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A few days before Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011, he reminded the Egyptian people that ’istiqrār (‘stability’) was his legacy both domestically and internationally. Their choice was between ‘stability’ and ‘chaos’, he threatened. This thesis argues that stability is a mode of governmentality whose power cannot be fully appreciated at the level of political discourse only. Rather, stability as a practice of government is entangled with peoples’ values, aspirations, and the intimate politics of everyday life. In Egypt between the Free Officers coup of 1952 and the January 25th revolution of 2011, ‘stability’ embodied access to both tenured employment and the means to reproduce the conditions of ‘a good life’ in the context of the family. Adequate understanding of stability and its ubiquity as an ideal must take into account the complex ways in which state projects and imaginative appropriation of those projects intersect. The thesis draws on fieldwork in an industrial neighbourhood of Cairo central to political movements of Egypt to analyse the everyday politics surrounding access to tenured employment in the context of the casualisation of labour and deregulation of capital since the inception of neo-liberal reforms in Egypt in 1991. By analysing the politics of labour at a site of strategic interest to the Egyptian regime from Abdul-Nasser to Mubarak, the thesis highlights how adequate understanding of political economy, practices of governing and neoliberalism must include both the shop floor and the home.

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