There is a growing body of literature on sectarian violence against religious minorities in the aftermath of the Arab revolts. This paper seeks to make a conceptual and empirical contribution to understanding sectarian violence affecting religious minorities from a political economy lens and through a comparative country case study of Egypt and Libya. It identifies particular contextual factors such as the emergence of a security vacuum in both Egypt and Libya, the struggles over governance in the aftermath of the revolts as creating the enabling environment for the thriving of political and criminal groups and networks that targeted Copts economically. The paper argues that the economic modalities of targeting Copts in both Egypt and Libya included similar tactics of encroachment on livelihoods, imposition of levies, and in particular hostage taking in return for ransoms. While the paper acknowledges that the entire populations of Egypt and Libya became vulnerable to criminal assaults on account of the breakdown of law and order, however, it is possible to identify through cross-country comparisons (i)the specifics of the pattern in which Copts were targeted (ii)the nature of the intra-group and inter-group dynamics that increased their vulnerability, and (iii) distinct community responses both from within and outside religious minority membership. The research is based on fieldwork undertaken in Egypt with (i) Copts in rural and urban locations in Upper Egypt between 2011-2014 using interviews, focus groups and case studies and (ii) Coptic returnees from Libya through interviews and case studies undertaken in 2015. This is complemented with broader literature review of the historical, political economy and security situation of Egypt and Libya. The contribution of the research is (i) to go beyond ideologically reductionist understandings of sectarian violence by exposing the plurality of interests and drivers in particular in the economic realm (ii)expose the importance of intersecting identities (class, gender, geographic location etc.) in understanding the power dynamics of the political economy of targeting religious minorities such as the Copts (iii) address the near absence of rigorous academic scholarship on the experiences of Coptic labour migrants (who roughly numbered 300,000 in Libya) in the aftermath of the revolts (iv) unpack through a long duree perspective the nature of power configurations at historical junctures that expose religious minorities to specific economic patterns of vulnerability