An Egyptian Village between two Revolutions: From Socialist Foundation to a Declaration of Independence
In September 2012, Tahseen, a village in the Nile Delta governorate of al-Daqahliyah, declared “administrative independence” from the municipal government due to state neglect. This movement arose in response to the government's failure to provide and maintain essential infrastructure services. Over a span of more than two decades, the Tahseen community took it upon themselves to provide most of these services, using construction expertise and funding primarily sourced from Arab Gulf migrant labor remittances. After successfully establishing these essential infrastructure services, Tahseen's community initiated a civil disobedience movement. What sets Tahseen apart is not only its rare rural revolutionary action during Egypt's 2011 uprising and its aftermath, but also its unique origin story. The village was established in 1956 as part of land reform policies and "land reclamation" efforts under Gamal Abdel-Nasser's regime. However, as Egypt's socialist project was gradually reversed in the following decades, Tahseen received minimal economic, infrastructural, social, and agricultural support from the state. Viewed through the lens of neglect and ruination, Tahseen's story highlights the transformation of an Egyptian village created by the state in the 1950s. Despite its origins in state-led development efforts, Tahseen ultimately sought administrative independence in 2012, demonstrating how villagers took it upon themselves to rebuild infrastructure and utilize it socio-materially for political action.
2023/24
Mediating Political Subjectivities: Infrastructure, Mobility, and Social Action in Egypt’s Nile Delta
In her book project, Nada El-Kouny investigates how infrastructure is not only an avenue for the provision of services but is also the ground on which contestations over sovereignty are generated. The project examines how material infrastructures, like the building of roads, and social infrastructures of political organizing, coalesce in producing political subjectivities. Developing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research conducted between 2012 and 2018 in Egypt, the project focuses on rural citizens who over the past four decades experienced the privatization of the economy and structural adjustment programs, pushing them out of a system of self-sufficiency and a majority-agricultural economy. Infrastructure, as material mediums that organize and facilitate societies, is the node through which the project investigates how politics are enacted, experienced, and contested. The project also expands on the notion of materiality more broadly, to address how social infrastructures are embodied channels through which citizens and communities organize themselves and attain infrastructural services from the state. A significant component of the project includes ethnographic fieldwork with labor migrants. The research focuses on the forms of return investments in the built environment of the migrants’ origin villages through their work primarily in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Italy. The research equally investigates how the sociopolitical subjectivities of these migrants are formulated due to their migration and how they manifest in their villages of origin.