Egypt’s Coming Chaos

This article originally appeared here on ForeignPolicy.com on Friday, July 3, 2015.

Barakat’s assassination was just the most recent in a long list of Egyptian officials killed at the hands of their opponents. Everyone knows about President Anwar Sadat’s murder in October 1981, but far fewer know that in the 1940s alone, two prime ministers, a minister of finance, a well-respected judge, and the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, were assassinated. With the obvious exception of the greater influence of the British, who occupied Egypt at the time, there are echoes of that era in Egypt’s current political dynamics — notably hypernationalism, political instability, widening violence, and a pervasive sense of chaos. How did it all end then? With a coup.

While a coup today seems unlikely, if not entirely implausible, the Egyptian military’s decisions are once again at the center of the current moment.

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