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Infrastructural Citizenship in Egypt’s Nile Delta
Abstract
This paper presentation addresses two Egyptian rural communities’ everyday contestations and negotiations around essential infrastructure provision to understand how citizens’ political subjectivities are formulated. As derived from ethnographic and archival research conducted between 2014 and 2018 in Egypt’s Nile Delta governorates of al-Daqahliya and al-Beheira, it appeared that lack of government provision and upkeep of infrastructural services are the principal grounds on which citizens hold multiple state authorities and actors responsible and question their legitimacy. The paper argues that people’s everyday interactions and engagements with the state and their understanding of their place as citizens in return, emerge from an affective-material and sensorial experience of infrastructure. Infrastructure becomes the medium through which rural citizens experience the state and choose to demand their rights. The paper additionally argues that these expectations and demands from the state are deeply embedded in a social-contract between rural citizens and the state emerging from the 1950s. At the same time that they demand these services from local and national state authorities, they work on providing these services themselves through their social networks, political organizing, and wasta-connection mediation relationship. Therefore, the paper presents a co-constitutive relationship between rural-based citizens’ social infrastructures and their buildings of physical infrastructures like roads, schools, and sewage networks. From this tension between the citizens’ expectations of the government’s provision of these services, yet their grassroots provision in the state’s absence of them, the presentation questions what this means for the forms of citizens’ political subjectivities formulated in Egypt’s current political environment.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Environment