During the Sadat and Mubarak periods, Coptic (Orthodox Egyptian Christian) activism was extraordinarily rare. Rather than making demands on the state, members of the Coptic community operated through the Church, in what has been called a "neo-millet" system. This practice positioned Copts as clients of the Egyptian Pope while preventing them from petitioning the government as citizens. In the late Mubarak era, during a period of rising insecurity for Egyptian Christians, young Copts began organizing and protesting outside of the aegis of the Church. Coptic demonstrations increased after the 2011 uprising that deposed Mubarak. In this same period, roughly 2009-2012, attacks upon Copts increased dramatically. Although national politics, including the (unsuccessful) struggles of the Mubarak and SCAF regimes to consolidate power, certainly played a part in the escalation of violence, this paper finds that the main drivers of conflict can be found at the local level. Perhaps counterintuitively, an increase in political rights was inversely proportional to the physical security of Egyptian Copts in general. The reason was that the more struggles for citizenship rights threatened local strongmen and traditional (extra-legal) modes of conflict resolution, the more those same local elites retaliated against Coptic communities. Extensive newspaper research shows that violence through the local coercive apparatus typically took the form of attacks upon churches and individuals, as well as tacit permission for vigilante assaults. For this reason, fluctuations in Muslim-Coptic relations must be understood not only in relation to national politics but also in terms of the local stakeholders who benefit from or are threatened by formal juridical accountability. Drawing on dozens of interviews in Cairo and Upper Egypt, as well as sources in three languages (Arabic, French, and English), the paper traces variations in anti-Coptic attacks and Coptic organizing across the late Mubarak period, the transitional rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and the first year of Mohamed Morsi's presidency. After assessing variations in violence across time and space, I find that attacks are most frequent when traditional local elites are under threat and their hegemony is in decline. In this sense, so-called sectarian tension may actually constitute a milestone in the development of citizenship.