The proliferation of small arms in Cairo and across Egypt is just one symptom of the security vacuum that persists two years after the uprising that shattered Hosni Mubarak’s seemingly unbreakable police state. Distrustful of a police force known for being simultaneously abusive and incompetent, and wary of an increasingly politicized judicial system that rarely delivers justice, many Egyptians are administering law and order on their own terms.

In one particularly extreme case in March, two young men accused of stealing a rickshaw in a Nile Delta town were stripped naked, hung upside down from the roof of a bus station, and beaten to death by a mob of 3,000 people. Not all of the vigilantism is violent, however. Take Namaa, a civil society organization that works on sustainable development. The group is funding a crowd-sourcing initiative that solicits reports about neighborhood hazards — damaged electrical wires, for example — and dispatches volunteers to respond to problems that might otherwise be ignored by local authorities.

Meanwhile, facing intermittent strikes by judicial workers and police offers, Egypt’s overextended government is all too willing to outsource some of its law enforcement functions to nonstate actors and informal institutions. In the notoriously lawless Sinai Peninsula, official state courts have long preferred to delegate the adjudication of tribal disputes to customary courts. Since the revolution, local authorities there have tolerated the expansion of informal Sharia committees that administer Islamic law, creating what is beginning to resemble a state within a state. Informal justice is not limited to Egypt’s most remote regions, and unofficial customary courts in the greater Cairo area have seen demand for their services, ranging from dispute resolution to marriage licenses, increase notably since 2011.

Instead of working to reform the country’s dysfunctional institutions, some political leaders have embraced the devolution of core security functions to community-based policing initiatives or private contractors.