contexts that can be addressed, but because of the nature of his religiosity and the ideas he embraces.
Threat industry: immigrants are a threat to jobs and our standard of living, Muslims are a threat to Western civilization with its values, blacks are a threat to the dominance of the white man, the virus is a threat to the economy and globalization before humans and their health, and terrorism is a threat to the national state and stability, and the poor are a threat to economic growth...etc. Thus, contemporary man lives in constant fear and intimidation. To remain as it is, when minorities, the poor, terrorist groups, and migrant workers are blamed, even though they came to fill the gap in the availability of cheap labor in light of economic transformations.
In the politics of intimidation, one thing is always replaced by another through multiple dichotomies that highlight the contrast and conflict between them: protection from the virus versus the violation of privacy and the waiver of some human rights.
And in the war on terror, the preservation of the state versus repression and the closure of the public sphere.
In immigration, economic well-being versus preventing immigration...etc.
The problem is that wars do not end and the goal that was conceded to it is not achieved: preserving the state, eliminating the virus, stability, increasing jobs or economic prosperity.
Can you explain to me the continuation of the war against the Brotherhood for all these years, despite the rapid success in the desertification of the public sphere, with the failure to eradicate terrorism in Sinai.
The removal of citizenship through classification/removal, the state invests its power in defining those covered by its citizenship, and creates national exclusion and transforms it into institutional bases, and this explains the secret of the transition to the law now despite what happened previously in the exclusion of many Brotherhood and opponents from the state apparatus.
The state creates a unified process of removal by expanding the crimes that lead to removal, for example, it uses fewer legal mechanisms of proof for the groups against which war is waged, and provides less procedural protection than ordinary law for these groups.
In the fight against terrorism, against illegal immigration, and against minority violence, the discretion of law enforcement institutions is always widened or the use of punishment is exaggerated.
What do these mechanisms teach us?
If the political, religious, linguistic, ethnic and social differences are erased, no one will be safer, and he will be the next target.
It should be noted that at each stage of the contemporary state's struggle with an issue, this issue is left to lead and reshape other fields.
In the United States, new policies were not formulated to migrate away from the war on terrorism after September 11, 2001, and the public sphere has been desertified in Egypt since 2013 in the context of the war on terrorism and what I call the national security doctrine/ideology that is based on intimidation and intimidation about the fate of Syria Libya and Yemen.
Diminishing the rights of the groups against whom the war is waged by turning them into a state of non-citizenship is the necessary prelude to violating the rights of the citizens themselves.
Studies have proven that rights that are curtailed in times of war and crises are not recovered because we move from one war to another.
Political discretion and the predatory state
It is noted on the proposed draft law that it transfers the power of discretion, which was exercised by a limited number of the state’s security and judicial agencies, to spread this power and transfer it to middle levels in the state’s bureaucratic apparatus, thus expanding the concept of political assessment that is based on the situation and not the contract, that is, the lack of A credible commitment to building political and legal bases that can limit the hands of power in political judgment.
Political appreciation, by its nature, aims to benefit one party at the expense of another, which casts a shadow - as studies of political economy have monitored - on economic development. Development cannot occur if the state is a tool for public predation, that is, the transfer of resources from one party to another exercising its discretion. The political assessment of the abolition of a legal privilege is that it cannot happen without creating another legal privilege at the same time, because the political assessment, by its nature, aims to benefit one party at the expense of another, which in our case is to storm the stability of the public servant for the benefit of his superiors.
If the movement of societies is a transition from status to decade, then economic development will be achieved through institutional conditions that do not cancel legal privileges by force, but undermine existing ones through clear and specific rules that enjoy the confidence of all. We must realize that the process of economic development is essentially a process of institutional transition, and any transition implies a cost imposed on the current beneficiaries of the system for the benefit of a broad segment of the population. These studies add to us another feature, which is that attempts to change the rules of the game through political assessment will only incite the search for rent, and this explains the inflation of the real estate investment component in the Egyptian economy, which leads to a greater waste of wealth.
The starting point of state predation - any country - is how to reduce its costs by convincing its prey that it is not prey.
A predatory state will be more successful if it can convince its citizens that state activities are undertaken in the public interest or the preservation of the state and its national security, which will enhance voluntary compliance with state mandates and reduce its need to allocate resources to outright coercion.
It is clear, then, that economic development cannot take place if the state is an instrument of public predation, i.e. the transfer of resources from one party to another exercising its discretion, and if political discretion is enabled the state of production will deteriorate, because political discretion is by its very nature public predation.
A state transfer of property rights, which is intended to benefit one party, cannot take place without expropriating the resources of another party at the same time.
[Consider how the sale of land has been restricted to real estate developers and not to individuals].
Lessons from transitional political economy have made it clear that well-intentioned attempts to reform the economy have done more harm than good, since such reforms are initiated through political exclusion, rather than a credible commitment to a priori setting of political rules that deters political judgment.
Related to this point is that combating predation requires that individuals establish institutions of collective action that consistently provide opportunities for prey to defend itself from the predatory state, and this may explain why the institutions of civil society through which it could have been negotiated to improve predation conditions are weakened. The extent of predation also depends on what the predator is able to capture, and on the prey's ability to evade capture. The scope of the predatory state shrinks when the assets are far from the predator's sight, foremost of which is real estate in Egypt, which is the first store of wealth for the Egyptians. This explains the upward curve of the use of information technology and artificial intelligence to see the state what it does not see from the movement of society, especially in the informal economy.
Finally, the starting point of state predation - any country - is how to reduce its costs by convincing its prey that it is not prey. A predatory state will be more successful if it can convince its citizens that state activities are undertaken in the public interest or the preservation of the state and its national security, which will enhance voluntary compliance with state mandates and reduce its need to allocate resources to outright coercion.
Thus, national security ideology legitimizes government actions that impose costs on some to benefit others, based on the idea that when they do so they work for "Long Live Egypt." This is done by reducing the state to a limited person or coalition that governs. Here we can refer to the phenomenon of wasting historical capital that was accomplished over the last two centuries in Egypt, which allowed the establishment of a number of institutions with well-established traditions that led to the state performing its functions independently of the orientations of the political system, so that we are now faced with a dilemma that affects all Arab countries, which is that The continuation of the state depends on the continuation of the ruling political system, especially in light of the dissolution of the national state into its primary elements of sectarianism, tribalism, ethnicity, regionalism and sectarianism.
The conclusion given to us by a political economist describing a predatory state is that "we have a political system that gives excessive power to those at the top, and they have used this power not only to limit the extent of redistribution [meaning the distribution of resources and wealth and add power] but also to shape the rules of the game in their favour." .
The dissolution of the civil apparatus of the state
It is noted that the draft law confers a security character on the bureaucratic apparatus of the state after the latter's complete domination of the public sphere. It is also a continuation and continuation of the general trend of the Egyptian state since Mubarak towards not immunizing the public servant from dismissal, and reformulates the relationship of the state with the bureaucracy, and the idea of the public servant that was based on Its legal status must be stable, otherwise it will lead to the collapse and erosion of the institutional structure. The public office - by its nature - is based on a long-term work by fortifying the legal position of the person holding it. The late Tariq al-Bishri describes to us in his important article on the nature of tyranny what happened to the state apparatus during the Mubarak era. He says: Here we find that in the first two or three years of the nineties he issued a set of laws, the first of which is related to the appointment of leaders to leadership positions in the state so that their appointment is temporary and no Through previous rights and legal positions for them, but through purely presidential choices for them.This was related to jobs or the so-called non-recurring government jobs or leadership jobs.
At the same time, the producing public sector companies, which amounted to more than 411 companies, were affiliated with the different ministries according to their types. Agricultural companies follow agriculture, industrial companies follow industry, commercial companies follow supply...etc, and they are supervised by public bodies and institutions. He amended this system and made it a system of companies that follow holding companies, so that they can be disposed of by sale in the future. And each had boards of directors that changed every 3 years on non-recurring leadership positions in government. He decided that in the name of democracy, and that elections are held by the general assemblies of each company. In fact, all of these general assemblies are on the board of directors of the holding company, which is appointed by one minister, the minister of the public business sector. In the name of decentralization, he placed all companies in the hands of one minister instead of a number of ministers, and in the name of democracy he made every company’s board of directors change every 3 years, thus destabilizing fixed positions in the face of one president and not shareholders.
Hence, the disintegration of this Egyptian administration began over the years of the nineties. All the holders of intermediate, senior or non-recurring positions, in the civil sector, and in public sector companies, all of these popularized the idea of “extinguishing the place” that is, not to do work that might draw the indignation of a chief Disgruntled with you, or have far-reaching results in the general performance of the various state agencies, public sector companies, or others. From here the disintegration and disintegration began, then the sale of the public sector began, and the disintegration of the state apparatus began to show its effects in the complete collapse of work in all fields. This was helped by the fact that in the public sector he developed the idea of “early retirement”, meaning that from the age of fifty the employee can request to be referred to the pension, in order to encourage all those with experience in these different sectors to leave the service at a time when the management body needs the work of those with all their previous experiences To train and transfer experience to different generations after them.
These are the means of dismantling and disintegrating the state apparatus in all its formations, so that it has become an apparatus subject only to its individual presidency. It completely crippled the ability of the different levels of professionals and those with technical expertise in the various branches of activity, and completely crippled his ability to act useful in the long run. All of this and more is taking place in light of the rising frequency of social tensions, which are clearly manifested in the breakdown of social trust. When the Arab Barometer asked about the possibility of trusting other people, only 30% of respondents answered yes in 2019 compared to 55% in 2011 (most people can be trusted). While only 10% were considering emigrating in 2011, the percentage increased dramatically, reaching 30%, according to the latest survey conducted by the Arab Barometer.