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“Love Curriculum, Passion Infrastructure: Neo Authoritarian Egypt and the Right”
Abstract
Mainstream views have unquestioningly positioned Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s rule of Egypt as a return to the past. This temporality alternates between a wholesale rollback to Mubarak’s neoliberal era and a revival of a Nasserist military state. This paper ruptures this narrative of continuity by exploring how Sisi’s regime is importing, adapting, and innovating new modalities of governing bodies and spaces. It positions Sisi’s regime in a broader trajacetory of a “new right” that comes into force after 1967 and consolidates in innovative ways after the Arab uprising of 2011. In doing so, it pays particular attention to Saudi, Emirate, and Qatari discourses, practices, and strategies. This paper focuses on Sisi’s proposed “love curriculum” which replaces previous models of citizenship with notions of charity, moral protection, and leader-subject dependency while emphasizing an eroticized adoration of the military state. This curriculum takes some of its inspiration from Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari doctrines and discourses. However, it is also imbricated in national specificities and concerns. The paper places this “love curriculum” in conversation with escalating policies of workers and consumers in key transportation and infrastructure projects, such as football stadiums, canal projects, and train hubs. This policing in Egypt labels these workers as debauchers, blasphemers, and human traffickers. By detailing Egypt’s adoption and cooptation, since 2012 of moral control in both curricula and the service industry, this paper attends to various regional, national, and local influences in the consolidation of a neo-authoritarian right.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies