Gramsci’s ‘Southern Question’ and the Egyptian Revolution: Intellectuals, Disruption and Subalternity

Authoritarian retrenchment after the Arab Uprisings is explained either by invoking regimes’ disproportionate repressive advantage on civic activists and ‘leaderless’ popular mobilisation, or by pointing to opposition groups’ insufficient preparation or radicalism. A Gramscian approach helps understand why both explanations are unsatisfactory and do little justice to the fluidity of Egyptian politics in 2011-2013. First, it helps understand opposition groups’ revolutionary significance. Specifically, it is clear that despite being couched in moderate terms, opposition groups' ‘reformist’ demands – such as their anti-corruption agenda – were rightly perceived by regime actors as radical challenges before, during and after the Uprisings. Second, while undeniably significant, repressive capacities alone cannot explain the ‘return of the regime’ and the decline in civic activists’ fortunes because they contradict analyses of their importance before the Uprisings. If activists eroded Egypt’s authoritarian regime before the 2011 revolution, what made them unable to continue doing so thereafter? Conversely, if activists’ agency was effective before 2011 despite the regime’s overwhelming coercive capabilities, their post-revolutionary decline cannot be explained by that pre-existing imbalance alone. If activists’ agency cannot be denied before the Revolution, we must account for it thereafter. To explain activists’ post-revolutionary decline while capturing the fluidity of Egypt’s ‘revolutionary moment’, we build on Gramsci’s concept of disgregazione, which plays an important albeit under-researched role in his Notes on the Southern Question and in the Prison Notebooks. In doing so, we also contribute to the rediscovery of Gramsci’s work in Middle East Studies by engaging with lesser-known Italophone Gramscian scholarship.