After nearly thirty years in rule, the regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt was considered by many to be as 1Cimmovable as the pyramids 1D (Hamid 2011: 102). However, the collapse of this regime in 2011, following a mere eighteen days of protests stymied many scholars who began to question how such a revered 18pharaoh 19 could have fallen so abruptly. In this thesis, I try to provide an answer to this question. I hypothesise that the collapse of the Mubarak regime was facilitated by four developments, which, when combined, exposed the true hollowness of the regime 19s coercive and persuasive powers. These four developments were: the declining legitimacy of the Mubarak regime; the defection of key internal and external allies from the regime; the coalescence of a broad and unified opposition; and the strategic use of social media by that opposition. Through the development of a theoretical framework and the subsequent application of that framework to the case study of Egypt, this thesis finds that all four of these developments were present and did in fact facilitate the collapse of the Mubarak regime by revealing the regime 19s lack of coercive and persuasive powers
