Delta Democracy: Pathways to Incremental Civic Revolution in Egypt and Beyond, Catherine E. Herrold (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 224 pp., cloth $105, paperback $31.95, eBook $21.99

The result is a book that has a clear and well-grounded methodological approach, presents novel information to scholarly and policy-oriented audiences, questions and tests the received wisdom about how to view NGOs in autocracies (not neatly fitting into categories of full co-optation or adversarial contestation), and offers specific advice to policymakers charged with formulating U.S. international development policy. [...]it is the very nature of U.S.-Egyptian relations that constrains development assistance to NGOs that support, either explicitly or implicitly, democracy. While there are members of U.S. Congress advocating to have the subjects of democracy and human rights included in decisions about continued military funding to Egypt, it remains largely a peripheral issue, no matter which party controls the White House. [...]the author's important points about how to improve U.S. support for democracy might well be more effective in many places other than Egypt, in countries that are not seen as geostrategic bulwarks (the word used about Egypt for decades) and where there is some