Antonio Gramsci in the Arab World. The ongoing debate

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate not only how Gramscian categories are suited to explaining some of the events and phenomena in recent Arab political history, but above all how the most recent debate relates directly to that developed in the Arab world in the late 1970s, when Gramsci’s reflections began to penetrate for the first time in some countries of the Arab world, Lebanon, Egypt and Tunisia first of all. According to this analytical perspective, Gramsci’s accompanied the political Arab debate through the long political, social and cultural crisis originated in the mid-seventies in the MENA countries, until recent upheavals in 2011. Gramscian concepts as Hegemony, Civil Society, Organic and Traditional Intellectual, Passive Revolution, Southern Question have proven to be exceptional keys to understanding the various Arab socio-political issues in many different analytical fields.