In From Deep State to Islamic State, Jean-Pierre Filiu has produced an original account that puts the ferocity of the post Arab Spring “counter-revolution” into historical and comparative perspective. The same author had, in May 2011, written a hastily produced short book entitled The Arab Revolution: Ten Lessons from the Democratic Uprising, which projected a message of hope. Four years later, with Libya split among warring militias, Egypt riven by domestic conflicts, and Syria destroyed by war, Filiu begins by acknowledging how “I thought I had seen it all from the Arab despots: their perversity, their brutality, their voracity. But I was still underestimating their ferocity and their readiness to burn down their country to cling to the absolute power” (p. x). Filiu proceeds to unpack the reasons for the durability of what he calls “the modern Mamluks” (pp. 47–48) in a wide-ranging analysis that, at times, sacrifices depth for breadth and covers too much ground all at once.

The crux of Filiu's argument is that the presence of a substantial “deep state” across much of the Arab world (and Turkey) explains “how the nucleus of the ruling cliques could strike back with such unbridled violence” that constituted a “systematic war” of regimes against their peoples (p. x). While the borrowing of the concept of the “deep state” from its conventional Turkish understanding adds nuance to Filiu's analysis, it risks buttonholing very different sets of ruling elites into a square peg in ways that do not always convince. Additionally, readers picking the book by its title will find very little on the rise of the so-called Islamic State, one half-chapter notwithstanding, and will gain far more from Charles Lister's superlative account The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). And yet, the granular examination of the networks of power and violence that undergird the maintenance of autocratic rule merit close reading for the value they add to the emerging scholarship of the Arab Spring and its turbulent aftermath.

Filiu divides his analysis roughly into three sections and opens with a lengthy account of the “deep state” in action in Turkey. Defining the concept of dawla ʿamīqa as an area of “murky cooperation between state intelligence, corrupt justice, and organized crime” (p. 1), Filiu examines at length the ramifications of the unraveling of the shadowy structures of the Turkish variant of the deep state after its inadvertent exposure following a car crash in Susurluk in 1996. This opening section includes the “Ergenekon” scandal of the late 2000s and the “Sledgehammer” plot of 2010 that pitted the AKP government of Prime Minister Erdogan against sections of the Turkish military and security apparatus. These skirmishes, conducted when Erdogan was at the height of his popularity, hallowed out the independence of the Turkish judiciary and, Filiu suggests persuasively, polarized “a country bitterly divided between AKP supporters and their secular opponents, both claiming that law and the nation were on their side” (p. 12). Filiu acknowledges that, as president, Erdogan has assumed “authoritarian tendencies” of his own, but pressures of space prohibit him from examining in greater detail whether the replacement of one set of elites in favor of another has merely shifted, rather than eliminated, the contours and composition of the “deep state” in Turkey.

Filiu proceeds to expand at length on his identification of a modern class of “Mamluks”—the spiritual successors, in his view, of the emancipated slaves who ruled the Ottoman Empire for two and a half centuries. Ranging from Algeria to Yemen by way of Egypt and Syria, Filiu guides the reader through a sometimes chaotic jumble of people, places, and events, in a not-altogether coherent attempt to explain precisely what he means by the plethora of “Mamluk authoritarian regimes” which he also places in a separate category from “the aspiring totalitarian regimes” put in place by Colonel Qaddafi in Libya and Saddam Husayn in Iraq (p. 80). One of the most important points to arise from Filiu's historical approach is the potency of individual rivalries both for political power and for localized influence that shaped the distinct evolution of the security state in each instance, which Filu addresses in detail in a chapter he entitles “The Rise of the Security Mafias.” Here, Filiu makes the point that while “the military clique could be divisive and unstable. . . they stood as one united body when their core interest was attacked” (p. 116) and, over the decades, “morphed into multi-faceted protection networks, far beyond the realm of security concerns” (p. 118).

Turning to the specific events of the Arab Spring uprisings that resulted in the downfall of four regional leaders in 2011, Filiu struggles at times to draw together a coherent narrative that at once explains the differences in each outcome within the confines of the “modern Mamluk” argument. In Tunisia, he argues, “the security mafia was too centered on the presidential family” and “too police-oriented to see of the challenge of civilian protests” (p. 150). By contrast, in Egypt, just three weeks later, the “strong cohesion” within the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces was “a significant advantage for the Egyptian Mamluks in a country agitated by revolutionary fervor” (p. 155). Moreover, during the Muslim Brotherhood interregnum, which left “the Egyptian Mamluks in a state of shock,” Filiu argues that a “tripartite alliance between militarized intelligence, a politicized judiciary, and criminal gangs” gradually formed and ensured that Mamluk power was reasserted in the countercoup of July 2013 that toppled President Mursi (p. 167). However, two subsequent sections, entitled “Sisi the Superstar” and “Mamluks United” fail to capture the elite-level fractures among the various military, police, and intelligence agencies that since have emerged in a sea of shifting sands under President Sisi (pp. 180, 185).

For a book that features the name prominently in its title, the rise of the so-called Islamic State is given only a brief and relatively perfunctory analysis in the context of a chapter that deals with the rise of jihadi terrorism in Syria and Yemen. Filiu labels this chapter “Evil Twins in Yemen and Syria,” which he claims represent “the dictators and the jihadis” whose interests—both in Yemen and in Syria—aligned after 2011 in a determination to crush the mass and largely peaceful protest movements that had rocked the political and security establishment in each state (p. 194). Both ʿAli Abd ʿAllah Salih in Yemen and Bashar al-Asad in Syria used “the jihadi joker” in this way (p. 194), but scholars seeking an in-depth analysis of how and why the mass movements gave way to an elite-driven transition in Sanaʿa and militarized factionalism in Syria will not find it in the seven pages that Filiu devotes to Yemen and the six to Syria.

Readers seeking a 30,000-foot perspective on the Arab Spring and its aftermath will appreciate From Deep State to the Islamic State for its broad-based approach, but scholars seeking a deeper analysis of the dynamics of formal and informal structures of power, authority, and consent will feel unfulfilled. Nuggets of valuable insight, such as the observation that “Yemen stands as a sinister illustration of how irrelevant it is to oust a despot while keeping his repressive apparatus in place” are few and far between (p. 252), and are not sufficiently unpacked. And yet, Filiu's uncompromising analysis of the “Mamluks” has, at least, shone a probing light on the obscure security networks that, one suspects, would rather continue to operate in the twilight zone and as a law unto themselves.