I am walking from Tahrir Square to my favourite cafe in Cairo called الحرية or Freedom. After no more than a few steps I look up and stand face to face with a police officer in full riot gear. Next to him are two more policemen, rifles in hand and behind them towers an armoured vehicle. Going around the vehicle I can see more policemen sitting inside through the shooting slits. As I discovered during my short stay in Cairo this is a common sight which makes it no less disturbing. Throughout the bustling streets of Cairo, police are positioned at every main street or intersection. The large chunks of metal and their motionless guards stand out in a city which is always on the move. It is a display of power. The policemen do not do anything, at least nothing that I observed, but they show everyone the might that will be directed towards them if they step out of line. It is the most obvious and blunt way to express power and not the one that the Egyptian state with Sisi at its head employs. Travelling throughout Egypt I noticed that one does not get further than 100km without a police control. Oftentimes the luggage is searched or I had to wait without apparent reason and no clue what to do next. The treatment of Egyptians was much worse than mine. Creating this uncertainty is a used often enough by those in power to show their control over you and yet every time I encounter it, I can feel how it works. The checkpoints along highways are supported by military vehicles often with mounted machineguns. The word “police” sprayed on the side of these vehicles fails to hide that the state is effectively using its military to control the Egyptian people. I chose these words carefully to convey that it feels as if the Egyptian people are controlled by an outside force, an occupier, which is the regime. As occupiers, the regime employs police and military to control Egypt. But blunt displays of power and control are not enough for a regime to truly control a population. The armoured trucks and policemen stand out too much, can be avoided too easily.

Apart from the normal cops, throughout Egypt there are policemen without uniform. Sometimes they were a walky-talky or a gun which outs them as policemen under closer inspection. Still there are many you do not see. In addition, there is also secret police without any of the tell-tale signs of a policemen and trained not to stand out. Despite the lack of surveillance cameras in many parts of Egypt the combination of police and secret police means that there is a constant sense of surveillance in public. With severe limitations on freedom of speech and political acts in general it means that it is almost impossible to have an open political discussion with an Egyptian citizen in public. Dissidents, journalists, and academics are all targets for the regime since they pose a significant threat to the regime. While controlling them in public is important because acts in this sphere influence others, it is equally important to control the private. Listening in on calls, hacking phone microphones or simply blocking people from accessing certain social media apps are some of the ways in which the Egyptian regime controls the private. Along with seemingly arbitrary arrests this creates fear, a feeling that I have encountered many times in my time in Egypt. Fear is the last component of the regime’s control over the Egyptian people.

From my experience it is safe to say that Egypt is a police state. But most definitions for the term lacked a dimension that I only discovered in my time in Egypt. It is the sense that the regime would be smashed to pieces by the people it occupies the moment that the control ceases. Throughout my time in Egypt and the interactions I had, this feeling was constantly hidden behind a façade put up to protect oneself from the regime. But it was there. Many Egyptian people are desperate for change. They think it impossible to reach and given the control that the Egyptian state exercises maybe they are correct. Still, I have no doubt that the slightest opportunity will be ceased. A police state lives of control, if it crumbles, people will be ready take it apart and hopefully, build something better from the pieces left.