LAUSR

From Egypt to Europe, 2010). Within this context, it is debatable whether the authoritarian Egyptian state ofMubarak had any power to control labor emigration, and even if it is possible to hypothesize that Egypt was in favor of both intraand extraregional migration, it is doubtful whether this was mainly motivated by regime survival and not by economic factors. The book would have benefited from a clearer identification of the realist assumptions to migration underlying it and from a more sophisticated discussion of the economic factors shaping Egyptian migratory patterns, both within the Arab world and outside it. Overall it seems that the author overplays the role of politics and of the state in determining migration dynamics and underplays the role of the economy. Although the main goal of this contribution is precisely to demonstrate how, by using migration policies, the three Egyptian authoritarian regimes considered were able to consolidate their power, the causal link between emigration policy and the consolidation of authoritarian rule is not strongly established. In fact, the book mostly proves the contrary —that migratory policy dynamics are chiefly determined by economic factors and not by political aims. Therefore, the book could have benefited from a clearer identification of the dynamic interplay between economic and political factors. This would have helped mitigate reliance on the primacy of politics as the main heuristic variable used to explain migration from Egypt. The identification of a direct relationship between the aims of authoritarian leaders in Egypt and the dynamics of Egyptian migration should be treated with more caution and other, more structural determinants of this process given more empirical as well as theoretical relevance. This could be done, for example, by relaxing the realist framework of the analysis in favor of integrating political economy arguments into the discussion and considering the role played by economic and structural variables in the determination of Egyptian migratory dynamics in their different phases.