Throughout Husni Mubarak's presidency, Egyptian policy toward sub-Saharan Africa in general, and toward Ethiopia in particular, remained stagnant. Occasional warnings to the leadership in Addis Ababa to refrain from interfering with the northward flow of the Nile River accompanied pervasive disengagement with the states that controlled the river's headwaters. This pattern changed almost immediately following Mubarak's ouster. The burst of activism vis-a-vis the governments of northeastern Africa that took shape in the spring of 2011 signalled a transformation not only of the content of Egyptian foreign policy but also of its basic form. Popular delegations took the lead in reconstructing ties to Ethiopia, and set the tone for the marked improvement in bilateral relations that followed. Egypt's new posture toward Ethiopia is hard to explain in terms of conventional notions of threat and security. The shift in policy accompanied no change in strategic circumstances that might have elicited a recalculation of underlying interests by policy-makers in Cairo. A more promising explanation can be found in various strands of "securitization theory," which highlight the political dynamics that transform otherwise unremarkable features of a country's environment into matters of pressing national concern. Current scholarship on securitization focuses disproportionately on political elites, but as the case of post-Mubarak Egypt shows, it is crucial to explore the actions of public actors in order to untangle the processes whereby basic conceptions of threat and security get constructed and reconstructed, particularly in post-revolutionary circumstances.