From the Giza Plateau and its great pyramids you can glimpse the complexity of Egypt, the Arab world's most important country. Along the fertile Nile Valley peasants till the land using techniques unchanged since the time of the pharaohs. Behind is a global city that stretches out to the distance. Near the horizon smoke billows from modern factories.

Egypt is ribboned with such contradictions. On the outskirts of its capital, Cairo, the rich hide in their gated communities. In the centre vast numbers of poor people live in places such as the City of the Dead - a vast slum built among the tombs of the city's historic cemetery.

Stripped to its basics, Egypt is a repressive state run by Hosni Mubarak that uses naked brutality to ensure the survival of the regime. For global institutions it is the poster child for neoliberalism. For ordinary Egyptians it is a dictatorship that should have been toppled by a thousand revolutions.

Philip Marfleet is Reader in Social Sciences at the University of East London. He has published widely in the fields of globalisation and migration, Middle East Studies, religious activism and cultures of exile. He has worked in as a journalist in the Middle East and North Africa, for international human rights organisations, and in universities in Britain and the Middle East. He is author of Refugees in a Global Era (2006).

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