States of Wait: The Death Penalty in Contemporary Egypt

This paper is an exploration of the daily encounters of “political” prisoners on death row ward with figures of the state. Building on ethnographic fieldwork and theories around states, bodies, terrorism, law, and fantasies, the paper problematizes the contemporary state discourse on “terrorism.” Instead, it proposes an understanding of the state’s creation of gendered “terrorist” bodies, which it deems killable in the process. Meanwhile, it identifies the state as heterogeneous, and acknowledges the multifaceted manifestations of the contemporary Egyptian state in the everyday encounters with death row inmates and their families. It also explores the inevitable wait for the state in every process, thereby taking seriously the realm of temporality on death row, and what it then means to refuse to wait.