1In the Giza neighborhood of Cairo, scattered along the newly refurbished Khatam al-Mursalin Street, lies an impressive collection of buildings dedicated to culture. As you walk westward along the street, the plates hanging above the entrances of the imposing modernist buildings reveal that you are passing the National Center for Children’s Culture, the High Institute of Theater, the High Cinema Institute, the Academy of Arts, the Sayed Darwish Academic Center for Culture and Arts, and, finally, the Giza Culture Palace. Some complexes are separated from the street by a thick stone wall, decorated with circular paintings of famous Egyptian singers, actors, and cinema producers, suggesting that a rich cultural life thrives on the inside. Turning right into Amina Mohamed Street, the string of high-culture establishments continues: the Conservatoire, the High Institute for Music, and the High Institute of Ballet. On the left side of the street, you see the Nehad Seliha Theater, the High Institute of Art Criticism, and the High Institute of Folk Arts. Returning to Khatam al-Mursalin Street and continuing straight onto Gamal al-Din al-Afghani Street, you soon encounter a fenced-off building on your left. As we took a walk through the area in the spring of 2022, the modernist edifice, with its tall, narrow windows and intricate geometric latticework, showed clear signs of wear and neglect. Overgrown vegetation surrounded the building, and dirt covered its façade. Through the locked iron fence, a plaque revealed that the building was inaugurated by Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president between 1956 and 1970. The building seemed to be closed to the public. Through its windows, we glimpsed stacks of old files and piled-up papers.
Figure 1. The fenced-off building on Gamal al-Din al-Afghani Street
Photo, Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė, 13 May 2022
2The cultural complex in Giza stands as a monument to President Nasser’s ambition of incorporating culture into the state’s welfare objectives. Following the 1952 Free Officers coup, social justice and equality were declared as primary goals of the newly founded Egyptian Republic. The Nasser government introduced policies promoting a state-led economy; created social services geared toward lower-income groups; engaged in land redistribution and labor reform; and established free public healthcare and education (Eibl 2020, 212–222). Conceived and inaugurated in the late 1960s by Nasser’s Minister of Culture, Tharwat Okasha, the City of Arts, as it was to be called, was a project in harmony with its era. The initiative testified to a belief that culture should be provided by the state to educate and civilize the population, thereby creating modern citizens aligned with the state’s revolutionary objectives (Okasha 2010, 769–770). Nasser’s vision of welfare, similar to that of other socialist countries in the mid-twentieth century, was based on the idea that modern and cultivated citizens can emerge only within an appropriate material and architectural infrastructure, all under tight state supervision. Schools, youth centers, professional syndicates, and for that matter the City of Arts in Giza, were all deemed necessary for a thriving, all-encompassing welfare state.
3Visiting the City of Arts today calls forth a mixed and somewhat confusing impression. While some buildings are newly renovated, others appear neglected or closed, converted into storage for discarded files. The level of activity varies widely too. Some institutions remain operational, drawing crowds seeking government-run artistic education, notwithstanding the burgeoning private cultural scene and widespread skepticism towards the offerings of the public sector. Other parts of the complex are simply gathering dust. No cultural activities have taken place for decades.
- 1 The Academy of Arts (Akâdîmiyyat al-Funûn) was established in 1969 to supervise the educational ins (...)
4The current state of affairs is the result of decades of uneven government attention. Since the inauguration of the complex’s different buildings in the late 1950s and 1960s, renovation and maintenance have been patchy and unsystematic. In his memoir, first published in 1987, Tharwat Okasha—the driving force behind the City of Arts, who served as Minister of Culture twice, from 1958 to 1962, and then again from 1966 to 1970—laments the deterioration into which some cultural institutions have fallen. He especially cites the example of the High Institute of Ballet, which began to decline in the 1970s. According to him, the downturn was due to the state withdrawing direct oversight, transferring the supervision from the Ministry of Culture to the Academy of Arts (Okasha 2000, 748–751).1 Generally, Okasha’s account of the rise and fall of the cultural infrastructure that he established identifies the 1970s as the period when expansion turned to decline. He attributes the slump to budget cuts, administrative incompetence, and, most importantly, the abandonment of cultural welfare ideals in favor of personal and bureaucratic agendas (Okasha 2000, 748–799).
- 2 This had been planned since 2013, when it was placed under the authority of the National Center for (...)
5However, not all the buildings of the City of Arts have faced the same fate. While some have been left to crumble, others have been targeted for renovation. The appointment of Farouk Hosni as President Hosni Mubarak’s Minister of Culture in 1989 led to a reconstruction program that sought to repurpose some City of Arts premises to serve the changing needs of the population. For instance, the Sayed Darwish Concert Hall, which had seen its golden days between the 1960s and 1990s, was rejuvenated in 2010, and renamed the Sayed Darwish Academic Center for Culture and Arts (Akâdîmiyyat al-Funûn 2010). Similarly, the Tharwat Okasha Center, which languished in neglect for decades, was revived in 2021 as part of the National Center for Cinema, to become a hub for the dissemination of cinema culture.2 Moreover, when we re-visited the area in the summer of 2024, changes were underway around the building on Gamal al-Din al-Afghani Street that we had found fenced-off and crumbling two years earlier. The building had been cleaned, and a new sign hung above the entrance, announcing that the old structure was about to become part of the High Cinema Institute. Today, therefore, it is only partly correct to consider the City of Arts a decaying remnant of long-abandoned Nasserist ambitions and ideals. The cultural complex in Giza manifests the sedimentation of welfare ambitions from different historical eras; processes of selective renovation and creative repurposing; the impact of private initiatives; and cultural workers animating socialist spaces and structures in the neoliberal present.
6Tharwat Okasha’s description of the 1970s as the period of decline for the cultural institutions of the Nasser era aligns with a standard narrative of the rise and fall of the Egyptian welfare state. According to this account, in the 1950s and 1960s, in common with many other post-colonial nation-states, the Nasser regime embraced nationalism combined with socialism, and built a vast state bureaucracy tasked with upholding the era’s ideals of egalitarianism and state-led national development. From the outset, the Free Officers included “achieving social justice” as one of the 1952 Revolution’s six guiding principles (Naguib 1955, quoted in ElSayed 2018). In the years that followed, the implementation of Nasser’s program of Arab socialism gave rise to new aspirations of consumption (Bier 2011), expanded bureaucratic procedures and practices of documentation (Ayubi 1980), and fostered an array of dreams, expectations, and images that redefined the meaning of the state and its relationship with the people (Labib 2019; Meijer 2015). By the late 1960s, the Egyptian nation-state had established a raft of public institutions and free-of-charge social services catering to citizens’ welfare and well-being (Elsayed 2018; Eibl 2020, 212–222).
7In Sudan, Egypt’s southern neighbor, the early history of the post-colonial state is typically viewed in terms of the challenges of creating a unified state across a territory riven with identity-based conflicts (Young 2018, 19). Discussions of the nascent Sudanese state have more often examined development than welfare, focusing particularly on large infrastructure projects. When discussed at all, the welfare state figures as a story of unrealized aspirations, rooted in the ideals of the 1964 October Revolution, a broad-based popular uprising against the military regime of Ibrahim Abboud. These ideals were taken up by the so-called May Regime, established after Gaafar Nimeiry’s assumption of power in the military coup of 1969. Whereas the first governments following Sudanese independence in 1956 had adopted market-oriented policies, the May Regime departed from the capitalist path of development in favor of state-led socialist growth. In its initial years, the revolutionary government pursued several socialist-leaning policy programs. Almost immediately after the coup, state companies were established to control key sectors of international trade, as it was deemed essential for achieving greater self-sufficiency and more equitable distribution (Niblock 1987, 242–46). One year later, the country saw a series of confiscations, sequestrations, and nationalizations of foreign trading firms and both foreign and locally-owned banks (Cross 2021, 255). On the social front, the new government focused on revising labor laws and expanding social services to meet popular needs, including the expansion of public education (Niblock 1987, 245). These welfare ideals did not emerge in a vacuum. They had long been championed by local grassroots movements (Abdullahi 2021), and they were further invigorated by existing examples of state-led welfare politics across Africa, such as those of Egypt’s Free Officers, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, or Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.
8Despite the welfare projects’ different trajectories in Egypt and Sudan, the historiographies of both countries tend to identify the 1970s as the decade when decline set in. Whereas, in the 1960s, “it was considered bad manners in the Arab region not to identify with the hue and cry of Nasserism, Ba’athism, and Arab Nationalism” (Khalid 2004, 341), by the 1970s, the concept of state-led development began to be widely viewed as a trap (Young 2018, 146). Cast as the socialist Nasser’s counterimage, the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (1970–1981) famously launched an economic program of infitâh (“opening up”) in 1974, aimed at encouraging Western investment, foreign trade, and market-driven liberalization. Across the southern border in Sudan, Nimeiry is understood to have taken a decisive step away from his Nasserist image in 1971, as he transitioned from state-led “socialism” to a blend of political Islam and economic liberalization. The implementation of the first structural adjustment program under the supervision of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1978 marked the definite endpoint of the Sudanese regime’s original welfare ambitions, while the adoption of Islamic Sharia laws in 1983 diverged from the secular vision of decolonization that had prevailed in the previous decades.
9Returning to Egypt, while the central pillars of the Nasserist welfare-state might have withstood the first wave of this liberal onslaught, the standard narrative has it that things went from bad to worse under Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011). After Egypt too turned to the IMF for financial support and a series of loan agreements in the 1990s, austerity and neoliberal structural adjustments dominated economic policy, significantly reducing public spending in favor of private investment. As a result, state employees saw severe salary cuts (Soliman 2011) and the state’s earlier commitment to job security in the public sector came to an end (Elsayed 2018). In many ways, this dismantling of the state’s welfare mission has continued unabated under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (2014–). Once again in close cooperation with international lenders, the Sisi regime has slashed subsidies on staple consumption goods (Vannetzel 2019 and in this issue), while pensions and social security payments have been eroded by rampant inflation (Mohamed 2018).
10In Sudan, in the meantime, as the promises of state-led development failed to materialize, state-led religiosity and counterinsurgencies filled the vacuum. The turn to a more piety-oriented discourse initiated by Nimeiry was carried on by his successor, Omar al-Bashir, who entrenched Islamic rule in the country for a quarter of a century (1993–2019). The same era saw the country being increasingly fragmentated along ethnic lines, driven by civil wars in the western and southern regions, and eventually the creation of the independent Republic of South Sudan in 2011. On the economic front, al-Bashir’s presidency was characterized by economic liberalization and borrowing from Gulf countries, alongside the launch of ambitious agricultural and irrigation projects. This marked a new phase for the Islamist-military regime, aiming to establish “development” and the “hydro-agricultural mission” as its core identity (Verhoeven 2015; Mohamud and Verhoeven 2016). Since al-Bashir was ousted in a military coup in 2019, the country has been plagued by violence, with further military coups, widespread protests, and an ongoing civil war, all exacerbating an already precarious socio-political situation.
11As with all standard narratives, the stories about Egypt’s and Sudan’s fluctuating welfare ambitions are pedagogically appealing, but marred by oversimplification. Over the last few decades, a growing body of scholarship has added nuance and complexity to these tales of rise and fall, challenging several of their central assumptions. Regarding Egypt, the first thing that this literature demonstrates is that Nasser’s welfare state was not entirely new. Welfare-oriented policies and institutions did in fact exist in Egypt before 1952 (see e.g. Pollard 2014; El Shakry 2007). The rupture at the time of the Free Officers’ coup was therefore less abrupt than the standard story suggests. Second, the welfare state was never as generous and comprehensive as we might like to believe. Social services and job security were always limited to urban, public-sector workers and white-collar state employees. Neither peasants, nor private sector employees, nor the urban poor were ever properly covered by the schemes and programs rolled out in the 1950s and 1960s (Loewe 2000, 14; Eibl 2020, 226-243). Third, the fifty-four years that have passed since Nasser’s death have not exclusively seen the defunding, liberalization, and privatization of previously stable institutions. The Sadat years, in particular, actually saw the strengthening and expansion of pension schemes and social assistance programs, especially for previously neglected women and workers (Bibars 2001, 83; Sabry 2005). Indeed, even during the heyday of IMF-led structural adjustments in the 1990s, the changes in welfare provision were never as drastic as has often been supposed. The implementation of reforms was always hesitant and typically incomplete, showing clear signs of what Yusuke Kawamura (2016) has called institutional “path dependence.”
12Similarly, in the case of Sudan, attributing welfare ambitions to the early years of the May regime and economic liberalization to the subsequent Islamist-military government of al-Bashir is a simplification at best. As has been argued, for instance, by Raphaëlle Chevrillon-Guibert (2017), framing the respective economic policy choices of these periods as homogenous sets fails to acknowledge their internally contradictory natures. More broadly, the tendency to attribute policy shifts solely to the state stems from an oversight of the significance of syndicates and political parties in promoting and implementing welfare ideals (see, for example, Abdullahi 2021). As a consequence of the influence of such grassroots movements, economic liberalization during al-Bashir’s regime did shift the burden of development onto civil society through charity and philanthropy. Yet, it did not lead to a straightforward withdrawal of the state (Marchal 1999). Rather, the policies resulted in the state’s redeployment, as it incorporated economic actors into its apparatus and surveillance (Ahmed 2007; Marchal 2015; Chevrillon-Guibert 2017). In this shift, some social practices that had previously been privately managed, such as the duty of charity (zakât), were integrated into the state’s apparatus and became central to its redistribution policies (Abdalla, this issue). Oftentimes, this created a hybrid form of development, relying on citizens to finance the state’s various development projects (Mahé 2018; Baillard and Haenni 1997).
13One striking continuity across presidencies and eras in both countries is a high degree of institutional and demographic fragmentation. The Egyptian welfare state has always looked very different for citizens employed in different sectors of the economy. Distinctions between professional groups apply in social insurance schemes as well as in the public health care system: while army personnel and top bureaucrats enjoy the most generous benefits paired with low risks and modest contributions, workers in the informal sector receive almost no protection at all (Loewe 2000, 5–10). Moreover, in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, favored ministries within the state apparatus (culture, police, military) were always pampered and well-funded, even when austerity hit other sectors hard, such as healthcare and education (Mitchell 2002; Soliman 2011; Adly 2020). In the aftermath of the 2013 military coup, government-led projects and initiatives have also increasingly circumvented the state budget, drawing on alternative semi-private funding schemes and crony networks (Kassab 2016; Hamama and El Sharnoubi 2019). The reality of a fragmented state has been equally prominent in the case of Sudan. Following independence, divided administrations and unequal access to the state and the resources under its control have perpetuated regional secessionist ambitions. Since the inception of the Sudanese state, visions of its structure and governance have largely reflected the perspectives of elite groups from northern Sudan, concentrated in the major cities (Khalid 1990; Niblock 1987).
14This fragmented picture challenges common-sense notions of the state as a uniform centralized entity that collects taxes and then redistributes them to citizens. As has been noted by anthropologists, no state is ever particularly homogenous (Aretxaga 2000; Gupta 2012; Hansen Stepputat 2001). Rather, complex overlaps and contestations between competing and often semi-independent “faces of the state” (Navaro-Yashin 2002) are what we should expect everywhere, notwithstanding the appearance of homogenizing “state effects” (Mitchell 1991). In Egypt and Sudan, these trends are obvious and historically entrenched, and they are creating a bewildering landscape of overlapping and sometimes contradictory welfare programs and initiatives. Fragmentation is the rule rather than the exception. Demarcations between public/private, development/decay, and bust/boom are not always easy to delineate.
15In this special issue of Égypte Soudan Mondes Arabes, we set out to explore the layered entanglements of remains and renewal that characterize the contemporary Egyptian and Sudanese welfare states. Premised on an understanding of the present as composed of multiple temporalities that impact and haunt policies and subjectivities (Salem 2020), the issue’s nine empirical articles draw on ethnography and historiography to examine the welfare states’ deteriorations, fragmentations, and reconfigurations.
16In the broadest of senses, the issue seeks to problematize understandings of historical change in terms of the linear succession of distinct eras, so as to underline instead the layered composition of materiality, times, lives, and worlds. While studies exist on how different political projects seep into one another in the fields of political economy (Vannetzel 2019) and historical imaginaries (Salem 2020), there is a lack of understanding of how the socialist past informs the neo-liberal present on the levels of infrastructure and institutions. As outlined in the previous section, the Egyptian and Sudanese welfare states have most commonly been considered through the lens of shifting economic policies. With the aim of breaking new analytical ground, this special issue proposes a different focus on material traces and institutional remnants of past welfare ambitions.
17To render this exercise concrete, the issue mobilizes the metaphors of ruins and ruination. Contemporary urban landscapes in Egypt and Sudan are rich with material remains of past projects aimed at creating more egalitarian and socially just societies: cultural palaces, theaters, youth centers, schools, hospitals, government offices, trade unions, syndicate branch offices and headquarters, industrial estates and factories, state-run consumer and producer cooperatives, basic utility infrastructures, social protection schemes, and more. Over time, many of these facilities have lost their original purposes, as they have been redesigned to meet the emergent needs of the market economy, public-private partnerships, and new public management. As shown in the opening section on the City of Arts in Giza, the layering of older and newer structures, institutions, and routines over decades have left us today with a rich material and ideological palimpsest.
18To study this meshwork as ruins means attending to history’s material effects in the present. In anthropology and adjacent disciplines, the notion of ruination has emerged over the past decade as a productive framework for undoing linear understandings of time (Dawdy 2010). Inspired by multiple re-readings of Walter Benjamin’s musings on the ruins of Paris shopping arcades, as well as by a broader “archaeological turn” within the humanities, scholars have shifted their focus from ruins as a site for romantic reflections on vanished pasts, icons of loss, longing, and nostalgia, to ruins as material presence and ruination as a process of decay paired with renewal. Ruins, seen from this perspective, are an analytical lens for excavating condensed alternative layers of history as they haunt and impact the present (Dawdy 2010).
19Ann Laura Stoler, an influential proponent of this perspective, explores ruins in terms of the material and symbolic after-effects of colonial violence—which, though chronologically in the past, persists in the “corroded hollows of landscapes, in the gutted infrastructures of segregated cityscapes and in the micro-ecologies of matter and mind” (Stoler 2013, 348). While in Stoler’s work ruins and ruination mostly have negative connotations, others have highlighted the generative potential of ruins for imagining new forms of life. Examined ethnographically, ruins emerge as important sites of urban activity (Edenson 2005), as resource areas for scavengers and collectors (Khatchadourian 2022), and, more broadly, as spaces where activities linked to informal value generation are apt to develop (Dawdy 2010, 776; Tsing 2015). Scholars have also emphasized how ruins may shape affects and subjectivities (Navaro-Yashin 2009; Gordillo 2013), or serve as a reminder of failed promises of modernization (Yarrow 2017). In all of these studies, we see how ruins perpetuate the past into the present in tangible and ideologically pervasive ways.
20All nine articles in the issue set out to examine how the ruins of once-thriving welfare states—buildings, infrastructures, institutions, documents, ideals—have an ongoing impact on today’s market-dominated societies, in the form of private investments, individual dreams, imaginaries, affects, memories, and more. In doing so, our authors ask distinct but overlapping questions. Under what conditions are material sites and the remains of socialist pasts left to decompose or being repurposed? How are welfare-state ruins appropriated and reshaped by individual, collective, and governmental actions respectively? What types of leisure activities and affective, economic, or ideological attachments do such ruins generate? How do the residual materialities and infrastructures shape attachments to the state and its mythologies?
21As the range of questions, sites, and themes makes clear, we take “ruins” to index an array of overlapping connotations and meanings. As Anna Tsing has noted, whether something is a “ruin” or not is always relative to one’s point of view; what might constitute a ruin for some may not be considered as such by others (Tsing 2015, 211). In our case, this multivalence has prompted a classification of the articles in the issues according to four types of ruins: (1) material remains of buildings, architectural structures, and construction projects; (2) institutional remnants like bureaucracies and administrative procedures inherited from past welfare projects; (3) lingering value systems tied to welfare ideals of social justice, equality, and community; and (4) material objects produced within the framework of past welfare systems, which allow social scientists to methodologically trace the state’s layered fragmentation.
22The two articles in the first section of the issue consider the afterlives of material ruins in contemporary Egypt. As both pieces show, the current condition of the welfare state’s physical remains is the result of layered histories of private and public initiatives that include a great deal of contingency, and that cannot be reduced to a linear narrative of socialism followed by liberalization.
23In Corten Pérez-Houis’s article, we are told of the demise of Egypt’s automated and semi-automated factories for the production of red bricks. A prestige investment by the state to provide citizens across the country with cheap building materials, brick factories have recently been left to fall into ruin as cement blocks gradually take over. As Pérez-Houis shows, the ruination of brick factories does not square well with the standard narrative of the Mubarak years as the heyday of privatization. In fact, it was in the 1980s and 1990s that state efforts at brick production peaked. Rather than a sign of the welfare state withering away, then, the decline should be understood as a symptom of shifting priorities, as the Egyptian state increasingly devotes its attention and resources to large-scale, military-led infrastructure projects in the desert.
24Carl Rommel’s article similarly considers shifting state-priorities, in this case as relating to state-run youth centers (marâkiz shabâb). As Rommel shows, a large network of youth centers was established in Egypt between the 1960s and 1990s to provide spaces for sports, cultural activities, and recreation for citizens without the means to acquire private club memberships. In recent decades, governmental defunding has hit the centers hard, pushing the government employees, with whom Rommel conducted his fieldwork, to raise their own revenues in order to become economically self-sufficient. Yet, depending on the vastly different ruins that employees at different centers are left to work with, such efforts have very different outcomes. What we see at Cairo’s youth centers, therefore, is a process of “patchwork ruination,” as some marâkiz are well funded and pristine, while others crumble into decay.
25The second section illustrates that ruins of the welfare state can be institutional as well as material. The three articles in this section focus on institutions that provide welfare services in tandem with welfare states that are always fragmented by default.
26The section’s first two articles consider professional syndicates in Egypt, illustrating how the state has long relied on non-state groups to supplement its own provisions. In Sophie Frankford’s essay about the Musicians Syndicate, this dynamic is traced from the establishment of the syndicate in 1944 to the present. As Frankford shows, membership in the syndicate has from the outset constituted a potential means through which individuals gain access to precious resources: private healthcare, pensions, and, most importantly, access to employment in a tightly regulated work environment. At the same time, the provision of these benefits has been contingent on the policing and exclusion of potential new members. In other words, this provision of welfare at the margins of the Egyptian state apparatus is conditional on the construction of moral boundaries.
27Marianna Ghiglia traces the shifting role of the Journalists Syndicate within a rapidly transforming Egyptian media landscape. Challenging the linear narrative of neoliberalism since the 1990s, she notes that state-owned press companies have not been privatized to the same extent as other public sector enterprises, even as competition from private media has increased. Indeed, Ghiglia shows that the state has continued to fund private as well as public newspapers indirectly through social services ostensibly provided by the syndicate. In particular a subsidy called al-badal—originally meant to pay for journalists’ training to keep up with new technologies—has developed into a major source of income for the majority of Egypt’s journalists.
28Finally, in the article written by Salma Abdalla, we are given a similar history of entangled public and private welfare initiatives, in this case from Sudan. Detailing the transformation of Sudanese zakât practices, Abdalla shows how the Sudanese government has incorporated what was previously a private charity ritual into a central instrument of the state’s socio-political project, and how this has occasioned contentious and critical discourses about morality, generosity, and state provision. At first glance, this might seem like the reversal of the phenomenon described in the other essays in the issue. In lieu of fragmentation, ruination, and privatization, the state is here incorporating what was previously a private institution. Yet, as Abdalla shows, this process of state integration triggered the ruination of the zakât system itself. The more these welfare practices were bureaucratized, the more corrupted they became, leaving a previously well-functioning charity system in a desperate state of decay.
29The two articles comprising the third section explore how value systems inherited from welfare projects of the Nasser era in Egypt linger in a neoliberal present steeped in very different ideals. In their respective articles on the Food Subsidy System (FSS) and culture palaces, Marie Vannetzel and Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė draw on ethnography to explore what happens to these welfare projects amid the current neoliberalization of food markets and the increasing commercialization of culture.
30Vannetzel discusses local-level effects of the 2014 reforms to the FSS, which were justified as an effort to produce fairer social policies. She reveals how free-market logic has been incorporated into the new FFS, placing pressure on local ration-shop owners to reconcile the new subsidy system with the needs of their clientele. Similarly, in her ethnography of culture palaces in Cairo, Šabasevičiūtė shows how Cairo’s enthusiasts of literature repurpose decrepit buildings of culture palaces for the cultural needs of their communities. She argues that culture activists depend on “their own efforts” (guhûd zâtiyya), such as fixing and cleaning, to make palaces suitable for events, attract visitors, and pursue cultural agendas suited to their communities. Yet, among these market-oriented transformations, the ideals and values of a more socialist past remain relevant. Through ethnographic research, both articles demonstrate how citizens strive to uphold the value systems originally embedded in the welfare projects—notably, the principle of husn al-mu‘âmala (“good treatment”) in the case of ration-shops, and the ideal of free access to culture and entertainment, in the case of Cairo’s culture palaces. Even though none of Vannetzel’s and Šabasevičiūtė’s interlocutors is old enough to have lived in and benefited from the Nasserist welfare state, idealized notions of what the state should be and what it should provide are still pervasive, as Nasserism continues to haunt the neoliberal present (Salem 2020).
31The final section wraps up the issue with two articles that illuminate how material ruins and ruination can serve as tools enabling researchers to methodologically trace an object and uncover larger stories of entangled, contradictory, fragmented, and layered welfare projects.
32Louisa Arango’s research article takes off from the mystery of abandoned water meters found in houses across different neighborhoods of Khartoum to understand the ambiguities of Sudan’s social policies, caught between welfare ambitions and a market economy, with neither of the models fully dominating or being realized. As Arango argues, the water meters attest to the Sudanese state’s initial intentions to privatize and marketize the capital’s water supply, before these plans were abandoned in favor of a public-sector welfare model. Read as ruins of uncompleted processes of (neo)liberalization and of “welfarization,” the water meters undermine the binary between models of welfare and (neo)liberal state services, revealing the layering, overlapping, and blurring of histories, ideals, and projects.
33Chihab El Khachab’s article—a shorter piece that forms part of ESMA’s Sources and Documents section—is more explicitly devoted to methodological concerns. It reflects on El Khachab’s recent experiences of researching family archives of retired state employees and the state-published books that flood the second-hand book market in Cairo, providing concrete guidelines on how to trace the remains of a welfare state in ruins. El Khachab suggests that we view second-hand books as “commodified traces of the welfare state’s publications,” or, in other words, “the ruins of the official cultural apparatus designed to bring culture to the people.” His article not only shows that the market for used books, documents, and personal libraries in present-day Cairo can provide alternative sources for accessing Egypt’s contemporary history, but also offers reflections on what these sources can reveal about the material constitution of the Egyptian welfare state.
34The articles collected in this issue of ESMA demonstrate that ethnographic and historiographic attention to ruins can provide new perspectives on the Sudanese and Egyptian welfare states, past and present. Under close examination, ruination is never simply a function of deterioration and decay. What we find among the welfare states’ institutional and material ruins is rather a mix of congruent and contradictory processes of relapse, restoration, and reappropriation. Persisting as powerful reminders of bygone eras, the ruins of welfare states that are studied in the pages of this issue are a shaping force in our own times.
35But what about the future? If ruination is an evolving process, if ruins have an impact on social worlds long after they have ceased to play their intended role, what can an examination of the ruins of the welfare state tell us about time to come? In Sudan, tragically, the future at the time of writing looks desperately bleak. Following the outbreak of civil war in April 2023, predicting the future is almost impossible. But we have to expect almost unfathomable amounts of social and material devastation, and the thorough ruination of the state, let alone of communities and human lives.
36As for Egypt, the welfare state looks set to move in multiple directions at once. President el-Sisi’s regime has long been intent on distancing itself from the Mubarak era by progressively eliminating zones of informality under the pretext of technological efficiency and professionalization. This encompasses intensified efforts to combat informal housing and neighborhoods (Sharp 2021; Khalil 2021), and extends to the reform of some public services, by incorporating technology and increased regulation and control (Vannetzel, this issue). The eradication of the remains and ruins of earlier welfare-state projects—whether material, institutional, or ideological—forms an integral part of this overarching push towards cleanliness and formalization.
37Another notable tendency, especially during the last few years, is an impressive, if selective, return of the Egyptian state as the main player reshaping crumbling welfare-state institutions. Institutions of culture are the first that come to mind, notably the extensive refurbishment of Culture Palaces across Egypt (Šabasevičiūtė, this issue), along with various buildings in the City of Arts in Giza. Another example is Egypt’s government-run youth centers, where the state is now returning as a primary investor after decades dominated by semi-privatization (Rommel, this issue; Al-Yawm al-Sâbi‘ 2023). In this way, el-Sisi’s regime is restoring parts of earlier welfare projects, especially those deemed crucial for broadcasting the state’s vision of development.
38While rehabilitating certain ruins, the military-led government is simultaneously eliminating others to replace them with new institutions and, even more spectacularly, colossal urban infrastructure. Today, Egypt in general and Greater Cairo in particular are the scene of an unprecedented construction boom: new highways and bridges, social housing schemes, a boardwalk along the Nile, monorails and metros are all part of the era’s national project, the so-called New Republic (al-jumhûriyya al-jadîda) (Naceur 2022). These developments generate their own kinds of ruins, ruins that are qualitatively different to those left by former welfare projects. As you walk through Cairo these days, what is likely to strike you are not crumbling modernist buildings like the ones in the City of Arts in Giza, but rather endless patches of construction sites with excavators overturning the earth, workers carrying cement blocks, long stretches of dismantled pavement, the indiscriminate tearing down of new as well as historic buildings, and rapidly rising new bridges, high rises, and housing projects.
39To think about this debris as ruins and the ongoing construction boom as a process of ruination is partly a matter of aesthetics. As Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov has noted, it can often be very difficult to determine if an unfinished construction project is in a state of development or decay (Ssorin-Chaikov 2016:694, 710-11); beginnings and ends have a cunning way of looking almost identical. But President el-Sisi’s inordinate project of constructing a New Republic is also a process of ruination insofar as it is set to play an as-yet-unknown role in the future. The developments and their ancillary debris are “ruins of the future,” to borrow Yarrow’s expression and infuse it with a slightly different meaning (Yarrow 2017). In other words, the remnants of the new city emerging from numerous construction sites across Cairo are certain to shape Egyptian states, sociabilities, and lives for decades to come. Just like the ruins of the welfare state examined in this special issue, the ruins of the future springing up all across Cairo are not merely symbolic or metaphorical; they are the very tangible debris of the new city in the making. How they will shape the future—long after their intended usage has been exhausted—is for future scholars to tell. What we can say now is that the ruination of the Egyptian and Sudanese welfare states is set to continue, adding new layers of institutions and infrastructure, and contributing to these states’ haunted and fragmented palimpsests.
Acknowledgements
The work by Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė on this special issue was supported by a research grant (no. 23-07353S) from the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR). Carl Rommel’s research was funded by a grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (no. P21-0155).
We would like to thank Lucie Revilla and Malak Labib for having read and commented on an earlier draft of this introduction.