The Foundations of Hegemony in Egypt Before and After the 2011 Revolution: Disgregazione, Organic Intellectuals, and the ‘Southern Question’ as Method.

During the decade before Egypt’s 2011 revolution, independent pro- democracy human rights activists played an important role in the mobilization that prepared the ground for Mubarak’s ouster. Hailed as pioneers of the revolution during its heyday, once counter- revolutionary forces from the old regime gained the upper hand, those same Independent Civic Activists’ (ICAs) were faulted for not having a sufficiently revolutionary ideology or program to ‘take the state’ (Bayat 2017), or their defeat was said to have been caused by their weakness compared to the coercive capacity of the Army or the logistical infrastructure of the Muslim Brotherhood (Bellin 2012). Yet if ICAs slowly eroded Egypt’s authoritarian regime before 2011, it is necessary to explain why they were unable to do so after Mubarak’s removal. Likewise, if the coercive imbalance between ICAs and the regime or the Brotherhood was overwhelming, it is difficult to explain ICAs’ role before the Revolution. More generally, if ICAs’ agency – with all its limitations – existed and was effective before the Revolution, it must be retrieved in the analysis of events after Mubarak was ousted. This chapter engages with Gramsci’s original writings and with Italophone scholarship on Gramsci and draws together our previous work on ICAs before and after the Revolution with the aim of presenting an original elaboration of disgregazione in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and his Notes on the Southern Question that might help explain the Revolution’s ‘defeat’ while properly accounting for ICAs’ agency. Both empirical and theoretical reflections contribute to the elaboration of a new wave of ‘Gramscian’ scholarship in Middle East Studies.