Drawing upon the methods of critical security studies, ethnographic discourse analysis, and institutionalist political sociology, I will proceed by exploring the social bases, meaning frames, and mobilization mechanisms for four distinct spheres of welfare politics in Egypt: military fraternalism, Brotherhood syndicalism, Salafi pietism, and “April 6” collectivism. Each of these forms recently has become “securitized” (resignified through security discourse and practice). And in each of these spheres, degrees of privatization, “religionization,” and universalization operate in varying and contradictory ways. Although Egypt has undergone economic “liberalization” and welfare retrenchment since the 1970s, welfare politics is very much alive there. The military provides welfare and social rights and privileges for its uniformed personnel, and sees itself as transforming farmers and working-class men into modern citizen-soldiers, endowing them with patriotic pride, social discipline and granting them access to housing and benefits; but the armed forces do not see themselves (as they do in Venezuela for example) as being interested in distributing welfare to all. The Muslim Brothers have a highly privatized, small-business and professional-syndicate-based notion of charity-centered welfare; it is not interested in stirring class conflict, promoting redistribution of wealth, or demanding universalization of social rights. Its campaign discourse is “religionized” of course, but also politically liberal and pluralistic of late. Salafi welfareism is distributive but not redistributive; that is, their welfare apparatuses distribute Gulf remittance income and petrodollar aid to the poor but with the explicit aim of producing a mix of economic dependency and moral compliance, rather than social independence or autonomy within a fabric of universal socio-economic rights. Meanwhile, the “April 6” brand of welfare politics, with the kind of agenda that drove the first wave of mass uprisings in nearly every Arab country in 2011, is based on critiquing both militarization and religionization that had limited and constrained welfare and social rights politics, rendering citizens dependent, morally policed, and socio-politically disempowered. This paper will draw upon local ethnography as well as transnational/international-level analysis of human security politics to map the overlap and contrast between these distinct spheres of welfare politics as they intersect with, derive from, and take up the structures of state institutions in Egypt, and sketch possible future trends for the transitional period.