Title: Limited Expressions: Intellectuals and Security in Mubarak’s Egypt Abstract The paper investigates the relationship between the state and Egyptian intellectuals under the Mubarak regime. Since 1952, the state had tried to control intellectuals through the regulatory roles of the ministries of information and culture. The three decades between 1981 and 2011 witnessed fluctuating levels of political openness and de-liberalization. Notwithstanding Mubarak’s authoritarian practices, his regime adopted a discriminating policy towards intellectuals’ dissent. Whereas some writers were awarded some liberty to criticize publicly the regime, others were harassed by the security sector. The paper examines this variation in the ruling elite’s position, exploring which forms of opposition were permitted while others were not tolerated, and why. I argue that two factors impacted the regime’s decision to tolerate dissent: intellectuals’ capacity to mobilize and their views with regards to Islamism. The paper shows how the regime’s evaluation of intellectuals’ roles was often tied to its security concerns. In the early years of Mubarak’s rule when regional security was a major concern to the regime, intellectuals were granted higher levels of freedom and encouraged to communicate with fellow Arab intellectuals to help normalize Egypt-Arab relations. When domestic security threats became of a higher concern for the regime by the mid-1990s, intellectuals’ liberties were closely tied to their position vis-à-vis Islamists’ activism and their ability to mobilize. Dissent from intellectuals with more secular views and who were disconnected from protest movements was tolerated by the regime. The research follows the comparative historical approach to examine the development of the state-intellectuals relationship. It relies on extensive archival research of government-owned and independent newspapers covering the Mubarak era. The research also builds on months of field work in Egypt where a number of journalists, historians and writers have been interviewed.