Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen is an extraordinary book, which conveys a wealth of original and illuminating findings on the origins, interests, and conflicts within and between military, security, and political institutions in Egypt since the Free Officer's Revolution of 1952. The monograph is intellectually and politically provocative, and written in an accessible, passionate prose that draws the reader into a gripping narrative. This book could not be more timely, published just as latent conflicts between armed forces, police, the state, and the people erupt onto the streets of the Middle East and dominate the headlines of world media.

Hazem Kandil's overall argument is that political change is driven neither by “pressure groups, bargaining with civilians to promote their interests” (p. 2), as scholars utilizing rationalist or pluralist political methods would argue, nor by structural forces of capitalist development, modernization, or class conflict. Instead, Kandil asserts that conflicting state structures, and their dominant norms and leadership figurations, drive change. His method is that of institutional realism, “conceiving of the state not as a reified or monolithic body, but as an amalgam of institutions, each with its own power-maximizing agendas . . . [and whose incessant power struggles result] in new power formations. In this way, we can see that regime type reflects the prevailing balance of power at a given time, not an official hierarchy or ingrained practices” (p. 3).

Kandil's analysis of this competition between political, military, and security spheres unfolds as a series of riveting histories that spotlight the personalities, ambitions, and interests—as well as tragic flaws—of particular soldiers and leaders who dominate each chapter. Chapter 1 plunges into the struggles within the Egyptian state immediately following the 1952 coup/revolution, with General Muhammad Najib as figurehead and Colonel Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir as the real strongman. Kandil shows how ʿAbd al-Nasir moved to marginalize the power of the army after the coup, forcing the retirement of all independent-thinking military officers and giving power over the state not to his left-leaning and more democratically inclined friend, Khalid Muhi al-Din, but to Khalid's cousin, the Machiavellian, “cool-minded” Zakariya Muhi al-Din (p. 16). So while Najib and Khalid struggled to restore democracy and to return the military to a professional and limited role, ʿAbd al-Nasir instructed Zakariya to move aggressively to create a massive police and intelligence apparatus that would watch over the military and the people, keeping both soldiers and citizens marginalized from the centers of power. “The American embassy provided a million dollars’ worth of surveillance and riot equipment” to help found this security state (p. 20).

In Chapter 2, Kandil presents a devastating critique of the performance of ʿAbd al-Hakim ʿAmir as general commander of the armed forces. His military adventures, in Yemen during the 1960s and then in the 1967 war with Israel, are depicted as a series of personal attempts to exploit his close friendship with ʿAbd al-Nasir and to scheme at the margins of power by producing shows or coups de theater with the aim of restoring the military's political influence. The commander is described in the most unfavorable terms, as someone who confuses his own vanities for the needs of the military and completely lacks soldierly virtues. He is depicted as either hyperfeminine, almost camp, and then as hypermasculine, a virtual gangster. Kandil quotes from memoirs that portray ʿAmir as “unmanly”—someone who can do no better than to “mope like an old hag” (p. 48)—and that claim he transformed the army “into a tribe with him as tribal chief: allocating gifts and honors, granting personal favors, solving family disputes, inviting his men to all-night parties at his house” (p. 51). When ʿAbd al-Nasir finally mans up and removes ʿAmir from his post, the disgraced commander is returned to Cairo “in a humiliating fashion (rumor has it, in his underwear)” (p. 53). Subsequently, in order to neutralize ʿAmir's charismatic or, by implication, perverse sway, ʿAbd al-Nasir expanded the policing and repressive security apparatus further, and then founded the Arab Socialist Union as a popular mobilizing tool to help counter the power of ʿAmir's military. Although fascinating, Kandil's focus on ʿAmir's eccentric personality leaves the reader wondering why the Egyptian military remained so fiercely loyal to him throughout this period. Are there other sides to this story? In Chapters 3 and 4, Kandil portrays the subsequent president, Anwar al-Sadat, as the good soldier's worst nightmare—the commander-in-chief who schemes constantly against his own nation's interests, eliminates any decent officer from the ranks for fear he might become a threat, and engages in self-serving and foolhardy diplomatic maneuvers that block any effective use of the armed forces or the attainment of any national strategic aim. In his desperate bid to curry the favor of the United States, al-Sadat easily gives away his best cards. He refuses to hold Egypt's strategic high ground, literally (as when he gives away the mountain passes of Sinai to Israel during the October war of 1973) and figuratively (as when he sells out projects of Arab solidarity in order to please his U.S. patrons and undermine institutions that might challenge him). Importantly, al-Sadat accelerates the presidency's shift away from law and legality and toward increasing reliance on extralegal police actions and the Central Security Forces (which become the president's personal army, allowing him to shunt aside the armed forces’ institutions that he so mistrusted). A police state thus emerges in Egypt without any kind of durable institutional logic, and it stands wholly arrayed against any rational national interest or logic of public good.

Kandil argues that in the ʿAbd al-Nasir and al-Sadat periods, generals, traitors, and diplomats battled it out on the Cold War stage in a triangular game of state power between the military branch, the security branch (police, intelligence, thugs), and the “political” branch (identified in the book almost exclusively with the presidency and not at all with legislators or judges, who do not appear in the narrative). But one might ask, where are the people in this study? The people, whether part of identity groupings, class structures, or organized movements, appear merely as objects of manipulation or fabrication. When ʿAbd al-Nasir needs more support for his struggle to marginalize the military, he creates a populist political party to bring people into the streets for staged rallies—not to encourage real participation. When al-Sadat seeks to displace the frustrated military, he creates the National Democratic Party as a mechanism for bureaucratic cronyism and clientelistic dependency—not as a route to civic participation. Among the triangle of institutional regime players, Kandil identifies the military as being the closest to the people, the only to embrace norms of national autonomy and integration rather than self-aggrandizement, and the only to resist the temptation to serve foreign masters. In this analysis, then, the nation is represented exclusively by the military. Social movements—labor, students, peasants, human rights organizations, women's groups, opposition political parties, even Islamists—are depicted here as ineffective in pushing for historical change, incapable of standing for the people or the nation, and impotent to intervene in the intimate rivalries and personality complexes that characterized the inner theater of state crisis and transformation.

But then in Chapter 5, we move from a character-driven institutionalist narrative to a political–economic analysis that provides a clear step-by-step tracing of the rise and fall of the Mubarak-era's crony capitalist mode of rule. Kandil reviews Hosni Mubarak's utter dependence upon USAID programs and international finance, on the one side, and upon his own constantly metastasizing repressive policing apparatuses, on the other. In this context, Kandil analyzes the implementation of the socially devastating structural adjustment program in the 1990s, and the venally corrupt “de-development” program engineered by the “government of businessmen” (arrayed around Mubarak's son Jamal) in the 2000s. The author vividly analyzes the culmination of the police state in its most monstrous form during this latter period, in which the torture-obsessed State Security and its thuggish henchmen (baltagiya) undermined the other two sides of the triangle of governance (the military and the political). This imbalance delegitimized the regime to such an extent, Kandil argues convincingly, that it triggered the massive protests in January 2011 and provided a clear opportunity for the long-spurned military to move back to the center of the regime.

The political–economic methodology that drives Chapter 5 is useful and illuminating, but not representative of the book's basic theoretical framework, which is institutionalist in nature, albeit a kind of personalistic institutionalism in which the Machiavellian soldier-leader embodies the prerogative of the institution. The normative subject that anchors this analysis is consistently that of the forceful, bold, decisive, ruthless, male soldier—a praetorian subject that embodies national destiny and assures sovereignty against foreign exploitation. Kandil's analysis of the failure of military institutions to hold or reassume power at the top of the triangle of state power is based, in the end, on a vivid rendering of the failings of unsoldierly personalities and errant masculinities. For example, General Najib is described as proud, charismatic, and caring, but also as indecisive, too trusting, and insufficiently bold. Hesitancy is seen as the most tragic and unsoldierly of character traits. Strategic chances are missed, and history lurches in the wrong direction. ʿAmir is vain, unmanly, and too intimate with ʿAbd al-Nasir. Al-Sadat, the greatest villain in this tale, is a backroom dealer who fawns over Kissinger and Carter and rages like a spoiled adolescent against the advice of seasoned generals. ʿAbd al-Nasir, by contrast, is described at his best moments as steadfast, visionary, and crafty, but with the tragic flaw of being reluctant to abandon his friends and intimates.

I focus on this issue of the soldierly subject and the masculine and praetorian normativities that drive Kandil's analytical narrative, not in order to critique Kandil, but in order to bring this essential structure of the book's interpretative framework to the foreground. These aspects are of urgent interest and analytical import, so it would have been useful to see Kandil engage the rich, existing body of literature on masculinity, nation, and soldierly subjectivity in the army during the Mehmet Ali era (by Khalid Fahmy); on the moral prerogatives, control practices, and gendered subjects of the security-state at the intersection of military, policing, and religious institutions (by Paul Amar); on the nationalist masculinities of the effendiyya in the pre-1952 period (by Wilson Jacob); on the praetorian subjects and gendered identities of Turkish officers in the Ataturk regime (by Emma Sinclair-Webb).

In this riveting and groundbreaking work, the institutions of the coercive state in Egypt have finally been given a proper, disaggregative, illuminating, and fine-grained examination. The book is an absolute must-read for any student of Egypt, for any scholar of politics in the “Arab Spring” era, and for any specialist in the study of authoritarianism or democratic transition in general. It will be a favorite for those in military or security studies, or for any member of the public who is yearning to understand the back story behind the spectacular interventionism of the Egyptian military that has dominated world headlines, thrilling, terrifying, and bewildering observers.