State violence and its political effects has been an object of study in other regions, such as Latin America, for decades. Given the repressive characteristics its regimes, it is surprising how little research exists about the use of state violence or violence as politics in the MENA. Certainly, scholars have researched the various states’ coercive apparatuses as well as detailed instances of repression, torture, and security crackdowns. But what if state-initiated violence is processional regime-making affair? At a minimum, state violence is not random nor is it all the same. This paper asks if state violence can serve an instrument for politically engineering new relationships and practices between elites and society while also revealing the state’s weakness? While isolating types of state violence does not singularly explain Egypt’s transition, it can illuminate the relative strength of the state apparatus vis-à-vis society’s contentious politics. This paper’s argument is as follows: When elites oversee a state that exists in equilibrium, state violence is limited so as to maintain existing inequalities against society’s attempts to politically organize. As popular mobilization disrupts the state, elites deploy violence more frequently in a reactive manner to offset the state’s contracting capacity. Not only will elites use state violence that produces a sharp escalation in death tolls, but also violence that tries reconfigure those opposing the state. This paper considers theoretical work about state violence before process tracing the case of Egypt to show how changes in the elites’ deliberate use of patterned state violence reveals an attempt to make a new regressive political regime rather than preserve a past one.