This special section is based on part of the papers presented at the 'Gramsci in the Arab World' conference, held at the Università degli studi di Bari (Italy), in late 2017. Academic writings of Arab societies have been scarce and fragmented until the 1990s, when with the crisis of the Arab State and the end of the Cold War, Gramsci became one of the most cited Eu...

This article explores whether, in the decade preceding the 2011 uprising, Egypt's Independent Civic Activists (ICAs) can be considered organic intellectuals in terms of Antonio Gramsci's well-known definition. To do so, three aspects of 'organicity' with respect to subaltern groups are identified: a 'demographic' dimension, namely their embeddedness within subalter...