‘Who would go to Egypt?’ How tourism accounts for ‘terrorism’

Abstract

This article examines the tension between British and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses and Western tourism industry discourses. I analyse how guidebooks like the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet attract tourists by representing Egypt as an appealing tourist destination in a way that accounts for its positioning, in counterterrorism discourses, as a location and source of terrorism. They do so by producing ‘risk’ in a very specific way. Guidebook representations construct one extreme of Egyptian society as ‘bad’ Muslims who pose an essential threat to Western tourists and their inherently progressive liberal democratic values. Having defined risk in this way, guidebooks justify the production of ‘states of exception’ and ‘exceptional states’ that exclude ‘bad’ Muslims and protect Western tourists. These strategies function together to construct Egypt as non-threatening and appealing to tourists. I argue that guidebooks not only account for terrorism but represent Egypt in a way that largely reinforces British and Egyptian ‘war on terror’ strategies. These strategies similarly protect subjects and spaces that uphold Western liberal democratic values. This article highlights the constitutive role of tourism in international politics and simultaneously helps us better understand the complex and mundane means by which the current Western liberal order is (re)produced.

This article looks at British tourism to Egypt¹ and asks the question: Who would go to Egypt? Who would go to Egypt when Britain's counterterrorism strategy positions Egypt as a primary origin of inspiration and planning for international terrorism?² Who would go to Egypt when the Egyptian government itself frequently highlights threats from terrorism?³ Interestingly, explicit links established between international terrorism and Egypt have not greatly deterred British tourism to this country. In 2006, British tourists represented the highest proportion of visitors to Egypt. Since then, the UK has remained amongst the top three source countries.⁴ Timothy Mitchell argues that mass tourism, as against mass production, involves the organisation of people to consume rather than produce.⁵ As such it is the imperative of travel texts that benefit from this industry to produce a community of consumers through their representations of destinations. Travel texts must negotiate the tension between counterterrorism discourses that paint Egypt as a hotbed of terrorist activity, and their need to attract customers.

What I am interested in exploring is how British tourism texts, such as guidebooks, represent Egypt as an appealing tourist destination in a way that accounts for its positioning as a location and source of terrorism. I argue in this article that guidebooks use two strategies that work together to represent Egypt as a destination attractive to British tourists. They lay the groundwork for these strategies by producing ‘risk’⁶ in a very specific way. Guidebook representations of Egyptian spaces and subject construct one extreme of society as ‘bad’ Muslims. These ‘bad’ Muslims adhere to a form of Islam that is essentially threatening to Western tourists and their inherently progressive Western liberal democratic values. These values include the recognition of individual rights and freedoms, representative government, and the rule of law, within a free market system. They are characterised as ‘Western’ not with reference solely to geography but in the sense that they are associated with, and have been used historically to (re)produce, a ‘West’ and ‘Western’ subjects that are privileged and protected in relation to correspondingly constructed ‘others’. Post-colonial theorists draw attention to the co-constitution of the so-called West and non-West, not only in terms of how the former has been defined in hierarchical opposition with the latter, but in terms of how they have selectively appropriated each others’ ideas and practices.⁷

Having defined risk in this way, the first strategy guidebooks use to attract Western tourists is to justify Egyptian government measures that protect these tourists by locating ‘bad’ Muslims in ‘states of exception’, where their legal, political, and economic rights are suspended. The second guidebook strategy is to locate Western tourists in ‘exceptional states’, (re)producing subject positions and reified spaces that are inherently privileged and protected as they ‘fit’ along a timeline that ends with Western liberal democracy. In the context of contemporary iterations of liberalism, these strategies function together to construct Egyptian spaces and subjects as non-threatening and appealing to tourists. Guidebooks thereby make risk known in a way that produces very specific solutions, justifying exceptions that privilege and protect the lives and rights of those seen as adhering to the values of Western liberal democracy.

These two strategies articulate intertextually⁸ with tactics employed by UK and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses, which are part of the post 9/11 ‘war on terror’ discourse. These discourses similarly justify and produce ‘states of exception’ and ‘exceptional states’ that together protect subjects and spaces that uphold Western liberal democratic values. These mutually constructed ‘states’ reveal the complex logic of exception that acts as an underlying principle of Western liberal democracy, protecting its values and (re)producing a particular world order. I argue that guidebooks not only account for terrorism, but also represent Egypt in a way that largely reinforces the discourses of British and Egyptian counterterrorism strategies, revealing the constitutive role of tourism in international politics.

Producing discourse: articulation and representation

To make this argument I perform a post-structural discourse analysis of guidebooks and UK and Egyptian counterterrorism strategies. When I use the term ‘discourse’ I refer to systems of signification that (re)produce meanings about the social world, ordering its subjects and objects accordingly. I refer to the constituent parts of discourses as ‘elements’, which include a broad range of ‘materials’ including artefacts, sites, and practices. A discourse is produced when, in a particular context, dispersed elements come to share a regularity or logic in their meanings, coming to be related in a way that constitutes a partial fixity, taken as natural or true.⁹ A discourse, though not arbitrary, is always unstable, incomplete and contingent, allowing for articulations to occur that may redirect or reinforce it.¹⁰ The dominant tourism discourse, for instance, relies on binaries of home/away, tourist/local, authentic/commodified, work/leisure, and virtue/pleasure, which are reinforced within tourism scholarship and popular discourses.¹¹ Binaries function to differentiate two terms in a way that mutually defines them, often privileging one over the other. These binaries, many of which are embedded in colonial representations and social relations, shape people's understandings of themselves and the world, influencing their practices in ways that reinforce these logics.

Guidebook representations play a role in the production of these tourism discourses. In this article, I examine how guidebook representations also articulate with and reinforce other dominant discourses, specifically ‘war on terror’ discourses that protect a Western liberal order. By ‘articulation’ I refer to the process that partially fixes meaning by discursively linking the elements of discourses, making them intelligible through chains of connotations with other discourses, and in the process altering their identity as the relation between them produces new meanings.¹² Representational practices are one way that meanings are partially fixed through the articulation and repetition of particular truths in a specific context. Jutta Weldes argues that through the process of articulation, elements of discourses are recombined to produce ‘contingent and contextually specific representations of the world’ that give its elements particular meanings. Through the repetition of these representations, these meanings become naturalised, shaping the way that people understand and act in the world.¹³ In examining representational practices I am not, however, trying to find the ‘reality’ behind them but understand them rather as constitutive. As Edward W. Said argues, ‘there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation’,¹⁴ contending that objects and subjects do not pre-exist their constitution through representational practices.

For the purposes of this article I define representational practices broadly. My discourse analysis examines not only textual and visual representations, such as the words and images found in guidebooks, but also the practices of policymaking and the organisation of spaces that function to represent Egypt. Specifically it analyses the Lonely Planet: Egypt (LP) and The Rough Guide: Egypt (RG),¹⁵ two of the most popular guidebooks in the world.¹⁶ These texts are produced by and for Western, and mainly British, tourists; they are published in the UK¹⁷ and reveal their audience by, among other things, citing travel advisories from the Australian, British, Canadian, New Zealand, Irish, and US governments as recommended pre-departure reading.¹⁸ Guidebooks construct themselves as a mediator between tourists, their locations and local populations, taking the role of human guides,¹⁹ but as Debbie Lisle points out these texts are not neutral but ‘framed in advance by the ethical vision of the company’.²⁰ This article analyses the corresponding logics and resonances in guidebooks’ textual and visual representations rather than how these are received and acted upon by tourists themselves. It was written in the context of extensive fieldwork in Cairo as part of a research project on the international politics of tourism.

To understand how guidebook representations articulate intertextually with those found in UK and Egyptian counterterrorism I study both primary and secondary sources. I examine UK counterterrorism discourse through a discursive analysis of the textual representational practices found in Pursue Prevent Protect Prepare, also known as CONTEST, the country's strategy for countering international terrorism, published by the British Home Office in 2009.²¹ I analyse the representational practices of Egyptian counterterrorism by drawing on secondary sources that discuss the discourses (re)produced by the most recent Egyptian government and by economic elites.²² To further explore Egyptian counterterrorism strategies I analyse a 2009 report from ‘The Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism’ (SRS).²³ The representations found in UK and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses articulate intertextually with guidebooks’ representations in the sense that the latter are made intelligible and reinforced not in isolation but through the meanings produced by the former.²⁴

In my analysis I seek to identify key intertextually articulated themes, logics or regularities, which produce the particular claims to truth or conditions of possibility that constitute a discourse. I also pay attention to complexities, instabilities, contradictions, and indeed exclusions, as well as whether and how these are reconciled.²⁵ In so doing I am not looking to characterise these articulated discourses as fixed, but rather to understand how they articulate in specific spatio-temporal contexts to produce very particular, contingent, and complex representations, with the associated asymmetries, boundaries, and exclusions they require and reproduce. Specifically I examine how current representations of Egyptian and tourist spaces and subjects in guidebooks articulate intertextually with UK and Egyptian counter-terror discourses to produce states of exception and exceptional states required to (re)produce the current Western liberal order.

Producing risk: representation of Egyptian spaces and subjects

Guidebooks depict Egypt as an appealing tourist destination, accounting for ‘terrorism’ in their representations of the specific subjects and spaces posing a risk to Western tourists. These representations shape how this risk is known and managed in a way that articulates intertextually with UK and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses and strategies. Guidebooks construct risk by highlighting two extremes of Egyptian society, one of which poses an inherent threat to Western tourists and their values. The RG highlights the oppositions between the ‘rich and poor, westernization and traditionalism, complacency and desperation’.²⁶ The LP guide similarly depicts one extreme of society as made up of those for whom ‘all is God's will’, that represent ‘traditional conservatism’, ‘reinforced by poverty’, and that foam at the mouth over the US's unwavering support for Israel. On the other extreme are those ‘who never set foot in a mosque until the day they are laid out in one’, who can afford to eat at McDonald's and regularly travel to the US.²⁷ Guidebooks thereby differentiate between these two extremes of Egyptian society based on their religiosity, which guidebooks connect with their class and level of support for the West.²⁸

Having constructed this duality, guidebooks go on to depict Islam,²⁹ and its associations with poverty and terrorism, in a way that suggests that those at the more religious extreme of society are inherently different from, and indeed threatening to, tourists. Both guidebooks highlight how Islam means ‘submission’,³¹ and go on to describe how it ‘permeates’³¹ or ‘pervades’³² Egyptian life. The LP mentions twice how ‘it's there’³³ or ‘prevails’³⁴ at an ‘almost subconscious’³⁵ or ‘unconscious’ level.³⁶ In so doing guidebooks suggest an adherence to Islam that is automatic, passive – even innate – rather than rational. They associate the religious extreme of society with a form of Islam that is conservative and static. The RG historicises this form of Islam as a branch that broke from the West, discouraged innovation, and became static, in direct opposition to the ‘west's secularism and materialism’.³⁷ The assumptions behind the RG's characterisation of Islam articulate with much of Western liberal social theory, which is based on a narrative of progress and reason that associates the presence of religion in the political and public – rather than solely private – realm with reactionary backwardness and as an obstacle to modernisation.³⁸ The guidebook thereby suggests an inherent connection between this branch of Islam and economic backwardness, functioning to naturalise secularism and capitalism, key tenets of Western liberal democracy, as crucial to progress.

Guidebooks also suggest that terrorism is inherent to this form of Islam, depicting it as essentially violent, anti-Western, and requiring absolute compliance from its followers. The RG and LP identify the terrorist groups carrying out attacks in Egypt as motivated by a hatred for the West, non-Muslims, and the secular Egyptian state.³⁹ They outline how most of these attacks have taken place against Western tourists,⁴⁰ asserting that ‘jihadist militants do see any non-Muslim foreigner as a potential target’.⁴¹ Guidebooks hold the Muslim Brotherhood and their ‘pro-Islamist family’ responsible for most attacks and highlight their links with al-Qaeda.⁴²

The LP partly contextualises terrorists’ grievances, arguing that Egypt's Islamists are a ‘political response to harsh socio-economic conditions’ and a repressive political system.⁴³ The guide highlights the work ethic and community spirit of the majority of Egyptians, thereby positioning them as ‘victims’ of underdevelopment who have been denied equality of opportunity.⁴⁴ However, the LP depicts Egypt's political and economic underdevelopment as wholly endogenous, due to the government's failure to fully implement economic liberalisation, ‘Western-style democracy’, and human rights.⁴⁵ By failing to question the goals of liberal democracy, the LP functions to locate Egypt as behind in a linear understanding of historical progression according to Western notions of development. Guidebook representations of terrorism in Egypt fail to contextualise Egypt's political and economic relationship with the West, which might mean admitting some Western complicity in terrorists’ grievances. They point out only that Egypt has become dependent on US aid,⁴⁶ which if anything positions the West as a benefactor. At the same time guidebooks obscure the role played by European powers to encourage debt in the nineteenth century, which led to the British occupation,⁴⁷ and the role of Western liberalisation policies⁴⁸ since the 1990s,⁴⁹ which have increased the gap between rich and poor in Egypt.⁵⁰ Guidebook tourists are similarly positioned as unquestionably superior and altruistic benefactors who make sustainable consumer choices, starting with their choice of guidebook that recommends – and itself makes – financial donations to counteract the effects of underdevelopment.⁵¹ In so doing guidebooks fail to question the role of Western tourism in colonialism and asymmetrical economic development,⁵² instead naturalising individualised market-based solutions and charity to overcome underdevelopment. Without such contextualisation, terrorists’ violent anti-Western stance, and consequent violence towards tourists, are constructed as irrational and indeed essential to a form of Islam that requires automatic ‘submission’ from its followers. This essentialised threat, positioned as it is in opposition to the altruistic West and its subjects, functions to imply that the West and its tourists are economically and morally superior through their adherence to Western liberal values that emphasise rational thinking, secularism, and autonomy. Guidebooks’ representations of Egyptian subjects thereby make risk known in a very particular way, suggesting that, in Egyptian spaces, Western tourists are constantly under threat from an inherently violent and irrational sector of society.

Guidebook representations articulate intertextually with British and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses that construct similarly defined spaces and threatening subjects. CONTEST, the UK counterterrorism strategy released by the Home Office in 2009, defines and seeks to detect those states and citizens ‘vulnerable’ to radicalisation and involvement in international terrorism. CONTEST does not assume that all Muslims are terrorists but links a form of Islam – directly and indirectly connected with al-Qaeda and its ideology⁵³ – with violence. It argues that this new form of international terrorism,⁵⁴ involving indiscriminate violence to cause maximum civilian casualties, has an explicitly religious agenda to establish a new world order as a duty to the Islamic faith.⁵⁵ CONTEST thereby articulates intertextually with guidebooks to identify and similarly define the specific spaces and subjects that pose a risk based on their adherence to a particular form of Islam. Any other CONTEST representations of potential terrorist states and subjects, which associate them with ‘underdevelopment’ and a hatred for the West and its values, therefore presuppose that they are Muslim.

Having established a form of Islam as the basis for terrorism, CONTEST follows the guidebooks’ approach of effacing Western complicity in the origins of international terrorism. It does so by explicitly asserting that, although al-Qaeda recruits members in the UK, the sources of inspiration and planning for terrorism are ‘overseas’.⁵⁶ It also directly connects states, and individuals’ ‘vulnerability’ to terrorist involvement with grievances related to their lower stage of political and economic development according to a Western liberal democratic model. However, like the LP, CONTEST identifies this underdevelopment as wholly endogenous to those (Muslim) states concerned, belying any Western involvement. Specifically, it contends that the origins of contemporary international terror networks lie in ‘fragile and failed states’ caused by ‘economic collapse, poor governance, the abuse of human rights’.⁵⁷ Meanwhile, those UK citizens vulnerable to radicalisation are identified as those (Muslims) who lack the opportunity to integrate due to social, economic, and political exclusions.⁵⁸ Although CONTEST recognises that these are partly due to racial and religious discrimination, it also associates such exclusions with what is ‘more generally a lack of affinity with and disconnect from family, community and state’, suggesting that more inherent factors contribute to Muslims’ lack of integration into modern, society.⁵⁹ Indeed, Shampa Biswas argues that, within Western secular discourse, religious fundamentalisms are often ‘presented as (traditionalist) reactions to the dislocations and alienations of modernity,’ connecting Islam with tradition and presupposing ‘progressive secularization’ according to the ideal of Western liberal democracy as the basis for modernisation.⁶⁰ Insofar as it identifies a form of Islam with innate violence connected with endogenous ‘underdevelopment’, CONTEST articulates intertextually with guidebooks to construct Islam as inherently backward according to Western standards of progress.

At the same time, CONTEST associates (Muslims’) vulnerability to terrorist involvement with an irrational hatred for the West and its rights, institutions and values. CONTEST outlines how (Muslim) states and citizens turn their local grievances into grievances against the West – and especially the US and UK – for causing or failing to remedy ‘conflict, failure and suffering’ in Islamic countries, arguing that the ‘terrorist narrative’ exploits such political events.⁶¹ By effacing (almost) any Western responsibility for Muslim-terrorist grievances, and depicting the West as their target whether or not it intervenes in ‘conflicts, failure and suffering’, CONTEST suggests that targeting the West is irrational, and indeed based on an essential hatred for its rights, institutions, and values. According to this logic, anyone – or at least any Muslim – who criticises government policies and British values can be seen as ‘at risk’ of radicalisation, thereby foreclosing political dissent that is not based on prior acceptance of these policies and values. Indeed, CONTEST cites any support for ‘US military withdrawal from Islamic countries’ as an example of one of the ‘political goals associated with Al Qa'ida’. By stating that ‘it is from among those who … hold these views that terrorist groups are able to recruit and survive’,⁶² CONTEST paints any (Muslims) who critique US and UK interventions as potential terrorists.

In so doing, CONTEST not only forecloses any British responsibility for Muslim-terrorist grievances but simultaneously depicts the UK as altruistic in its international role. CONTEST outlines the UK's goal to remove barriers to ‘vulnerable’ states, and citizens’ political, economic and social development and integration according to Western standards.⁶³ CONTEST therefore argues that Britain's response to terror ‘has at all times upheld the principles and values of the UK as a liberal democracy’,⁶⁴ which include ‘human rights, the rule of law, legitimate and accountable government, justice, freedom, tolerance and opportunity for all’.⁶⁵ In this way, the UK and its subjects are positioned as superior in their universally derived and applied values, requiring protection against those without such values. CONTEST, like the guidebooks, constructs risk in a way that represents British values and lives as under constant threat from states and subjects that submit to the dictates of an inherently violent, backward and anti-Western religion.⁶⁶

Like guidebooks and CONTEST, Egyptian counterterrorism discourses construct threatening spaces and subjects in ways that connect religion to violence and poverty. These discourses have been (re)produced by the most recent Egyptian government and economic elites both formally and informally, through local and national policies as well as more mundane discourses. Here I am not conflating economic elites with the state or vice versa, but rather identifying articulations between their representations that produce mutually constitutive discourses. The Mubarak government, for instance, positioned the government and country as under permanent threat of ‘destabilisation’ from, among other things, Islamist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and those linked to terrorist organisations such as al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, depicted as threatening to impede Egypt's move towards liberal democracy.⁶⁷ In opposition, the government represented itself as a preserver of ‘proper, as opposed to excessive or incorrect, Islam’,⁶⁸ a ‘moderate rational enlightened’ version of Islam that ‘is in the national interest’.⁶⁹ State discourses articulate with guidebook representations that, although critical of the government's failure to implement Western liberal democracy, specifically describe the Egyptian government as part of the less religious extreme of society. The RG and LP depict the Mubarak government as supportive of the West and of progress along secular lines, emphasising how it was part of Bush's ‘Coalition of the Willing’⁷⁰ and marginalises the Muslim Brotherhood.⁷¹

Representations in recent Egyptian counterterrorism discourses imply an inherent link between Islamist movements, violence and poverty by associating all three with the ‘demographic masses’ and urban spaces. Government and economic elite discourses have connected the general population and urban spaces with crime, disorder, violent protest, lawlessness, and nuisances.⁷² These depictions draw on representations of the Arab metropolis as ‘a terrorist risk factory that is necessarily “Islamic”’.⁷³ More specifically, Egyptian counterterrorism discourses have labelled such spaces as ‘ashwa'iyat’, a word used to identify the ‘slums, shantytowns and the self-made satellite cities of the poor’ and describe the people therein as ‘risky, “hazardous”, and errant figures’.⁷⁴

Reflecting guidebooks and CONTEST tactics, Egyptian counterterrorism discourses hold neither economic elites nor the state responsible for the grievances of these subjects and spaces, reinforcing the links made between Islam, poverty, and violence. Such discourses foreclose discussions of government corruption and the increasing gap between rich and poor as a result of liberalisation policies. Instead they rely on and celebrate the altruism of the benevolent privileged few as a source of financial redistribution, mainly in the form of soup kitchens and tables of food during Ramadan.⁷⁵ Eric Denis argues that this charity has become an ‘urban bourgeois value and a way of self-presentation essential to the image of a good citizen and good Muslim’.⁷⁶ In so doing, Egyptian counterterrorism discourses follow CONTEST in implying that any challenge to Egyptian state policies – currently applied by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) – are an indication of potential terrorism, limiting any dissent that challenges the government and its policies. Indeed, Egypt defines terrorists broadly as those ‘who are dangerous to public security and order’.⁷⁷ Amongst those arrested and detained for terrorism in Egypt include those with no clear link to terrorist violence, such as ‘internet bloggers critical of the government, human rights activists, members of the country's largest opposition group the Muslim Brotherhood, and journalists’.⁷⁸ By decontextualising poverty and violence, Egyptian counterterrorism discourses have positioned the government and economic elites as altruistic ‘liberals, or globalizers or democratizers’,⁷⁹ those implementing and emulating liberal democratic values under threat from an inherently violent general population. Although these discourses contradict guidebook and CONTEST representations that depict a failure to achieve Western liberal democracy as endogenous to the state concerned, the representations of all three articulate in the descriptions and strategies they use to identify and characterise risk.

Guidebooks, CONTEST, and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses identify risk with spaces and subjects represented as essentially different due to the nature of their Islamic faith. In so doing they articulate intertextually to construct the figure of the ‘bad’ Muslim that is an inherent threat to Western tourists, British citizens, and Egyptian elites. On the surface therefore guidebooks and CONTEST avoid simple tourist/host, British/Muslim dichotomies by differentiating between different sectors of Egyptian society and types of Muslims. What this more complex positioning of Egyptian and Muslim subjects allows for is a contingent articulation between three subject positions ‘under threat’ from corresponding figures and spaces of risk: the Egyptian elite subject, the Western tourist, and the British citizen, who are all similarly positioned through these discourses. The representation of two extremes of Egyptian society, rather than a homogeneous ‘other’, functions to produce inequalities as it (re)produces the superiority of detached Western tourists, the British state and Egyptian elites who take the responsibility to help ‘good’ Muslim ‘victims’ in a way that follows and entrenches ‘universal’ standards of development. The discourse of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims therefore makes known the threat in a way that positions Western liberal democracy, and those who successfully adhere to it, as superior in a way that is not territorially defined but based on shared values.

This discourse also reflects and contributes to post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ discourses, which have shifted from emphasising a clash between ‘civilisation’ and a ‘Barbarian Other’⁸⁰ to a concern with the battle between ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ Muslims, understood as those that strive towards and those that threaten Western liberal values, policies, and subjects.⁸¹ Contemporary ‘othering’ is tied to ‘values’, which marks a shift of focus from the ‘immutable origins’ that were the basis of Orientalist ‘othering’ strategies.⁸² Indeed, it is CONTEST's explicit aim to ‘elevate “moderate Muslims” to become the strongest voices in Muslim communities, able to lead a campaign promoting “shared values” and isolating the “extremists”’.⁸³ Guidebooks, CONTEST, and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses articulate intertextually to (re)produce post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ discourses that assume that ‘a good Muslim, paradoxically, is a secular Muslim who is influenced by the West’ and can be ‘assisted into modernity’, while a bad Muslim is ‘anti-modern’ and inherently destructive.⁸⁴ In so doing guidebooks, in articulation with UK and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses, function to construct and make known a religiously defined sector of Egyptian society represented as an inherent threat to Western tourists and their values. Lila Abu-Lughod argues that such classifications have revived ‘a profoundly civilizational discourse’.⁸⁵

It is important to note that guidebooks, CONTEST, and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses do not represent this threat as fixed and easily identifiable. Guidebooks, which make a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims in their representations of the two extremes of Egyptian society, at the same time contend that ‘the bulk of the Egyptian populace falls somewhere between these two extremes’.⁸⁶ This means both that ‘most Egyptians’ are horrified by terrorist atrocities,⁸⁷ but also that ‘the Islamists’ view of world events is broadly shared at every level of society, from janitors to generals’.⁸⁸ Guidebooks thereby represent all Egyptian subjects and spaces as posing a risk to Western tourists in the presence of a potentially threatening sector of society. Reflecting guidebook discourses, CONTEST describes how radicalised states and citizens are a minority, but that the Muslim community as a whole is ‘vulnerable’, requiring suspicion and surveillance.⁸⁹ Anyone could be a terrorist, especially with the increased prominence of so-called ‘self-starting’ groups as al-Qaeda fragments in the context of increased international pressure.⁹⁰ Egyptian counterterrorism discourses similarly identify risk with the general population and urban spaces, suggesting a threat from anyone but a small minority of elites. These discourses replace a discourse of ‘enemies’ with one of threatening spaces and subjects, which is more powerful in its versatility and ability to exclude a whole people. Guidebooks, CONTEST, and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses thereby produce a threat that, although specifically defined, is generalised and difficult to pinpoint. In so doing they constitute all Egyptians and Muslims as potentially threatening subjects.

Producing protection 1: states of exception

Having defined risk in this way, guidebooks proceed with their first strategy to attract Western tourists. The way that guidebooks construct and make known this risk allows them to encourage and defend risk-mitigation strategies that require strong safety and security measures. Guidebooks do so by emphasising how tourists are protected from ‘bad’ Muslims through the extensive security measures taken by the Egyptian government.⁹¹ These measures are paradoxically laws that suspend the rule of law for ‘bad’ Muslims in the interests of security. They can be understood as (re)producing states of exception, camps of ‘rightless’ people that are located outside of the political community and whose lives do not matter.⁹² However, as Aihwa Ong points out, the ‘exception’ can be ‘deployed to include as well as to exclude’. Articulations between these forms of exception have meant that they are not mutually exclusive but that ‘different degrees of protection can be negotiated for the politically excluded’ based on the multiple possible ways that subjects are evaluated and valued in different contexts.⁹³ Guidebooks’ first strategy to attract Western tourists is to use the representation of ‘bad’ Muslims as an essential, irrational, and violent threat to tourists – and indeed to the values of Western liberal democracy as a whole – to justify Egyptian government measures that locate these ‘bad’ Muslims in a variety of states of exception.

Here, guidebook representations articulate with Egyptian counterterrorism discourses, (re)produced through broader government discourses, which have used the threat posed by ‘bad’ Muslims to Western tourists and ancient relics to justify the political and economic exclusion of the demographic masses from tourist sites. Scholars have documented how state and local governments have violently evicted Egyptians working and living in historical sites such as the Pyramids, the tombs in Luxor, and Islamic Cairo, depicting these locals as uncivilised, lawless slum-dwellers and tomb-raiders, while monuments like the Pyramids have been closed on Egyptian holidays to limit visits from the general population.⁹⁴ The Egyptian government has justified these practices as a means of protecting tourists and relics. Guidebooks outline the exclusion of locals from tourist sites⁹⁵ but fail to implicate tourism and tourists in their indirect support for such Egyptian state policies. Instead they use this information as a means of positioning their tourists as responsible and worldly travellers, superior and detached in their knowledge of the ‘real’ effects of mass tourism and repressive governments.⁹⁶ By valuing the human rights of travellers over those of hosts and foreclosing critical reflection on tourist privileges and prejudices, guidebooks maintain what Lisle calls ‘an ethics without a politics’.⁹⁷ The intertextual articulation of guidebook representations and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses, which similarly position Western tourists and Egyptian elites as ‘at risk’ from ‘bad’ Muslims, functions thereby to privilege the rights of Western tourists, while those of many Egyptian citizens are suspended.

Insofar as guidebooks employ a logic parallel to Egyptian counterterrorism discourses and CONTEST to represent the threat to Western tourists, they also produce an acceptance of the broader counterterrorism measures taken against ‘bad’ Muslims by both the Egyptian and UK governments as part of the ‘war on terror’. The most recent Egyptian government used threats from terrorism and destabilisation on the part of ‘bad’ Muslims to justify its state of emergency. A 2009 report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism (SR) found that, in practice, the Egyptian emergency law gave State Security Investigations (SSI), located outside of the regular legislative channels, ‘carte blanche’ powers to arrest and detain individuals deemed ‘dangerous to public security and order’. These individuals could be held without charge or trial for years, sometimes in undisclosed detention centres where they were ‘incommunicado’ and likely subject to torture.⁹⁸ To the extent that Egyptian counterterrorism discourses brand the demographic masses as essentially ‘bad’ Muslims and maintain a broad definition of terrorism, counterterrorism measures can be used to indefinitely suspend the rights of the majority of the population. Indeed, the SR argues that Egypt's definition of terrorism ‘may unjustifiably restrict the enjoyment of human rights pertaining to the exercise of peaceful activities, including dissent and political opposition’.⁹⁹ The report points out that the most recent Egyptian government often used Emergency Supreme State Security Courts – which the SR argues do not offer a fair trial – to try suspects in cases where charges have no clear connection to terrorist acts.¹⁰⁰ In 2007, changes were made to article 179 of the Egyptian Constitution as part of the transition to replace the emergency law with a counterterrorism law. The SR has found that these changes continue to allow for suspects to be arrested, interrogated, and monitored without judicial oversight, becoming ‘a permanent state of emergency, although under a new name’.¹⁰¹ The SR has expressed strong concerns that the state of emergency has ‘become the norm’,¹⁰² producing a ‘culture of exceptionality’.¹⁰³ Indeed the ruling SCAF has not only extended the state of emergency, including the use of ‘emergency state security courts’, but has expanded its mandate, citing threats from, among other things, labour strikes, false rumours, thuggery, and traffic disruptions (alluding to those caused by recent demonstrations).¹⁰⁴ By constructing a risk to the lives and Western liberal democratic values of the Egyptian government and economic elites, Egyptian counterterrorism discourses have produced and justified the suspension of rights for those subjects and spaces represented as inherently threatening. In so doing, Egyptian counterterrorism discourses articulate intertextually with guidebooks’ representations of a bifurcated Egyptian society to further justify the protection of ‘good’ Muslims. Guidebooks' positive depiction of ‘good’ Muslims as pro-Western and economically successful reveals the political and economic, rather than purely territorial, logic that values and protects certain citizens and excludes others.¹⁰⁵

Similarly, CONTEST specifically outlines changes to British laws that jeopardise individual rights in order to counter the threat from international terrorism. These include, for instance, ‘control orders’ – introduced in 2005 – that place specific obligations on individuals in order to ‘prevent, restrict or disrupt’ their alleged terrorist involvement.¹⁰⁶ These obligations mainly include restrictions on movement or communication. Control orders can be imposed in a closed court for security reasons, and can last indefinitely.¹⁰⁷ In recent cases, control orders have been ruled as ‘unlawful’ by High Court rulings.¹⁰⁸ CONTEST itself acknowledges that control orders have been challenged successfully for depriving liberty under Article 5 of the European Court of Human Rights.¹⁰⁹ CONTEST maintains, however, that they are key to maintaining security,¹¹⁰ arguing that their prosecution measures ‘reflect a proper balance between the security of all and the liberty and privacy of the individual’.¹¹¹ The document therefore contends that these laws are justifiable within – and indeed uphold – the principles and values of liberal democracy as a response to those threatening them.¹¹² However, to the extent that CONTEST has constructed this threat as explicitly arising from a form of Islam, and underscores the potential for all Muslims to become radicalised, it is the rights of this specific group that are targeted for suspension. Indeed, Arun Kundnani warns that, within counterterrorism discourses, mainstream UK Muslims are no longer seen as ‘citizens to whom the state is accountable but potential recruits to a global counter-insurgency’.¹¹³ Insofar as CONTEST constructs groups and spaces that pose an inherent threat to Western liberal democracy and its subjects, it constitutes and simultaneously justifies a limit to liberalism's universal application¹¹⁴ and identifies those subjects and spaces to which it does not apply.

The intertextually constructed religiously based threat to Western liberal democratic values and subjects functions thereby to justify the (re)production of states of exception that specifically target ‘bad’ Muslims. This justification manages to resolve the aforementioned contradictions between representations of Egyptian government practices found in guidebooks and CONTEST, and those produced by the Egyptian government itself. Guidebooks and CONTEST pinpoint the Egyptian government's failures to universally apply Western liberal democratic values as a source of terrorist grievances. However, Egyptian counterterrorism discourses explain their failure to universally apply these values in a way that articulates with guidebook and CONTEST justifications: all three discourses represent states of exception for ‘bad’ Muslims as a means to protect subjects and spaces that uphold Western liberal democratic values. The exception to Western liberal democratic values is paradoxically revealed as a principle internal to it.

Sherene Razack argues that, with the so-called war on terror, ‘the camp has become the rule … inspired by a sense of permanent emergency and endless war’.¹¹⁵ The particular way that guidebooks represent and make ‘risk’ known, which fails to implicate Western liberal subjects and spaces, justifies the exclusion of inherently threatening spaces and subjects. To the extent that they construct a population in essential opposition to Western liberal democracy, guidebooks can be seen as contributing to the justification for the ‘war on terror’. At the same time this first guidebook strategy articulates with UK and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses to constitute Egyptian spaces and subjects as non-threatening and appealing to tourists.

Producing protection II: exceptional states

Having justified locating ‘bad’ Muslims in states of exception, guidebooks proceed with their second strategy to attract tourists. Insofar as they imply that tourists with Western liberal democratic values are inherently progressive, guidebooks can locate Western tourists in ‘exceptional states’. Exceptional states focus attention away from threats to tourists. Instead they (re)produce and privilege the ‘safe’ spaces and subject positions of a colonial ‘golden age’, which are no less essentialised than figures and spaces of risk. Exceptional states cater to colonial nostalgia for this ‘golden age’ located within a universal narrative of development according to Western liberal criteria, which functions also to protect those spaces and subjects that ‘fit’ somewhere along this timeline. These spaces and subject positions parallel and articulate intertextually with those privileged in UK and Egyptian counterterrotism discourses. Exceptional states effectively protect and privilege the human, economic, and political rights of Western tourists, British citizens, and ‘good’ Muslims who maintain Western liberal democratic values. In so doing, exceptional states work together with states of exception to (re)produce and reinforce a particular world order.

Guidebooks spatially locate tourists in the Pharaonic past of tombs and temples, thereby representing a temporally defined ‘tourist’ space. In passages and photographs that describe and recommend day-to-day tourist activities and interactions, guidebooks invite tourists to step back in time,¹¹⁶ and prioritise ancient sites in their itineraries.¹¹⁷ If people are included in photographs of these sites they are generally Egyptians in traditional dress. The location of tourists in ancient sites, is a familiar and comfortable image for British tourists. Egypt's past and it monuments have been appropriated and constructed, since colonial times, as representing the origins of Western civilisation, incorporating Egypt's heritage into a linear narrative of Western history whose endpoint is modern Western liberal democracy.¹¹⁸ Through this narrative Egypt is positioned as behind in a progressive ‘queue’ judged according to Western development standards.¹¹⁹ Representations of tourist sites efface references to the more recent historical context of these spaces and avoid their association with images of contemporary Islam, urban poverty, or modern Egyptian subjects that represent a threat to tourists. Such associations might disrupt the universal evolutionary queue as they elude classification according to its logic; they are not exclusively representative of ‘underdeveloped’ spaces nor do they reflect the utopian image of Western liberal democracy.¹²⁰ By avoiding these images and relocating Egypt ‘even further back in time’ in the ancient past, guidebooks restore the queue and construct ‘tourist’ spaces as safe from threats.¹²¹ Tourist spaces are ‘exceptional’ in that they essentialise a Western development model and privilege those spaces and subjects that ‘fit’ within its narrative.

The location of Western tourists in ‘exceptional states’ simultaneously produces privileged and essentialised tourist subject positions. By prioritising ancient Egypt, guidebooks invite tourists to take on the role of colonial explorers, arguing that ‘Egypt brings out the explorer in all of us’.¹²² Tourists are thereby encouraged to (re)incorporate Egypt into rational Western history,¹²³ without a mention of the West's physical and discursive appropriation of Egypt's past in which they are effectively participating. At the same time, guidebooks locate their tourists among a community of like-minded travellers who independently know, observe, and judge the ‘real’ Egypt from separate and superior positions, explicitly differentiating them from mass tourists.¹²⁴ Guidebooks exclude tourists from photographs, locating them as detached observers of the aforementioned reified ancient scenes and objects. In its quest to offer travellers an authentic experience, the LP presents tourists with clothing and body-language tips to ‘blend in’ as a ‘resident expat, thus deflecting attention onto the more obvious tourists walking behind [them] – and giving [them] more opportunity to enjoy the good things about Cairo’.¹²⁵ Tourists’ absence from photographs and ability to ‘blend in’ are tropes functioning to position Western tourists as observers of the ‘real’ Egypt who are themselves not observed.¹²⁶ Guidebooks thereby maintain continuities with nineteenth-century photographic representations that portrayed the ‘real’ Egypt, cut off from its observer, as well as with British colonial tourists to Egypt who similarly disguised themselves to maintain an ‘invisible gaze’.¹²⁷ With reference to these colonial practices, Mitchell argues that ‘to see without being seen confirmed one's separation from the world, and corresponded at the same time to a position of power’.¹²⁸ Guidebook tourists are thereby scripted to enact a modern colonial gaze that keeps a sovereign distance in order to gain visual command over spaces. At the same time, both guidebooks position tourists as superior by constantly ridiculing Egypt through cynicism and humour in their texts. In guidebook discussions of the Egyptian transport system, for instance, the LP explains that scenes inside public buses usually resemble ‘a Guiness World Record attempt on the greatest number of people in a fixed space’¹²⁹ and the RG exclaims that the new yellow cabs ‘amazingly, actually use a meter’.¹³⁰ Such statements reinforce Egypt's inferior position in relation to tourists according to the aforementioned ‘queue’. Guidebooks thereby (re)produce tourists as modern autonomous individuals in relation to the simultaneously produced ‘object’ of their gaze.¹³¹

More specifically, guidebooks explicitly position tourists as descendants of British colonial travellers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They do so by suggesting books from this period as pre-departure reading.¹³² Several scholars, including Derek Gregory, Timothy Mitchell and Edward W. Said, argue that such texts, and corresponding colonial-era practices like photography and tourism, produced Egypt as a transparent and legible space, laying the groundwork for imperialism.¹³³ To do so they draw on Said's theory of ‘Orientalism’, a cultural enterprise and system of knowledge about the ‘Orient’ institutionalised in the late eighteenth century by British and French empires and appropriated by the American empire since World War II. Orientalism functions to constitute and define the West as superior in relation to the Orient in a way that has (re)produced the West's colonial practices.¹³⁴ Said explains that within Orientalist discourses ‘on the one hand there are Westerners, and on the other there are Arab-Orientals; the former are (in no particular order) rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values, without natural suspicion; the latter are none of these things’.¹³⁵ Nonetheless, the LP and RG go on to recommend activities, such as travelling on the Nile in dahabiyyas (two-masted wooden sailboats) and steamboats, that re-enact eighteenth and nineteenth-century British travelling practices as part of ‘nostalgia’ for the ‘colonial tradition’.¹³⁶ Guidebooks equate these colonially inspired travellers with a kind of worldliness and heritage but at the same time fail to contextualise or critically reflect on the role of British colonialism in Egypt. The RG is more critical than the LP, which at points explicitly legitimises and praises the British occupation,¹³⁷ but neither guidebook is self-reflexive about the Orientalist assumptions behind their depictions of ‘bad’ Muslims,¹³⁸ or indeed behind the travelling practices of contemporary Western tourists in Egypt. Guidebooks also fail to outline the part tourism and tourists played in imperialism. F. Robert Hunter outlines specific links between tourism and the West's conquest of the Middle East, focusing on the reciprocal relationship between imperialism and Thomas Cook and Sons’ development of tourism in Egypt from 1869 to 1914.¹³⁹ He argues that the British Empire was vital to tourism development as it offered protection, supportive local governments, and new regions for development. At the same time, tourism was vital to the British empire as Thomas Cook and Son's company not only directly aided imperial ventures by conveying an expeditionary force to Sudan to rescue General Gordon in 1884, but helped Britain maintain its empire by deepening Egypt's economic dependence, developing good ties with locals, spreading support for empire through British tourists, and maintaining a British presence in Upper Egypt. By obfuscating the relationship between tourism and empire, tourists’ positioning by guidebooks is part of the process of nostalgia for ‘innocent and uncorrupted’ spaces of a (fictional) ‘golden age’ with its clearly defined subject positions and power relations.¹⁴⁰ By locating tourists as detached explorers observing ancient Egypt, guidebooks position them firmly at the head of the aforementioned ‘queue’, precluding any threats from, or complicity in, Egypt's present.¹⁴¹ These colonial subject positions are located and protected in ‘exceptional states’, as they perform roles that fit into a reified linear narrative of Western development. A retreat into these states functions to relieve present anxieties around figures and spaces of risk by locating Egypt as part of a familiar discourse of Western origins or control. Indeed, Gregory argues that ‘while they may be displaced, distorted, and (most often) denied, the capacities that inhere within the colonial past are routinely reaffirmed and reactivated in the colonial present’.¹⁴²

A retreat to colonial subjectivities in guidebooks articulates with Britain's move, reflected in CONTEST, to prioritise loyalty to ‘Britishness’ above all else. Indeed, Simon Gikandi argues that English identity – and its ‘master narratives’, including liberal universalism and modernity – was shaped through and understood in relation to colonial subjects and spaces.¹⁴³ According to Gikandi, there is currently a ‘crisis of Englishness’, which he attributes to the fact that its identities and narratives lost their validity outside of imperialism, forcing ‘the imagined community to be unravelled’.¹⁴⁴ Gikandi argues that this crisis is reinforced by ‘the large migration of formerly colonized subjects into the metropolitan centre’,¹⁴⁵ which has brought into question the spatio-temporal differentiations that helped define ‘Englishness’. CONTEST addresses similar concerns related to ‘Britishness’, which unlike ‘Englishness’ does not differentiate between or define itself in opposition to countries within the United Kingdom. The UK's solution, reflected in CONTEST, is to shift from policies of tolerance and multiculturalism, which have been seen as allowing inherent (Muslim) threats to develop,¹⁴⁶ towards a civic integration approach, which involves respecting the ‘principles and values of the UK’ and retaining differences in the private realm.¹⁴⁷ Guidebooks’ second tactic, which produces and privileges colonial subject positions in exceptional states, therefore articulates with CONTEST in a way that reinforces Britishness and assuages post-colonial anxieties and fears brought on by globalisation. This second tactic supports the first, which identifies and locates ‘bad’ Muslims in states of exception, reflecting how the current retreat into a ‘universal’ liberal British identity requires, (re)produces, and (re)excludes the ‘other’ for its definition.¹⁴⁸ Indeed, according to Gikandi, travel and ‘self-realization in the spaces of the other’, continues to be a vital means by which ‘Europe and its others are re-created’.¹⁴⁹ The guidebooks’ production of safe exceptional states for tourists thereby articulates with the production of a safe UK, scripting the roles and interactions of its subjects.

Guidebooks’ location of tourists in the ancient past articulates also with government and tourism industry discourses that have contributed to the production of exceptional states. Like guidebooks, the Egyptian government's counterterrorism discourses as well as nationalist and tourism industry strategies allow Pharaonic Egypt to stand in for Egypt's ‘modern’ identity, distancing themselves from Islamic identities.¹⁵⁰ To ‘protect’ tourists and Egyptian heritage, Egypt is increasingly restoring its sites in a way that creates safe and sanitised outdoor museums that prioritise the distant past and the appeal of its heritage.¹⁵¹ This representation of Egypt that prioritises its ancient past, and its associated restoration projects, is supported by international organisations like the European Union, UNESCO and UNDP, who see these sites as part of Western history, and indeed the history of humankind.¹⁵² To represent the ‘real’ Egypt and protect tourists, these international actors, along with the Egyptian state and tourism industry, support projects of spatial (re)organisation that physically and discursively efface the more recent historical contexts of these sites and their relationship with people as spaces of residence and employment, reifying and privileging their (narrowly-defined) ‘artifacts’.¹⁵³ The absence of the Egyptian general population from tourist sites, based on its aforementioned threat to tourists and monuments, reinforces a depiction of the ‘real’ Egypt as firmly located in the ancient past. At the same time, this image of Egypt articulates with guidebooks to physically produce exceptional states in a way that privileges the rights of Western tourists.

The image of Egypt produced through this articulation functions also to protect and privilege the political and economic rights of Egyptians adhering to Western liberal democratic principles. It does so firstly by contributing to the (re)production of Egypt's Pharaonic nationalism, which associates Egypt with its ‘glorious’ ancient past.¹⁵⁴ Political parties prior to Egypt's 1952 revolution adopted Pharaonic nationalism as a tactic in the struggle against British colonialism.¹⁵⁵ It was also a key source of inspiration for Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egyptian president from 1956 to 1970, who embraced secular rule.¹⁵⁶ In the 1970s, President Anwar Sadat solidified the newest manifestation of Pharaonic Nationalism, which involved Egypt's move towards liberalisation and alignment with Western foreign policy,¹⁵⁷ naming himself ‘the last of the Pharaohs’. Although he initially embraced both Egypt's Pharaonic and Islamic identities,¹⁵⁸ towards the end of his tenure Sadat positioned himself and his regime in opposition to Egyptians espousing more ‘extreme’ religiously defined identities, justifying policies that violently repressed Islamists.¹⁵⁹ Indeed, Islamists who assassinated Sadat defined their actions with reference to this opposition when they shouted ‘We have killed the Pharaoh!’¹⁶⁰ The dichotomous positioning of the Pharaonic state and Islam at that moment corresponds with the construction of the ‘real’ Egypt by tourism industry and government discourses. This narrowly defined and elitist Egyptian identity justified the political and economic exclusions¹⁶¹ that Islamists were resisting and continues to do so through the state of emergency that was imposed after Sadat's death. The Pharaonic image of Egypt came to coalesce around and reinforce the political agenda of Mubarak's pro-Western, pro-liberalisation regime that distanced itself from a ‘bad’ Muslim identity. Guidebook representations that prioritise Egypt's ancient sites and their depiction of the most recent government as ‘good’ Muslims function together to produce exceptional states that essentially privilege an Egyptian regime that maintains liberal democratic values.

Secondly, the production of ‘safe’ and appealing tourist spaces has advanced the short-term financial interests of Egyptian economic elites who largely benefit from tourism, often at the expense of the monuments themselves. In Luxor, for instance, restoration projects prioritise the expedient production of safe, exclusionary, and visually attractive ‘tourist’ spaces. In so doing they sacrifice conservation in terms of historical accuracy and proper materials, disregarding the damage that the increased presence of tourists is likely to cause to the monuments.¹⁶² These choices reveal a contradictory articulation between the elite Egyptian discourses of nationalism and liberalism, underscoring the contemporary liberal rationality underlying Pharaonic nationalism. The contemporary iteration of liberalism – often referred to as neoliberalism – goes further than classical liberalism, which opposes government interference in the natural laws of the market,¹⁶³ and ‘adopts the self-regulating free market as the model for proper government’.¹⁶⁴ This mode of governance specifically prioritises economic logics and values defined by market-driven truths,¹⁶⁵ privileging ‘market-driven calculations’ and ‘self-governing subjects as preferred citizens’.¹⁶⁶ Indeed, the ‘restoration’ of Egypt's ancient monuments ultimately privileges Western tourists, multinational corporations, and elites that own hotels, along with tour guides who require a university degree to be licensed.¹⁶⁷

Overall, the production of these exceptional states reveals the liberal logics behind the inclusion and protection of the rights of Western tourists, as a means of increasing the flow of resources to ‘good’ Muslims, while less marketable and profitable ‘bad’ Muslims are excluded from tourist sites. Exclusions and inclusions are therefore key to a logic of exception based on protecting politically and economically valued subjects rather than – and often at the expense of – territorially defined citizens.¹⁶⁸ Ong explains that, within contemporary liberalism as a technology of governing, the logic of exception not only excludes certain subjects from politics and the benefits of capitalist development,¹⁶⁹ as in the case of those ‘bad’ Muslims violently evicted from their spaces of work and residence, but becomes a practice of governance that creates ‘new economic possibilities, spaces and techniques for governing a population’.¹⁷⁰ States of exception are therefore not entirely based on the suspension of political rights but are strategies that function with exceptional states to ‘differently regulate populations for optimal productivity’ through spatial practices.¹⁷¹

The logics behind the production of exceptional states that protect tourists are also shared by new state-subsidised urban development projects that protect ‘good’ Muslims ‘at risk’ from the general population. Egyptian real estate developers are currently constructing gated communities for elites on the desert outskirts of Cairo.¹⁷² Developers promote satellite cities as a form of protection for elites at risk from the spaces and subjects of urban areas. Like guidebooks, they architecturally market nostalgia for the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial era of Egypt – without any reference to the British occupation – as a solution to the instabilities of the present. Paralleling the positioning of the tourist as colonial explorer in tourist spaces, Egyptian elites are positioned as part of a detached and superior elite national patrimony pioneering in the desert,¹⁷³ which caters to a similar nostalgia.

The construction of elite satellite communities is supported by and caters to a liberal tenet that development should be left to the private sector. Real estate developers involved in building these highly profitable sites are supported by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund through structural adjustment programmes as well as indirectly by the most recent government, which has offered them credit from public banks and holds down land prices.¹⁷⁴ In this way these exceptional states maintain the market rationality of ‘tourist’ spaces that prioritise ‘market-driven calculations’ and Western liberal democratic subjects. At the same time, paradoxically, they have been highly subsidised and promoted by the state and international financial institutions, reinforcing the mutually beneficial rather than antagonist relationship between state and business elites’ discourses in the Egyptian context. Indeed, the seclusion of elites in their own private participatory democracy, where residents manage infrastructure and services through a common fund,¹⁷⁵ goes hand in hand with the aforementioned discourse of risk and states of exception, which limit dissent to this contemporary liberal moral order and the political system that supports it. The construction of risk thereby ‘legitimizes political de-liberalization (including repression, torture, election-rigging) while promoting a particular landscape of perverse economic liberalization (producing gates, walls, mass arrests, and surveillance systems rather than any social or labour equivalent of a free market)’.¹⁷⁶ In these spaces as in tourism sites, the logic of exception functions as a market-driven technique that produces spatially defined economic possibilities and techniques to manage populations.¹⁷⁷ Such exceptional spaces thereby protect the economic, political, and human rights of elites (or ‘good’ Muslims) who reside in and construct these satellite cities, functioning to privilege Western liberal democratic subjects and development models. The flipside of the state of exception, where ‘bad’ Muslims are denied rights within a political community, are exceptional states that privilege the rights of those positioned at the other extreme of society.

Conclusion

Guidebook representations of Egyptian spaces and subjects construct Egypt as an attractive tourist destination by producing and managing risk in a way that accounts for terrorist threats and constructs these threats as manageable. They thereby negotiate the meta-narratives of Egypt that characterise it as a ‘bomb’ or ‘tomb,’ as an explosive device associated with pollution, terrorism, riots, and protests, or as ‘dead or ruthlessly repressed’ with its ‘romantic myths of tombs and harems’ that lure tourists.¹⁷⁸ More than this, guidebooks articulate intertextually with UK and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses in ways that similarly protect and privilege Western liberal democracy through states of exception and exceptional states. These exceptional states work with states of exception in such a way that they are mutually constitutive, underscoring the logic of exception that (re)produces the current Western liberal order. Risk thereby functions as ‘a social and political construct that crystallizes, sorts, and normalizes dangers, fears, and anxieties that define and limit a given society’, producing stigmatised subordinate groups, scapegoats, and illegitimate territories.¹⁷⁹

By examining the articulations of guidebooks, CONTEST, and Egyptian government and economic elite discourses, I have shown how tourism discourses function to (re)produce and reinforce counterterrorism discourses. Highlighting the constitutive role of tourism in international politics helps us better understand the complex and mundane means through which Western liberal democracy is protected. Such a reading of international politics disrupts the dichotomy between high and low politics that privileges the former, by analysing how representations derived from tourism texts and domestic counterterrorism policies – that respond to a nationally and internationally defined threat – articulate in ways that redirect and reinforce discourses at the local, domestic, and international levels. It is not therefore a question of whether high or low politics are more important or powerful in international politics, but of looking at how particular representations articulate transnationally in very specific times and spaces.