Projects as an Iterative Pursuit

Egyptian Imaginaries of the Social Agency of the Project Form

in Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
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Carl Rommel Researcher, Uppsala University, Sweden carl.rommel@antro.uu.se

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Abstract

This article examines imaginaries of the social agency of the project form in contemporary Egypt. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with lower-middle class men in Cairo who contrive small-scale investment projects, it demonstrates how projects are envisioned to (1) create the world anew, (2) shape the ‘near future’ and (3) fashion platforms of relative stability amid unpredictability, hustling and making do. The article also illustrates how the project form's normative temporalities are often distorted, materialising in iterative sequences of never fully completed projects that nonetheless ‘make the world move’. In conclusion, I suggest that the same iterative temporality is recognisable in the Egyptian regime's current push for spectacular megaprojects, and that an imaginary of social and temporal agency undergirds the attraction to Egyptian projects across scales.

Résumé

Cet article examine les imaginaires de l'agentivité sociale liés à la forme de projet en Égypte contemporaine. En s'appuyant sur un travail de terrain à long terme avec des hommes de la petite classe moyenne au Caire qui mènent des projets d'investissement à petite échelle, nous montrons comment ces projets sont envisagés comme ayant trois objectifs : 1) créer le monde à nouveau, 2) façonner ‘l'avenir proche’, et 3) fabriquer des plateformes de la stabilité relative, malgré les conditions d'incertitude, les pratiques de l'arnaque, et débrouille. L'article montre aussi comment les temporalités normatives de la forme de projet sont souvent dénaturées, et se matérialisent en séquences itératives de projets qui ne sont jamais achevés mais qui, malgré tout, ‘faire bouger des choses’. En guise de conclusion, nous suggérons que la même temporalité itérative est reconnaissable dans la politique actuelle du régime égyptien de créer des mégaprojets spectaculaires, et un imaginaire de l'agentivité sociale et temporale est à la base de l'attraction aux projets égyptiens à toutes les échelles.

It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends. (Didion 1968: 225)

The current Egyptian regime is a regime engrossed in projects (mashari‘; sing. mashru‘). Following the 2013 military coup that ousted the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated President Muhammad Mursi, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's army-backed administration has invested huge monetary and symbolic resources in megaprojects: thousands of kilometres of highways and bridges, ambitious land reclamations, fish farms, solar energy parks, an expansion of the Suez Canal and urban developments in the country's desert hinterlands. The New Administrative Capital 45 kilometres east of central Cairo constitutes the most spectacular example. Launched with great fanfare in 2015, it is projected to house most government institutions and seven million inhabitants by the late 2020s (see Taweel 2023).

The Egyptian project extravaganza has spurred on numerous, heated debates. According to an official government statement, ‘mega national projects’ constitute a ‘locomotive of development . . . they raise hope in a better future that ensures a decent life for every citizen’.1 The mainstream media tend to agree. For television pundits, such as Ahmed Musa on Sada el-Balad, ‘projects are investments, that is activities’. They constitute ‘achievements for the country as a whole’ (ingazat lil-balad kulluh) and ‘a path towards a stronger Egypt full of greatness (khayr)’ (‘‘ala mas'uliyyati’, 3 June 2018). Other commentators are more critical. In autumn 2019, Mohamed Ali, a charismatic former building contractor to the Armed Forces Engineering Authority, posted a series of Facebook videos from his exile in Spain, revealing incriminating stories of corruption in projects that his company had participated in. The videos attracted millions of views, caused massive public outrage and initiated a short but intense wave of protests that the regime was not able to fully control.2

Ali's revelations struck a chord among a citizenry marked by austerity policies. Over the last 13 years, I have conducted more than 48 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo, and I have often heard interlocutors questioning the rationale of spending billions on megaprojects at the same time as subsidies are cut and taxes raised, inflation is devastating, and millions struggle to get by.3 Still, while my friends are often cynical and critical about how specific projects are financed and managed, a broader imaginary of projects (mashari‘) as the key to better tomorrows stays strong. Megaprojects may be spoken about in a language of excess and wastefulness, yet I continue to meet people who express admiration for the achievements and sentiments tinted by national pride. Many would argue that strict cost-benefit analyses do not tell the complete story. This is what 36-year-old Hagar,4 a domestic worker and mother-of-three from the working-class neighbourhood Imbaba, told me in spring 2018 as I questioned the rationale of the recent expansion of the Suez Canal.

I'll tell you something, yi mister. This new canal was not built because we want to make money (‘ashan naksab). No, no, no – it was built to make the world move a bit (‘ashan yimishshi al-dunya shiwayya). Did you see this country in the days of the revolution? The country was standing still! Now, there are loads of projects (dilwa'ti fih mashari‘ kitir).

In this article, I use this comment of Hagar's as a launching pad for an ethnographic examination of the social agency that inheres in the project form. The promise to ‘make the world move a bit’ after a period when it has been ‘standing still’ is, I will suggest, one reason why Egyptian projects continue to be alluring and enticing, even if people like Hagar know that projects are ripe with waste and corruption, that few deliver according to plans and that they rarely benefit anyone but the already wealthy. In doing so, my research both builds on and critically nuances recent studies questioning the rationality and sustainability of Egyptian megaprojects (e.g. Sims 2010, 2018). It also aims at contributing to anthropological debates about development and infrastructure that push beyond commonplace notions of ‘success’ and ‘failure’, ‘completion’ and ‘delay’ (e.g. Baxstrom 2011; Carse and Kneas 2019; Ferguson 1994; Guma 2020; Gupta 2018; Ssorin-Chaikov 2016).

To this end, the article will, for the most part, leave the world of megaprojects behind. My ethnography will instead consider a much smaller type of ‘projects’ that also proliferate in Egypt today. The Arabic word for project, mashru‘ (pl. mashari‘ or mashru‘at), has similar connotations as its English counterpart: research projects, construction projects, talent development projects, infrastructure projects, and so on. In everyday parlance, however, a mashru‘ first and foremost indexes a small self-run business: to drive a taxi; to buy and sell sportswear; to open a café; to raise ostriches on one's roof; to build a football pitch that one rents out by the hour. Over the last years, my fieldwork in Cairo has followed men from the lower-middle classes who plan, launch and run such investment projects. While Egyptian women are busy running projects too (Elyachar 2010), my research has focused exclusively on male mashari‘, mostly for reasons of access, but also because of a longstanding interest in Egyptian masculinity.5 Many of the men with whom I work have attended university and they often have some kind of salaried employment (wazifa). That such men find it necessary to launch side-projects to top up eroding salaries makes them part of a growing subsection of the postcolonial middle classes that is both educated and underemployed (e.g. Cohen 2004; Jeffrey 2010; Mains 2007). Their entrepreneurial aspirations spotlight a transforming Egyptian social contract, in which formal education no longer guarantees social and economic stability, and where capitalist ethics are omnipresent (Armbrust 1996; Pettit 2023; Schielke 2015; Shechter 2018).

My primary interest in this article is the imaginaries of social and temporal agency that projects ground for my interlocutors. As argued by Andrew Graan and myself in the introduction to this special issue, one modality of the project form's ‘normative power’ is that it allows humans to perceive the social and material world as mouldable and manageable. It is both a temporal and fundamentally agentive organisational form that provides recognisable templates for humans to act in and on time. While this might seem similar to Sherry Ortner's analysis of agency as ultimately a kind of project-making (2006: 129–154), my ambition is actually markedly different. Rather than using a pre-conceived but never fully unpacked notion of ‘projects’ to theorise what intentional agency is and is not (as Ortner does), I examine ethnographically how project-making allows men in Cairo to imagine an agency of a particular kind and with a specific temporal orientation. What is an Egyptian man who runs a mashru‘ understood to be capable of doing and achieving, and what temporal character does his action take? How does this contribute to the project form's widespread attraction and appeal?

My arguments will proceed in four cumulative ethnographic sections, all of which consider a mashru‘ launched by a man who I call Samir. The first discusses how projects are envisioned as opportunities to create the world anew. The second explores how projects facilitate a human agency to work on the near future, a timespan for intervention that otherwise looks conspicuously abandoned. In the third section, I show that projects are often talked about as vehicles to achieve a widely shared dream of ‘stability’ (istiqrar), although stability is as much a prerequisite for the agency inherent in project-making as the result of it. The final section considers how the project form's idealised temporalities are distorted in actually existing projects. Most often, projects in Cairo materialise as what I call an iterative pursuit: a series of never fully completed projects and an ongoing hunt for the new, which is considered valuable not because of its end results, but due to the work and action that it nonetheless provides. In the conclusion, I once again scale up the conversation to megaprojects, teasing out a series of tentative parallels in terms of temporalities and aspirations. While by no means arguing that small and large mashari‘ follow exactly the same logic, I do suggest that my ethnography about individual projectors allows us to isolate an imaginary of social and temporal agency, which is inherent in projects across scale. This imaginary of action, movement, progress and stability renders Egyptian projects – large as well as small – immensely attractive.

Samir's New Project

When Cairene men describe their dreams of projects, they envision novelty and a fresh start. The projects that my interlocutors contrive are rarely spoken about in terms of maintenance or small fixes, but as decisive breaks and clean slates. This imaginary of the new is reflected in the Arabic etymology. Similar to ‘project’ in English – which stems from the Latin verb proicere, to ‘throw forth’ or ‘thrust out’ – mashru‘ is derived from shara‘, to ‘enter’, ‘go into’ or ‘initiate’. The passive participle of shara‘, a mashru‘ is by definition something that has been ‘entered’ or ‘initiated’. Launching a mashru‘ means taking a step into a previously unknown. It gestures to radically altered futures shaped by human imagination and intervention.6

The promise to create the world anew has long attracted my friend Samir, an unmarried man in his early fifties from the Cairene lower-middle class neighbourhood Shubra. Samir stems from a family with a bit of social but less economic capital. In the 1930s, his father established a small supermarket in one of Shubra's leafy side streets, which is still run by Samir's older brother. The family also owns three early-twentieth-century apartment buildings in the neighbourhood, although the properties generate almost no income as a consequence of Egypt's old rent control laws.7 For twenty years, Samir has lived with his aging mother in an apartment in one such building, across the street from the family supermarket.

Having experimented with multiple political ideologies in his youth, Samir has led a strictly pious life since his mid-thirties: he prays five times a day; he fasts not only during Ramadan but also at the 13th, 14th and 15th of each lunar month;8 he makes religious references in every thinkable kind of conversation. Samir also sports a Salafi-inspired beard without a moustache and a dark spot on his forehead (zabiba), the unmistakable mark of diligent prayer. And yet, the fact that Samir typically dresses in sports clothes and trainers indicates that my friend is not your average Salafi. The way people address him as yi kutsh (coach) shows that worldly affairs matter too. In fact, Samir's main preoccupation has long been to provide Shubra's male youth with opportunities to play football. This is something he told me one of the first times we met:

A sportsman (ragil riyadi) is a complete human being (insan kamil). He sleeps well, eats well, takes care of himself. [. . .] This is what I teach the youth. I want to make them respectable people, men who do good to others. When I train boys, I teach them everything: discipline and working hard, morals, religion, everything.

For some ten years now, Samir has furthered these aims through projects (mashari‘). When we first met in 2016, he was running a football academy at a youth centre (markaz shabab) in northern Cairo, and he was organising matches for Shubra's adolescents against teams coached by friends of his in other parts of the capital. Recently, Samir and an old school mate had also taken charge of a five-a-side football pitch inside a ministry compound. Having paid one year of rent upfront, they were in turn renting out the pitch to groups of boys and men who played football recreationally, or to coaches running football academies. Samir was visibly proud as he gave me a tour of the site. The space was green, clean and isolated from the city noise. He told me that he would soon start his own football school, fostering ethical, healthy and respectable young men.

When I returned to Cairo the following year, I found Samir's plans in shatters. The ministry had suddenly hiked the rent, forcing him to let the pitch go. Samir was working long shifts in the family supermarket that autumn. When I passed by, I often stayed talking until 2 or 3 am. Some of these nights, I found Samir tired and, as he admitted, slightly depressed (mukta'ib). He would tell me about a past when things had been different: when his activities with the youth had rendered him a famous man in Shubra; when he had been active; when there had been projects. ‘Nowadays, people still know me, but I used to be more famous’, he bemoaned once.

I'm just sitting (a‘id) in the supermarket.9 There are no activities. It used to be easier. One could train kids anywhere: in a square, or in a park, or at a youth centre [. . .] I need to do something; I need to find a new project.

Other evenings, Samir was more upbeat, joking with customers and offering candy to kids in the street. On such nights, when no customers heard us, he would tell me about a new project that might be on the horizon. A month ago, he had found an advertisement in a newspaper announcing that a courtyard inside a school, only a few hundred metres away, would be rented out. Samir had answered the ad promptly. He had negotiated with the school's headmistress and they had reached a preliminary agreement: Samir would rent the courtyard for five years, provided that he changed the surface from asphalt to artificial grass. Samir found the conditions excellent. He already had the necessary connections.

There is this guy here in Shubra called Ahmed. His company constructs pitches all over Cairo. He imports artificial grass from Turkey. He'll do it for a good price and the company will cover half of the investment. As he has a business licence, he'll sign the contract, but we'll be partners. Me and the company, 50/50.

Seeing the excitement in Samir's eyes, I asked him how he envisioned that this project would change his life. What would be different to working in the supermarket? Samir assured me that the pitch (al-mal‘ab) would be a whole new ballgame. First, it would be a chance to make much more money. The supermarket, he explained, hardly allowed him and his brother to stay afloat. A pitch implied higher risks but potentially much higher gains. But money was not Samir's main drive.

This project is beautiful. It's clean and right here in Shubra! There are no other pitches close by. I already know people who want to play and there are ministries and companies with employees who play after work. We'll activate the youth (hananashshat al-shabab): academies, matches, tournaments. [. . .] What is important is not the money, but money make good things (khayr).

Working on the Near Future

In a much-quoted 2007 article, anthropologist Jane Guyer argued that the contemporary era is preoccupied either with immediate concerns – hustling, making do, quick fixes – or with very distant horizons – monetarist calls for macroeconomic stability or revivalist Christianity's notion of ‘prophetic time’. In the doxas of neoliberal economics and evangelic preaching that constitute her archives, ‘the long run’ is where rewards could possibly be reaped, either as economic growth (that eventually trickles down) or as redemption at the day of the Second Coming. By contrast, Guyer famously suggested that the ‘near future’ has been curiously ‘evacuated’. Today, nobody has the time, ability or resources to manage the mid-term timespan, which used to be the primary target for political, social and individual interventions during the post-war era. Indeed, both monetarists and evangelists stipulate that attempting to optimise the near future is likely to be counterproductive, immoral or even outright dangerous. The temporal orientation is either right here or intangibly far away. At one point, Guyer calls this ‘a combination of fantasy futurism and enforced presentism’ (2007: 410).10

One appeal of the social agency conjured by the project form is its potential to dislocate Guyer's temporal fix and reanimate the near future as a timescale of productive action. Projects are not only envisioned as instigators of something new and better. They also provide opportunities to work out futures that are neither completely proximate nor overly distant. Samir's football pitch provides an illustration in this regard. It took a bit longer than he had hoped for, but in December 2017 his project started to materialise. As the school's headmistress finally gave her green light, frustrating waiting was replaced by febrile activity. In less than two weeks, Samir managed to borrow 170,000 Egyptian pounds (approx. 10,000 U.S. dollars at the time) from family, friends and informal credit circles (gama‘iyyat). As soon as his part of the investment had been collected, the bulldozers from Ahmed's company moved in, and a green artificial grass field was constructed on top of the schoolyard's torn concrete. In early March 2018, the pitch opened for the public.

In the five years that has passed since, Samir has spent all but a handful of evenings at the site. From 4 pm – when the pupils and teachers leave for the day – until 2 o'clock in the morning, he sits on a plastic chair at the school's entrance, answering his phone, taking reservations and dealing with payments, as boys and men play under the yellow floodlight. In the last three years, Samir has worked together with a younger assistant who manages the activities for some hours every night. This arrangement, he tells me, has freed up time to carry out crucial development and maintenance work. Instead of taking out a salary, Samir has invested most revenues into the facilities: replacing the nets surrounding the pitch; refurbishing toilets; improving the lighting; setting new tiles around the field's perimeters. In 2019, he opened a second pitch in the school's inner courtyard. In spring 2022, he inaugurated a third football field inside the facilities of a charity organisation a couple of kilometres away.

To pull off these improvements, Samir has mobilised already existing networks of family and acquaintances. He has brought in players, borrowed money, acquired high-quality building materials and had manual works done at a reasonable price. He also cooperates with coaches who run football academies for boys and girls on weekends. As Samir's contracts with the school last for five years only – when they expire, the pitches will belong to the school – it comes naturally to envision his efforts as temporally limited. In late 2019, I asked him what he ultimately wanted his project to achieve. This is part of his answer:

The school will take everything after five years, but that's not [a] bad [timespan]. Look how much we've achieved in less than two [years]! [. . .] Step by step, I built the project; step by step, it will improve [. . .] By the way: for the youth, five years is a long time. I mean, a boy who starts training at the age of ten will be fifteen [when the project ends].

The agency that Samir realises through the football project ticks most boxes for what Guyer would call ‘midterm reasoning’ (2007: 409). Operating on a foreseeable five-year future, his mashru‘ affords him concrete opportunities to conjure up, work on and improve the world around him through creativity, social networks, capital and diligent work. As noted in the introduction to this special issue, this is a general feature of the imaginary of social agency inhering in the project form. Targeting a future that is neither distant nor immediate, projects everywhere facilitate a ‘temporal sovereignty’ (Ramsay 2017) over the mid-range timespan. The project form encourages precisely that modernist vision of linear and incremental improvements, which according to Guyer belongs to the past.

Now, the observation that Guyer's proposition might have been overly schematic is neither new nor limited to projects. Several anthropologists have in recent years pinpointed activities, ambitions, schema and techniques filling the near-future gap that evangelists and monetarist leave evacuated: capitalist labour regimes (Bear 2015), bureaucratic planning (Abram 2014), house-building (Nielsen 2014) and political organisation (Lazar 2014; see also Miyazaki 2007). In Egypt, such scholarship has identified a pervasive near-future-oriented ethics within revivalist interpretations of Islam, an ethics that amalgamates productively with capitalist dynamics and ideals of family building (Schielke 2015), as well as with middle-classed framings of the 2011 Revolution (Mittermaier 2014).

And yet, my point here is not to yet again illustrate that Guyer might have overstated her case. What I suggest is rather that her argument about an evacuated near future resonates extremely well in present-day Egypt, and that mashari‘ become attractive precisely because they constitute one of few available avenues for imagining and acting on a mid-term horizon that is otherwise conspicuous by its absence. Drawing on fieldwork conducted right before and immediately after the January 2011 Revolution, Samuli Schielke has argued that many Egyptians live their lives ‘in the future tense’: economically, religiously and politically (2015). In the wake of the revolution's collapse, however, Cairenes whom I meet are also familiar with the sentiments that Guyer calls ‘enforced presentism’. The ambition to live in the future tense might still be widespread, but so is also an acceptance that the near future is unlikely to be any better than today, and a resignation vis-à-vis the possibilities to impact the future in an era dominated by economic urgency (Bandak and Anderson 2022). Many people find themselves ‘stranded in the present’, as David Scott (2014) puts it in an analysis of (post-)revolutionary temporality in Grenada. Moreover, while the recent wave of austerity paired with currency devaluations have had devastating effects on welfare and purchasing power, President el-Sisi keeps ensuring the citizens that these policies will pay off in the ‘long run’. That the horizon for the reaping of these riches is constantly pushed forward should come as no surprise.

Samir knows everything about this predicament. My friend invested great hopes in the revolution, and its collapse has left him politically cynical. He sees no prospects that Egypt will change for the better under the current regime, nor that the people could transform politics or society. He should have known better than being hopeful about worldly affairs, he has often told me. The destiny is anyway written by Allah. Still, Samir has kept envisioning social improvements in the form of mashari‘. His work at and around the football pitch renders him stressed and attentive, but also distinctly aspirational. In the midst of political and economic paralysis, then, projects spawn a limited but existing realm for temporal action for men like Samir. The project form grounds an imaginary of agency that brings together capitalist investment, Islamic notions of Allah as the provider of material and social goods, and his personal commitment to reforming the youth through sports, and it allows Samir to both dream of and work productively towards a better future (see Bear 2015). This imaginary of temporal agency is both enticing and rare. In contemporary Cairo steeped in economic uncertainty, mashari‘ constitute atypical sites of promise and possibility, where the near future surfaces as something that can be understood, managed and moulded.

Stability as Agency

It frequently happens that people I meet in Cairo tell me that they launch mashari‘ to ‘become a bit more stable’ (hastaqirr shiwayya). Such aspirations should not come as a surprise. As several ethnographers of contemporary Egypt have noted, istiqrar (stability) indexes a bundle of conformist social, economic and moral values that might be glossed as ‘the good life’: material comfort, family building, a home and not too many worries about tomorrow. Istiqrar in this sense functions as a historically entrenched meta-value. It is an ideal that few people would think of questioning, and toward which most Egyptians strive (Kreil and Schielke 2023; Makram Ebeid 2012, 2014; Schielke 2015, 2020).11

To pinpoint more precisely what stability signifies for my interlocutors, it is useful to consider what a stable life is meant to leave behind. When men like Samir speak about mashari‘ as opportunities to become more stable, they often counterpose istiqrar to bahdala (or less frequently, marmata): the humiliating daily struggle to merely get by; the dirty and sweaty hustle of moving around in the city; a life full of monotonous labour without tangible returns. Projects carry a promise of bringing this predicament to an end. Especially when Samir ran his first pitch inside the ministry compound, he often praised how it allowed him to be ‘relaxed’ (mistrayah). ‘Isn't it beautiful’, he told me when I visited. ‘We are in the middle of the city, but the city isn't here. No zahma (congestion); no bahdala. So clean and respectable (nadif wi muhtaram)’.

For another friend, Mahmoud, who will be introduced in the next section, relaxation might not be at the horizon, but the promise is similar. Finding the right project, he acknowledges, would not free him from work, yet it would allow him to work a bit more comfortably and productively (see Rommel 2018). It would see him breaking free from a vicious circle of endless work to merely cover expenses (masarif) without ever getting anywhere. Mahmoud, like Samir, talks about this prospect as istiqrar. For both men, projects offer opportunities to stabilise sealed-off spheres of control, productivity, agency and respectability. A mashru‘ is imagined as a limited yet demarcated platform of stability outside and above the messy bahdala, in which men like them are otherwise destined to be caught up.

These observations from contemporary Cairo nuance the way sociologists and business scholars have theorised ‘projectification’ in (Western) societies since the 1970s. In this scholarship, projects are habitually portrayed as uniquely flexible. In contrast to previously dominant organisational forms – for example, five-year plans or welfare programmes – project temporalities are short, mouldable, adaptable and better suited to an increasingly volatile world (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005 [1999]; Jensen et al 2016; Lundin and Söderholm 1995). For the men I work with, the situation is somewhat different. Surely, the world is unpredictable, and no doubt, the project form thrives on its flexibility. As I have argued, almost any business initiative could be formatted as a mashru‘. And yet, a measure of permanence is at least as important. For my interlocutors, projects are rarely counterposed to dismantled universal service provision or modernist planning – they rarely benefited from such anyway – but to the ever-ongoing bahdala, the daily struggle to get by. In this sense, while projecting in Egypt could be understood as yet another way to ‘make do’ and ‘hustle’ (Di Nunzio 2019; Mains 2007), projects crucially nurture dreams that exceed mere survival: they gesture towards a tangible yet limited insulation from precarity glossed as social, economic and conjugal istiqrar. In my ethnographic setting, then, we glimpse a partly new facet of the imaginary of temporal agency grounded by projects. At some times and in some places, the project form might look attractive because it comes across as a relatively stable organisational template, not a particularly flexible one (see also Boltanski and Chiapello 2005 [1999]: 103–107).

At the same time, the Egyptian dream of stability is not a dream of non-action. As anthropologist Alexandra Schindler (2021) has noted, istiqrar does not primary connote stillness, but a capacity to move forward in controlled, predictable and productive fashion. Indeed, becoming stable often means breaking free from periods of stifling idleness, to once again get going (Schindler 2021: 153–186).12 As already discussed, mashari‘ can both kickstart and sustain action. When Samir was desperate to find a new project in late 2017, he often talked about himself as idle and inactive: he was just ‘sitting’ in his supermarket; he was waiting for others to act; there were no activities. Later, when the pitch at the school was up and running, he talked about the five years that he had been given as a period of precious stability, during which he would work productively to effect forward-looking change. In summer 2018, a few days before leaving Egypt, I asked Samir what he hoped to have achieved by the time I returned, six months later. He said:

So far, there've been many troubles with the headmistress asking for additional money and repairs: no stability. I haven't been able to sit back and relax one single day [. . .] You said six months? First of all, I'll fix some problems and pay off debts. That's most important: stability. After that, I'll start my own training sessions for young boys. Training them at 7 am on Friday mornings, teaching them morals, discipline, everything.

Samir's reflections that day shed light on how istiqrar functions as both a means and an end in Cairo's project economy: how it is a result of, but also feeds, the agency that makes projects attractive. As I have shown, the social agency that the project form allows men to imagine might first and foremost be about creating something new and working on the near future, possibly with the intention to one day achieve a measure of much-valued istiqrar. And yet, this work in and on time is more often than not premised on there being a bit of stability in the first place: in periods of too acute precarity and crisis, margins shrink to a minimum and there is neither time nor capital for men to project at all. As such, stability features recursively in the imaginary of social agency grounded by projects in Cairo. To launch a project requires a controllable space for action amid uncertainty and hassle, a realm of active and purposeful calm that only a project seems capable of carving out.

Projects as an Iterative Pursuit

The project form's idealised temporalities are often disfigured in actually existing projects. Here, the neat imaginary of agency, newness, stability and near-future improvements clashes with conflicting rhythms, contingencies and limitations (see Introduction, this issue). My friend Mahmoud – a father-of-three in his early 40s living in the working and lower middle-class area Matariyya – has learned this the hard way. Mahmoud grew up in a village in the Nile Delta, and he moved to Cairo to attend university. Ever since I met him in 2011, he has worked as a gym instructor in a private university in a desert suburb. This is by some measures a decent employment (wazifa). The salary is above the national average; it gives his family private health insurance; his working hours and holidays are relatively generous. Despite that, Mahmoud has always been looking elsewhere, always been searching for projects (mashari‘). After selling a plot of land that he inherited from his late father, he bought a taxi that he drove before and after his hours in the gym. On sensing that the taxi business was faltering, he sold the vehicle and bought a private car for driving Uber. In the month before the floating of the Egyptian currency in 2016, Mahmoud was involved in an initially flourishing but eventually disastrous black-market currency exchange scheme. For many years, he has traded pet birds that he raises on his balcony. Mahmoud has also tried to establish himself in the business of selling fishing gear on Facebook, and together with a group of colleagues, he has planned – but never succeeded – to invest in a workshop producing textile patches for clothes repair. Like Samir, Mahmoud too has long dreamt of building a football pitch, but he has not found a suitable location.

Mahmoud's hunt for entrepreneurial projects resonates with the imaginary of agency accounted for above. Only a mashru‘, he is convinced, could make a decisive leap into a radically improved unknown. It would provide a small platform of stability, from which he could work a bit more productively, improve his economic situation and give his kids a better life than he has had. In October 2019, Mahmoud took a few days off from the gym to drive me and a couple of my colleagues to a series of megaprojects in the deserts. My friend and I had plenty of time to talk in the car, and our discussions often returned to projects. At one point, as we were returning to the city and dusk fell over the congested eight-lane Suez Road, he told me:

For people in Matariyya, projects are the only chance. I'm trying to think of new projects all the time. Did you know that in Islam trading (tigara) is considered superior to salaried work (wazifa)? It's beautiful to create something from scratch. [. . .] What is important is to have ambition (tumuh) and to take chances. [. . .] My job in the gym won't take me anywhere. The salary is only [enough] for daily expenses. I could never send my kids to a good school. Everyone needs a project that works (mashru‘ illi shaghal) to make something new.

At the same time, Mahmoud is aware how difficult it is to get it right. Egypt, he has often told me, is no good for projects. ‘The problem’, he continued as we exited the ring road and descended on the Corniche along the Nile,

is the government. They control everything: permits, taxes, fees, bribes. It's impossible to establish anything without contacts (wasta). [. . .] But I'll continue searching. What else can one do? I have started many projects, but I didn't have any luck. It's all about luck and destiny (hazz wi nasib). One day, I'll find a project that works.

Mahmoud knows from experience that projects come and go. As soon as one is up and running, the promised stability at the horizon, breakdown typically ensues, and it is time to start hunting anew. Mahmoud is by no means alone in finding it easier to start new projects than establishing something lasting. In my research material, it is rule rather than exception that projects open up one day and close down the next; that they are in a perpetual stage of development; that there is always something new projected for. This is partly due to the fact that project failures push people to launch new projects. For years, Mahmoud was using all the money he made from driving Uber to pay back debts from his ruinous currency-exchange business; my friend Omar, another football coach, started a sports shop that did not succeed, and is now running a football academy to pay off his debts; as soon as Samir was pushed out from his first pitch at the ministry, he immediately began searching for a new one.

This start-and-stop temporality testifies to the project form's remarkable adaptability. The project form is a template for imagination and agency that is flexible and recognisable enough to format a plethora of actual projects, and this is a key reason why people are able to project again, and then again. It is also worth noting how this cycle dislocates the controllable near-future timescale that renders projects attractive in the first place. Egyptian mashari‘ might be envisioned as platforms of stability for controlled future-making, but that is rarely what is found at closer inspection. Instead of one project affording the agency to re-shape the intermediate future, the experiences of men like Mahmoud rather speak of a proliferation of half-completed projects and an ongoing hunt for the new, which taken together seems never-ending. In this sense, projecting in Cairo constitutes an always ongoing iterative pursuit in what Ashley Carse and David Kneas have called a ‘suspended present’ (2019: 18–20). More often than not, the project form's idealised near-future temporality fizzles out into much shorter and much longer horizons, a combination of acute short-termness (new projects all the time) and overarching long-termness (a never-ending stream of unfinished projects) with the near future once again palpably evacuated. Ironically, dreams of a stable near future end up reproducing the instabilities of an endless present.

Among the people I work with in Cairo, this iterative pursuit is widely accepted. Mashari‘ might be talked about in terms of decisive breaks that could change everything, but there is also an acknowledgment that a project that ends all project-making is unlikely to ever appear. Still, a half-completed project is better than no project at all. Getting a chance to leave the struggles of the bahdala behind and work a bit more productively might be worth a great deal, even if it does not last. Actions in the present have real effects also when they do not result in the future planned for and gestured to (see Baxstrom 2011). As Mahmoud put it that day in the car: what else can one really do but continue searching, hunting and projecting?

Furthermore, running a project, even if it eventually fails, might facilitate new projects further down the line. For Samir, this insight has developed over time. Ever since the pitch at the school opened, he has kept looking for additional opportunities. Over the years, we have visited numerous parks, schoolyards and parking lots to get a sense of potentials and problems. In fact, I have often sensed that Samir takes solace in future projects when frustrations amount at the current one. In January 2019, he told me that he felt mistreated by the school, which kept on demanding additional services from him. He had also been cheated by his partner in the construction company who did none of the work but wanted half of the profit. At the same time, Samir did not want to complain too much. ‘Money is not everything’, he told me,

I've also gained a lot of experience and contacts (khibra wi ‘alaqat). This phone is money (al-tilfon da fluss), all the contacts that I have in it. Even if they threw me out from the pitch today, I'd have this [his phone and contacts]. It would make it easy to start a new project. The pitch has made me a bit famous.

This quote speaks to a final imaginary of agency inhering in projects, an agency intimately related to the iterative temporalities that mashari‘ manifest in Cairo today. By carving out a platform of stability and momentarily relieving a man from the bahdala, a project might not solve everything it was intended to solve, but it might provide just enough time, space and resources to look up, and look around, and to move on to the next project when the current one comes to an end. In a similar way that credit has become indispensable for large sections of the Chilean population, allowing them to buy a bit of time and wait for possibilities in an era of precarity (Han 2011), or the way waiting a year or two before taking up formal employment provides relatively well-off youth in northern India with skills and social networks that ultimately entrench their class position (Jeffrey 2010), projects allow lower-middle class Cairene men to stay in the game, evaluate prospects and mobilise connections, kin and community in ways that men who do not have projects cannot do. Although a fleeting one, this is also a stability of kinds: a stability that centralises agency and action rather than stillness and calm. The hunt for projects might be an iterative pursuit and it rarely results in anything permanent. Still, projects tend to facilitate new projects, putting projectors one step ahead in the ever-ongoing, iterative hunt.

Conclusion: Scaling Back Up

This article began in the buzz that surrounds Egypt's ongoing megaproject extravaganza, and it will end on a similar note. How can we understand Hagar explaining that the New Suez Canal was not primarily built ‘to make money’ but ‘to make the world move a bit’? What could such a statement tell us about the attraction to state-led infrastructure projects that exists among some sections of the Egyptian population, despite exaggerated scales, missed targets and blatant wastefulness?

When probing this ostensive paradox, my ethnographic examination of much smaller Cairene projects could be useful to consider. At first glance, the dreams underpinning national and individual mashari‘ might look very different indeed. The excessive construction of desert cities seems more related to capitalism's imperative for endless growth than to the ‘stability’ epitomised by a decent family life, to take one example. And yet, there are also conspicuous parallels, and I will discuss those briefly in what remains of this article. More specifically, as far as the imaginary of social and temporal agency goes, Egyptian dreams of projects are, if not completely ‘scalable’ (Tsing 2012), at least partly isomorphic across scale. Such correspondences might not make the state's push for megaprojects rational and justifiable, but they do render them a bit more familiar and understandable for many Egyptian citizens.

The promise of pristine newness constitutes a first isomorphism. As I have argued, my interlocutors habitually conceptualise projects as opportunities to let go of the past and radically remake themselves and their worlds. Only a mashru‘ could allow Samir to leave the depressing idleness in the supermarket and once again become active and famous. Only through a project could Mahmoud break free from the endless toiling struggles that Egyptian talk of as bahdala and finally get somewhere in his life. A similar desire to take a decisive step into uncharted territories is evident in state-led megaprojects. As several scholars have noted, large-scale mashari‘ rarely anticipate incremental fixes and maintenance of already existing, decrepit urban infrastructures. Megaprojects are instead fuelled by a longstanding nationalist dream of breaking free from the geographical constraints of the over-populated Nile valley and carving out a brand-new world in the empty desert (e.g. Mitchell 2002; Sims 2018).

This too is a vision of projects facilitating a transition from a realm of unimprovable clutter to one of stable control, where the near future can be properly managed. State actors might not use colloquial terms such as bahdala to describe the short-termness that is to be overcome, but their projects have similar ambitions. When a New Administrative Capital is built in record time, it is projected to ease congestion in central Cairo over the next five to ten years. When an expansion of the Suez Canal is completed in three years, it provides a vision of expanded commerce and stable hard currency revenues for decades to come. These scattered examples speak to a generalisable point: projects, of all scales, ground an imaginary of human agency over the near future that is both rare and appealing. Especially when contrasted to the volatile instability that presumably reigned during the revolutionary years, President el-Sisi's projects promise a controlled and orderly movement forward which many citizens value and recognise as istiqrar (stability).13

Let us also note that the tendency among my interlocutors to project iteratively is recognisable in the context of megaprojects too. Indeed, whereas Egyptian media speak endlessly about infrastructural projects being planned, launched and inaugurated, one hears far less about completed ones. Today, about a dozen desert cities surround Cairo proper, all of which are in a hazy in-between state of semi-completion and under-construction. In most cases, the number of inhabitants is but a fraction of what was planned for, several decades after construction started (Sims 2018). Yet at the time of finishing this article, the regime steers almost all resources and aspirations into its latest two additions: the New Administrative Capital in the Eastern Desert (Taweel 2023) and the recently launched Ras al-Hekma megacity on the Mediterranean coast (Shawkat 2024). Today as well as in the past, the emphasis is on rushing into new and increasingly spectacular projects rather than on completing projects that already exist.

Just like when it comes to smaller projects, though, this iterability might be less of an issue than it seems at first glance. Plans and results rarely match up, but neither journalists, nor politicians, nor ordinary citizens ever really expect them to do so. While this is a topic that begs for more ethnographic research, it seems quite clear to me that the perpetual semi-completion/semi-abandonment bothers foreign planners, journalists and researchers much more than my Cairene interlocutors. One possible reason for this is that people in Egypt know that the sole purpose of projects is not to produce completion and finality once and for all. As my ethnography shows, it is not only that the Arabic word mashru‘ literally means ‘initiation’. What is ultimately at stake in Egyptian project-making is an imagination of temporal agency and a notion of istiqrar (stability) that connote a controllable platform, above the bahdala, from which one can work and project anew in a temporary yet relatively productive fashion. While not necessarily ‘succeeding’, projects, of all scales, do ground this alluring imaginary. To once again paraphrase my interlocutor Hagar, one does not primarily launch projects to ‘make money’. More than anything else, Egyptian mashari‘ ‘make the world move’ again after periods when it has been ‘standing still’.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at several academic workshops and conferences, and a number of colleagues have either read drafts or listened to my presentations. Among those giving me the most valuable feedback are: Walter Armbrust, Brenda Chalfin, Alexandra Schindler, Karin Ahlberg, Marie Vannetzel, Alice Elliot and Andy Graan. I would also like to thank Social Anthropology's editor, Dimitra Kofti, for her sensitive editorial inputs, and the anonymous reviewers, for rigorous reading and commenting. Research for the article was made possible by funding from the ERC-advanced grant ‘Crosslocations: Rethinking relative location in the Mediterranean’ (2017–2021) and a grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, titled ‘Egypt as a Project: Dreamwork and masculinity in a projectified society’ (2022–2025).

Notes

1

State Information Service website, 3 April 2016 (https://www.sis.gov.eg/Story/99743?lang=en-us) accessed 5 May 2024.

2

For an analysis of Ali's popularity and persona, see Arman (2019).

3

Most of this fieldwork was conducted with football journalists, supporters, coaches and club officials (see Rommel 2018, 2021). Since 2017, my research has shifted focus gradually to men who launch small-scale investment projects.

4

All names in this article are pseudonyms. Some placenames have been changed.

5

See Rommel (2018, 2021) on masculinity and Egyptian football. While masculinity forms a central theme also in my current research project – ‘Egypt as a Project: Dreamwork and Masculinity in a Projectified Society’ – it is not addressed explicitly in this article.

6

Two other words deriving from the same root are shari‘ (street) and shari‘a (the canonical law of Islam). While a street might be thought of as a spatial ‘entering’, the etymology of shari‘a gestures to its origin in the Revelation of Prophet Muhammad, the ‘initiation’ of Islam.

7

A remnant of President Gamal Abdel Nasser's welfare state ambitions, this legislation has controlled the rents in central Cairo since the mid-twentieth century. As rents have not been adjusted for inflation, tenants with ‘old rent’ contracts (igar adim) might pay as little as a few Egyptian pounds per month.

8

Within some puritan Islamic traditions, it is encouraged to fast during three days every month when the moon is full (al-ayam al-qamariyya).

9

As Alice Elliot (2022) has noted in the context of emigrant men returning to their families in Morocco, the Arabic verb ‘sitting’ (qa‘id/a‘id or jalis) has overlapping connotations. On the one hand, it is used as a shorthand for being unemployed. On the other hand, it indexes emasculation in settings where masculinity is associated with movement, action and initiatives.

10

Although Guyer contrasts the evacuated near future both to the short and the long term, her discussion of the latter constitutes the article's main contribution. Depictions of the neoliberal era as one of speed, immediacy, hustling, urgency or space-time compression are numerous (e.g. Bandak and Anderson 2022; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Di Nunzio 2019; Harvey 1989; Mains 2007).

11

Due to its axiomatic appeal, istiqrar has often been politicised. While President Mubarak portrayed himself as the guarantor for political stability (Makram Ebeid 2012, 2014), President el-Sisi's legitimacy rests on a narrative that he brought back stability after revolutionary chaos and turmoil (Kreil and Schielke 2023). During Egypt's revolutionary period (2011–2013), debates over which actors promoted and who threatened istiqrar constituted a crucial discursive-political battleground (Armbrust 2019; Rommel 2021; Schielke 2015).

12

As for normality being associated with predictable forward-oriented movement, see also Jansen (2014).

13

See Kreil and Schielke (2023) for a discussion of the Egyptian phrase ‘the wheel of production needs to turn’, a proverbial way of speaking of economic stability as predictable and continuous movement often used to legitimise el-Sisi's rule.

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Contributor Notes

CARL ROMMEL is a Researcher at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. His current research, ‘Egypt as a Project: Dreamwork and Masculinity in a Projectified Society’, is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Rommel's research on sport, masculinity, revolution, urbanism and projects in Egypt has been published in Men & Masculinity, Critical African Studies, Middle East – Topics & Arguments, Soccer & Society and MERIP. His first monograph was Egypt's Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity and Uneasy Politics (University of Texas Press, 2021). He has also co-edited Locating the Mediterranean (Helsinki University Press, 2022) and co-authored An Anthropology of Crosslocations (Helsinki University Press, 2024). Email: carl.rommel@antro.uu.se; ORCID: 0000-0003-0301-6131.

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  • Abram, S. 2014. ‘The time it takes: temporalities of planning’, JRAI 20: 129147.

  • Arman, L. 2019. ‘Money and image: framing Mohamed Ali's face off against Sisi’, Mada Masr 24 September, https://www.madamasr.com/en/2019/09/24/feature/culture/money-and-image-framing-mohamed-alis-face-off-against-sisi/) (Accessed 3 September 2024).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Armbrust, W. 1996. Mass culture and modernism in Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Armbrust, W. 2019. Martyrs and tricksters: an ethnography of the Egyptian revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  • Bandak, A. and P. Anderson 2022. ‘Urgency and imminence: the politics of the very near future’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale 30: 117.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Baxstrom, R. 2011. ‘Even governmentality begins as an image: institutional planning in Kuala Lumpur’, Focaal 61: 6172.

  • Bear, L. 2015. Navigating austerity: currents of debt along a South Asian river. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.

  • Boltanski, L. and E. Chiapello 2005 [1999]. The new spirit of capitalism. New York: Verso.

  • Carse, A. and D. Kneas 2019. ‘Unbuilt and unfinished’, Environment and Society 10: 928.

  • Cohen, S. 2004. Searching for a different future: the rise of a global middle class in Morocco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff 2001. ‘Millennial capitalism: first thoughts on a second coming’, Public Culture 12: 291343.

  • Di Nunzio, M. 2019. The act of living: street life, marginality, and development in urban Ethiopia. New York, NY: Cornell University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Didion, J. 1968. Slouching towards Bethlehem. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

  • Elliot, A. 2022. Repeating manhood: migration and the unmaking of men in Morocco, in K. Isdoros and M. C. Inhorn (eds.), Arab masculinities: anthropological reconceptions in precarious times, 97115. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Elyachar, J. 2010. ‘Phatic labour, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo’, American Ethnologist 37: 452464.

  • Ferguson, J. 1994. The anti-politics machine. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

  • Guma, P. K. 2020. ‘Incompleteness of infrastructures in transition: scenarios from the mobile age in Nairobi’, Social Studies of Science 50: 728750.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Gupta, A. 2018. The future in ruins: thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure, in N. Anand, A. Gupta and H. Appel (eds.), The promise of infrastructure, 6279. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Guyer, J. 2007. ‘Prophecy and the near future: thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelic, and punctuated time’, American Ethnologist 34: 409421.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Han, C. 2011. ‘Symptoms of another life: time, possibility, and domestic relations in Chile's credit economy’, Cultural Anthropology 26: 732.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Harvey, D. 1989. The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Blackwell.

  • Jansen, S. 2014. ‘On not moving well enough: temporal reasoning in Sarajevo yearnings for “normal lives”’, Current Anthropology 55: S74S84.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Jeffrey, C. 2010. Timepass: youth, class, and the politics of waiting in India. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.

  • Jensen, A., C. Thuesen and J. Geraldi 2016. ‘The projectification of everything: projects as a human condition’, Project Management Journal 47: 2134.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Kreil, A. and S. Schielke 2023. ‘The wheel of production must turn: the striving for normality as a commitment to reality in post-2011 Egypt’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 148: 4158.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Lazar, S. 2014. ‘Historical narrative and mundane political time’, JRAI 20: 91108.

  • Lundin, R. A. and A. Söderholm 1995. ‘A theory of the temporary organization’, Scandinavian Journal of Management 11: 437455.

  • Mains, D. 2007. ‘Neoliberal times: progress, boredom, and shame among young men in urban Ethiopia’, American Ethnologist 34: 659673.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Makram Ebeid, D. 2012. ‘Manufacturing stability: everyday politics of work in an industrial steel town in Helwan, Egypt’, PhD dissertation, LSE, University of London.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Makram Ebeid, D. 2014. ‘“Old people are not revolutionaries”: labor struggles and the politics of value and stability (istiqrar) in a factory occupation in Egypt’, FocaalBlog 13 November, http://www.focaalblog.com/2014/11/14/dina-makram-ebeid-labor-struggles-and-the-politics-of-value-and-stability-in-a-factory-occupation-in-egypt/ (Accessed 3 September 2024).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mitchell, T. 2002. Rule of experts. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

  • Mittermaier, A. 2014. ‘Bread, freedom, social justice: the Egyptian uprising and a Sufi Khidma’, Cultural Anthropology 29: 5479.

  • Miyazaki, H. 2007. ‘Arbitraging faith and reason’, American Ethnologist 34: 430432.

  • Nielsen, M. 2014. ‘A wedge of time’, JRAI 20: 166182.

  • Ortner, S. 2006. Anthropology and social theory: culture, power, and the acting subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Pettit, H. 2023. The labor of hope: meritocracy and precarity in Egypt. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.

  • Ramsay, G. 2017. ‘Incommensurable futures and displaced lives: sovereignty as control over time’, Public Culture 29: 515538.

  • Rommel, C. 2018. ‘Men in time: on masculine productivity, corruption, and youth football in the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian revolution’, Men and Masculinities 21: 341362.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Rommel, C. 2021. Egypt's football revolution: emotion, masculinity, and uneasy politics. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

  • Schielke, S. 2015. Egypt in the future tense: hope, frustration, and ambivalence before and after 2011. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Schielke, S. 2020. Migrant dreams: Egyptian workers in the Gulf States. Cairo: AUC Press.

  • Schindler, A. K. 2021. ‘Living in permanent transience: an ethnography of contemporary Alexandria’, PhD dissertation, CUNY.

  • Scott, D. 2014. Omens of adversity: tragedy, time, memory, justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Shawkat, Y. 2024. ‘Understanding Egypt's Ras al-Hekma land deal: no panacea’, The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy 12 March, https://timep.org/2024/03/12/understanding-egypts-ras-al-hekma-land-deal-no-panacea/ (Accessed 3 September 2024).

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