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.

This paper explores the roles and locations of precarious lawyers in social movements and political debates in Egypt. Through a careful examination of the contradictory class locations of contemporary Egyptian lawyers, professionals living through subaltern lives, I examine how lawyers become critical mediators of street politics and legal mobilization for social change. The political street provides one critical infrastructure of claim-making through street politics, the conflicts between people and authorities shaped and expressed in the physical and social space of the street. Courtrooms, on the other hand, provide the legal infrastructure of claim-making by mobilizing the law, a practice often regarded by scholars as inherently different and often oppositional to street politics. In this paper, I argue that lawyers, as subjects embodying both subaltern living and elite legal knowledge, broker a relationship between the legal sphere and the political street, thus blurring their divisions, and enabling claim-making and politics that strategically weds both infrastructures to achieve the purpose of the movement. In this paper, I draw on various movements and political debates in the past decade in Egypt, including the Tiran and Sanafir Islands Case and the Warraq Island Evictions. This paper is based on an 18-months ethnography conducted in courtrooms in different governorates of Egypt.

I choose Bulaq Abule’lla district to put together securitization and gentrification as main analytics to read the transformation that has occurred in the post the political ruptures of 2011. The district has a shadow security network that sometimes follows the police station and at other times follows another key decision-maker. During 2011 revolution times, the geographical location of Bulaq Abul’ella was politically vital as it is adjacent to Tahrir Square where major revolutionary events took place in Cairo. The residents of Bulaq were portrayed by officials as heroes and thugs at different times of the Egyptian revolution during the period from 2011 to 2013. Bulaq Abule’lla, a district in a central location in Cairo, subjected to major urban transformations due to the high land value associated with its location, noting that its western periphery is the river Nile bank. Its residents have been dispossessed by business capital and the government. Bulaq Abule’lla has its so-called formal and informal urban and economic settings. The shadow security network in which exist at Bulaq Abule’lla have been involved in counterrevolutionary activities, as well as revolutionary activities. Additionally, this shadow security network has a role to play in the dispossession processes. In the urban geography of Bulaq Abule’lla, I unpack different modes of violence that are constituted through Baltaga (thuggery) as an infrastructure of violence. In order to unpack the positionality of these personnel, I will unpack the political economy associated with thuggery labor. Through an ethnographic study of 18 months, in this paper, I will unpack two words that constitute that political economy of violence that are Baltaga and Maslaha (Thuggery and Interest). Both words transcended into meanings that are associated with each other. The first is Baltaga, a noun in Arabic that refers to violent and thuggery activities and are about acts of force that are beneficial to its doers and/or to others. The second is, Maslaha, it is a noun in Arabic refers to some social interest whether money or a position. Young men who are accused of being thugs usually come from the urban poor. Networks of Baltaga do associate in Cairo with popular neighborhoods and/or so-called informal settlements, related to the social stigma associated with criminality and poverty. The phenomenon of shadow security networks is majorly, but not exclusively, of masculine young men, that constitute a class that is always in-the-making works as an infrastructure of ruling and violence.

During the spring of 2020, Cairo responded to the global pandemic by imposing a curfew. During this time, Cairenes took to flying kites over the city’s bridges and rooftops in the few hours before curfew time. Young people from different neighbourhoods would attach their cell phones to the kites to take snapshots of the city from above. By July, kites were banned, seized and their owners were fined. The pretexts for grounding the kites were personal safety as well as national security, making it another one of those irrational things states do for security and to crack down on joy. This short-lived curfew corresponded to multiple global measures that range from total lockdown to slowing of activity. For many, a condition of being fenced in, in lockdown, and enmeshed in relations of containment and emergency posit new questions about urbanity. For others this condition of suspension or “glitch” (after Lauren Berlant) is reminiscent of familiar interruptions and emergencies experienced many times in the past. Indeed, Cairo has only also recently experienced multiple curfews in 2011 and during the violent summer of 2013. The paper draws on affective thinking about the city, specifically Lauren Berlant’s conceptualizing of infrastructures, glitches and attachments, as well as the growing literature on atmospheric and elemental geographies of air. It asks a series of question about what kind of infrastructures of urban living are interrupted or allowed to extend during times of change of rhythms in the city. How do social and material infrastructures extend, suspend and respond to the glitch of a curfew? And, in what ways does this glitch sit within ongoing and ordinary inhabiting the city? In the paper, I argue that addressing these questions allows us also to think through this curfew’s more violent resonances in a post-revolutionary city. Thinking with infrastructure as material and affective also allows us to complicate infrastructure beyond looking at it the purview of the state, on one hand, or the social relations that extend despite of the state on the other-- rather, as ambivalent inhabiting of the city.