Historicizing the Neoliberal Security State: Assemblages of Police and Social Order in Egypt

Abstract Responding to recent calls to situate the neoliberal security state within longue durée transnational histories of colonialism and capitalist expansion, this paper focuses on historicizing the discourses developed by police actors in one such state to rationalize and legitimize their work. Drawing on a previously unexplored trove of Arabic-language professional writings by Egyptian officers, I trace how they responded to economic liberalization from the 1970s onward by developing accounts of police as integral to processes of population management and economic ordering required for a successful market society. These vernacular theories overlapped with European genealogies of police as a technology of government productive of capitalist social relations. However, I argue that they did not simply instantiate a universal logic of police originating in Europe; rather, they highlight the need to account for how variegated assemblages of police and capitalist order cohere through encounters with successive, contrasting imperial projects in ways shaped by distinctive local conditions. Building on bottom-up perspectives from within the state apparatus, the approach developed here offers new ways of understanding the historicity of the neoliberal security state and the coloniality of the project of police at its core.