"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."--

Contents
Contributors
Introduction: "Cairo Securitized: Can Another World be Made?"
Paul Amar
Section I: Vernacular Mediascaping
Beyond 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 Abed
2. Securitized Consolidation, or How the State Co-opted Private Media
Mohamed Elmeshad
3. The City and the Jungle: Africa and Blackness in the Egyptian Interwar Cinematic Imagination
Ifdal Elsaket
4. Viral Visualities, Image Cycles, and Mosireen's Revolutionary Archives
Mark Westmoreland
5. Queer Digital Activism: Street Media and Subversion of Digital Securitization
Afsaneh Rigot and Nora Noralla
Section II: Reversing Social Cleansing and Depathologizing Justice
Beyond 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 Guirguis
7. Cairo's Sexuality Infrastructures: Securitizing Abortion, HIV, and Gender Affirming
Surgery
Miguel A. Fuentes Carreño
8. Road to the Future: Infrastructure and Landscape Sanitized of Trees and People, Viewed
from 'God's Eyes'
Mohamed elShahed
9. The Khaki Color of Football: Digitized Militarization of Egypt's Most Popular Game
Rania Ahmed
Section III: Anti-enclave Densityphilia
Beyond 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 Khalil
11. Urbanizing Dreams: The Struggles of Attaining 'New' Social Contracts for Middle- and
Upper-Middle Classes at Cairo's Desert Edge
Momen ElHusseiny
12. Military Capitalism: Economic and Security Logics of Egypt's New Administrative Capital
Roberta Duffield
13. Gulf Investments, Megacontractor Projects, and Urban Isomorphism: The Imposition of a
New Way of Life
Maïa Sinno
Section IV: Convivial Sociabilities
Beyond the binaries of street mobility versus family domesticity, public versus private
14. Cairo Up! Infrastructures of Security and Desire
Aya Nassar
15. The Curious Cases of the Disappearing Maids: Mobilization and Precarity Among Foreign
Domestic Workers in Cairo
Sabrina Lilleby
16. Cruising Ethics in Cairo: Queer Street Socialities against Fear Regimes
Ahmed Awadalla
17. South Sudanese Refugees and Community Schools in Cairo: A Home Away from Home
Amira Hetaba and Elena Habersky
18. Entangled in the City: Interstitial and Queer Urbanism through the Eyes of a Second-
Generation Nubian
Yahia Saleh
Section V: Participatory Futurity
Beyond 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 Arese
20. Peripheralization and Infrastructural Violence: "Haussmanization" in Managua, Nicaragua and Cairo, Egypt
Ahmad Borham
21. Statizing Informality and Unbundling Rights: Neoliberal Infrastructure in Cairo's 'Ashwa'iyyat
Deena Khalil
22. Al-Asmarat: Managing Informality, Reproducing Precarity, and Dislocating Workers
Mostafa Mohie
23. Pacta Sunt Servanda? Exercising Possession in an Informalized Cairo
Yahia Shawkat
Section VI: Enforcement Sovereignties
Beyond the binary of thugs versus police
24. Gestures of Territorialism: Baltagiyya, Land Anxieties, and Securitizing Squatting
Hatem Hassan
25. Cairo Militarized: Army Economies, Security Industries, and Surveillance Geographies
Zeinab Abul-Magd
26. Thuggery, Urbanity, and Enforced Sovereignties: Competing Universes of the Baltaga
Aly el Raggal
27. Deconstructing Thuggery: Riots, Prison Breaks, and the Criminal Subject of (Non)Violent
Street Politics
Mohamed Ahmed
28. Sectarian Politics? Securitization, Urban Development, and Coptic Advocacy in Cairo
Amy Fallas
Section VII: Abolitionist Desecuritization
Beyond 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-Samragy
30. Challenging Urban Militarization in Post-2011 Downtown Cairo: Walls and Checkpoints
Laura Monfleur
31. Becoming a Man in Cairo: Sudanese and South Sudanese Refugees, Gangs, and Structural
Violence
Paul Miranda
32. Policing Women's Sexual Economies in Downtown Cairo: Students and their Brothel
Friends in Colonial Times
Hanan Hammad
Index

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.