Coups and Revolutions in Egypt

Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy

This Newlines Institute Contours podcast assesses state resilience and fragility in Egypt and the future of the Egyptian state using one of the best books on this subject, “Coups and Revolutions: Mass Mobilization, the Egyptian Military, and the United States from Mubarak to Sisi ,” by Dr. Amy Austin Holmes. Newlines Institute Senior Analyst and Contours host Nicholas Heras sits down with Dr. Holmes and another highly regarded Egypt expert, Mohamed Soltan, to discuss the Egyptian state's response to the three mass uprisings it faced since 2011 and how the Abdel Fattah al-Sisi-led government could adapt to numerous pressures on Egypt's stability. Dr. Amy Austin Holmes is currently a Public Policy Fellow at the Wilson Center. Previously she served, for more than 10 years, as a tenured Associate Professor at the American University in Cairo, where she lived through the uprising that overthrew Hosni Mubarak and al-Sisi's subsequent rise to power. Mohamed Soltan is a human rights policy advocate and founder of The Freedom Initiative, a leading rights organization dedicated to the release of political prisoners in the Arab World. In 2013, Mohamed was shot and detained amid a violent crackdown on dissent following Egypt’s military coup. He began an open-ended hunger strike to protest his unjust imprisonment and inhumane detention conditions, which ultimately lasted 489 days. The Obama Administration, urged by bipartisan members of Congress and international civil society, intervened at the highest levels to facilitate his release in May 2015.