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L' ATTACCO DI FOGGIA - FRANCESCO GRAVINA'S TEATRO-EDICOLA, THE WORLD'S SMALLEST THEATRE, BECOMES THE SUBJECT OF A CASE STUDY AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY The Teatro-Edicola Foyer '97 Becomes an International Case Study for the Stanford Social Innovation Review SAN SEVERO, 16 September 2026 - From a derelict newsstand of four square metres in Via Tondi to a paradigm of social innovation examined by Stanford University. Such is the trajectory of the Teatro Edicola Foyer '97, the cultural project realized by the Foyer '97 company under the artistic direction of Francesco Gravina, which in the space of a few months has transcended national boundaries. The news, reported today by La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, is that the prestigious "Stanford Social Innovation Review", the cultural journal of Stanford University dedicated to social innovation, will publish in September, both on its website and in its Fall 2026 print edition, the reportage "The Six-Seat Revolution", authored by Dr Luciano Magaldi Sardella and overseen editorially by Deputy Editor David V. Johnson. The project was inaugurated on 27 March last, on the occasion of World Theatre Day, when a former newsstand, shuttered for years, was transmuted into a diminutive theatre: six seats, a stage of fewer than two square metres, performances lasting but a few minutes, with actors and audience separated by less than a metre. A formula at once essential and original that has taken all by surprise: more than sixty spectators in a single afternoon and full houses throughout the three days of the inaugural season. A success that has evinced the public's appetite for a cultural proposition beyond the conventional circuits. It is for this reason that the SSIR has elected to analyse it as a potential model of low-cost urban regeneration, conceivably replicable across the thousands of disused newsstands throughout Italy and Europe. Enquiries regarding its replication have already been received from other cities, including Lucca and Rome. At its heart, as Gravina explains, lies a simple notion: "The theatre comes to the street where you walk every day". The newsstand, once a locus of daily information, changes its function and becomes a place of encounter with artists. An accolade that brings a reality born in the Province of Foggia to the centre of the international discourse on social innovation. What appeared to be a four-square-metre wager may now become a model to be exported far beyond San Severo.

LA GAZZETTA DEL MEZZOGIORNO - SAN SEVERO'S TEATRO EDICOLA FOYER '97 ON THE STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW The Teatro-Edicola Foyer '97 Becomes an International Case Study for the Stanford Social Innovation Review SAN SEVERO, 16 September 2026 - From a derelict newsstand of four square metres in Via Tondi to a paradigm of social innovation examined by Stanford University. Such is the trajectory of the Teatro Edicola Foyer '97, the cultural project realized by the Foyer '97 company under the artistic direction of Francesco Gravina, which in the space of a few months has transcended national boundaries. The news, reported today by La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, is that the prestigious Stanford Social Innovation Review, the cultural journal of Stanford University dedicated to social innovation, will publish in September, both on its website and in its Fall 2026 print edition, the reportage "The Six-Seat Revolution", authored by Dr Luciano Magaldi Sardella and overseen editorially by Deputy Editor David V. Johnson. The project was inaugurated on 27 March last, on the occasion of World Theatre Day, when a former newsstand, shuttered for years, was transmuted into a diminutive theatre: six seats, a stage of fewer than two square metres, performances lasting but a few minutes, with actors and audience separated by less than a metre. A formula at once essential and original that has taken all by surprise: more than sixty spectators in a single afternoon and full houses throughout the three days of the inaugural season. A success that has evinced the public's appetite for a cultural proposition beyond the conventional circuits. It is for this reason that the SSIR has elected to analyse it as a potential model of low-cost urban regeneration, conceivably replicable across the thousands of disused newsstands throughout Italy and Europe. Enquiries regarding its replication have already been received from other cities, including Lucca and Rome. At its heart, as Gravina explains, lies a simple notion: "The theatre comes to the street where you walk every day". The newsstand, once a locus of daily information, changes its function and becomes a place of encounter with artists. An accolade that brings a reality born in the Province of Foggia to the centre of the international discourse on social innovation. What appeared to be a four-square-metre wager may now become a model to be exported far beyond San Severo.

A Momentous Milestone in International Commentary! SOURCE: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/luciano-magaldi-s-05a4a71b3_the-meloni-doctrine-italys-transatlantic-share-7336809181242441728-F2Qf/ Extending in advance my deepest appreciation to: 1) Mr David Freddoso, "The Hill" Deputy Opinion Editor. 2) Mr Chuck Jordan, "The Hill" Opinion Editor. I am delighted to share a particularly significant achievement in my journalistic endeavours: the publication of my inaugural opinion piece in "The Hill", one of the U.S. Top 10 most influencial political news sources, and America's 2018 second-most influential news publication after CNN and the third-most cited source for US political discourse on social media. 📰 "The Meloni Doctrine: Italy's 'transatlantic pivot' is reshaping European diplomacy" by Dr. Luciano Magaldi Sardella, Opinion Contributor Published on 4th June 2025: --> https://lnkd.in/dMX7t9D7 Having one's analysis featured on such a distinguished platform represents the culmination of years dedicated to studying transatlantic relations and European diplomatic strategy. The opportunity to present Italy's evolving geopolitical positioning to The Hill's substantial American readership has been both an honour and a profound responsibility. This publication marks not merely a personal milestone, but rather the beginning of what I hope shall be an ongoing contribution to international policy discourse. I extend my sincere gratitude to The Hill's editorial team for their confidence in my work, and to my colleagues and connections who have supported this journey. I look forward to continuing this dialogue on the evolving dynamics of European-American relations and Italy's increasingly pivotal role therein. Link: https://lnkd.in/dMX7t9D7

The article by Dr Luciano Magaldi Sardella, ‘The Archaeological Site of Herdonia: The Pompeii of Puglia’, published in Popular Archaeology SOURCE: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article-dr-luciano-magaldi-sardella-archaeological-sardella-ph-d--kqr8f/ I am pleased to share my latest contribution, supervised by Dan McLerran, devoted to one of the most fascinating and regrettably undervalued archaeological sites of Southern Italy: Herdonia—often described as the “Pompeii of Puglia”—and published in the prestigious Popular Archaeology. In my article, entitled “The Archaeological Site of Herdonia: The Pompeii of Puglia”, I explore the history, the considerable potential, and the enduring challenges of this remarkable archaeological site in Ordona, still insufficiently appreciated despite its immense cultural heritage and the recent establishment of the Herdonia/Ordona Herma Archaeological Museum. 📅 Publication date: 25 February 2026 📝 Publisher: Popular Archaeology 🔗 Read the article: https://popular-archaeology.com/article/herdonia-puglias-lost-city-and-italys-most-neglected-archaeological-marvel/ A further step towards restoring Herdonia to its rightful place at the heart of cultural and scholarly discourse.

The Psychologist – The British Psychological Society – When Walls Become Wellness SOURCE: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/psychologist-british-psychological-society-when-walls-sardella-ph-d--pu8sf/ Dr Luciano Magaldi Sardella and Professor Matteo Mantuano on how ‘Stramurales Participatory Street Art’ transforms urban mental health. Link: https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/when-walls-become-wellness The Psychologist, The British Psychological Society by esteemed Dr. Joe Sutton, Head of Science Communication at BPS Contenuto dell’articolo On a sweltering afternoon in June 2018, we stood in the central square of Stornara, a small agricultural town in Puglia, Southern Italy, watching something extraordinary unfold. Local artist Lino Lombardi was facilitating a heated discussion among residents about which mural designs should adorn their town's crumbling walls. What struck us wasn't the art itself, but the transformation we witnessed in the eyes of people who, just months before, had described their hometown as a place to escape. These were individuals reclaiming their narrative, voting on their future, literally painting over decades of decline. We are environmental and community psychologists who have spent over a decade studying how built environments shape mental health outcomes. Dr Luciano Magaldi Sardella's research focuses on participatory arts interventions in declining rural communities, while Professor Matteo Mantuano specialises in the psychological mechanisms of community empowerment and collective agency. When we first learned about the Stramurales festival in early 2018, we recognised it as a rare opportunity to observe participatory urban art as a potential tool for addressing the mental health crisis plaguing Southern Italy's depopulating towns. Over the past seven years, we have conducted extensive fieldwork in Stornara – interviewing residents, documenting the festival's evolution, and analysing its psychological and social impacts. What we found in Stornara was something far more significant than an innovative community-led arts initiative. It was environmental psychology in action – reshaping how we understand the relationship between built environments, participatory arts, and mental health. The Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight Recent research reveals an alarming convergence of environmental and mental health crises that remains curiously underexamined in psychological discourse. Mental health research receives a mere 2.3 per cent of overall National Institute of Health funding. We cannot know how much of that concerns our environments – both natural and built – which fundamentally shape our psychological wellbeing. The newly proposed field of 'EnvironMental Health' emphasises that deteriorating built environments correlate significantly with elevated stress, social isolation, and worsening mental health outcomes. Southern Italy's rural communities embody this crisis. Between 2002 and 2017, South Italy region lost approximately two million residents to migration, predominantly young adults aged 15-34. This exodus created what Johan Galtung described as 'structural violence' – systematic arrangements preventing communities from realising their potential. The mental health toll manifests not just in individual diagnoses, but in collective despair, eroded social capital, and communities watching their futures literally emigrate. Stornara exemplified this trajectory. By 2017, this municipality of 6,000 residents faced the familiar spiral: economic contraction precipitating youth emigration, accelerating infrastructure deterioration, driving further decline. Walls crumbled. Businesses shuttered. Hope evaporated. Then something changed. The Stramurales Revolution: Democracy through Design What emerged in Stornara transcends conventional cultural tourism. The Stramurales International Street Art Festivalworks through three foundational democratic mechanisms that distinguish it from superficial beautification projects. Organised through Stornara Life APS – an open-membership association founded by Maestro Lino Lombardi – the festival prevents elite capture through voluntary property owner participation ensuring no coercion; democratic content selection through annual community voting on festival themes and mural proposals; and transparent, inclusive governance that gives all residents a voice in the festival's direction. This participatory architecture facilitates what the World Health Organization describes as 'community empowerment' – processes enabling communities to increase control over determinants affecting their health. Recent field studies in Vienna demonstrate that urban art interventions reduce stress and anxiety while improving mood states, but Stramuralesgoes further by embedding art creation within democratic decision-making structures. When residents voluntarily offer walls and vote on content, they perform acts of material and psychological investment. This restoration of collective agency – the belief that residents can shape their hometown's future rather than merely witnessing decline – directly addresses the structural violence that erodes mental health. Between 2020 and 2025, Stornara experienced a huge increase in tourism revenue despite pandemic disruption. New businesses opened. A Stornara-born emigrant who returned reluctantly in 2017 to provide parental care, now works as a tour guide and describes Stornara as 'the coolest town in Italy'. These aren't just economic indicators. They're mental health outcomes. The Science behind the Transformation Contemporary research across multiple disciplines validates what Stornara residents experience viscerally. A 2024 systematic review examining 79 peer-reviewed articles identified how arts places – from permanent museums to temporary public installations – stimulate community engagement, enhance cultural identity, and foster social cohesion. Community-driven mural projects specifically strengthen local identity and pride, creating new routines for individuals to interact and build relationships. Recent experimental research in Berlin found that sidewalk-level art exhibitions significantly altered visitors' connection to and satisfaction with their neighbourhoods, improving overall wellbeing. This aligns with emerging theories on art viewing's impact on mental health, which identifies five key mechanisms: affective processes regulating emotions and stress; cognitive processes providing sensory stimulation and learning; social processes creating shared experiences; self-transformation through reflection; and resilience building for coping with challenges. Environmental psychology research demonstrates that built environments operate as therapeutic interventions. Studies on mental health inpatient facilities reveal that design elements affecting privacy, control, daylight access, and particularly the inclusion of artwork significantly impact patient outcomes. If hospital walls matter therapeutically, how much more do the walls we encounter daily in our communities? The Stramurales model harnesses these mechanisms through the recent concept of 'visual health activism'. Several murals explicitly engage health and human rights themes: Alaniz Niz's 'Refuge for All Migrants' represents exploited African agricultural workers; Sabotaje al Montaje's 'Turning Our Backs on Migration' challenges exclusionary policies; Devil Art Design's 'African Child at Sunset' portrays migrant youth seeking dignified futures. These works address social determinants of health through human rights advocacy. Migration policies denying basic rights create health vulnerabilities – including restricted healthcare access, hazardous working conditions, and psychological trauma from discrimination. The murals perform dual public health functions, in addressing residents' mental health while advocating for populations whose health rights face systematic violation. Place Attachment and Community Resilience The relationship between environmental perception, cultural identity, and community resilience has received substantial scholarly attention in 2024-2025. Research in rural China demonstrates that environmental perception of public spaces influences community resilience through chain mediating effects of cultural identity and place attachment. When communities transform their physical environments through participatory processes, they simultaneously strengthen the psychological bonds that underpin resilience. This explains why Stramurales succeeds where traditional economic development approaches falter. The festival doesn't just create economic value – though over 150 murals by international artists now attract thousands of visitors annually. It fundamentally reshapes residents' relationship with their environment, transforming narratives of decline into evidence of vitality. Each democratically selected mural becomes what resilience researchers call an 'anchor of hope' – tangible proof contradicting despair. Contemporary resilience theory emphasises that strength resides not merely in physical infrastructure but in social cohesion. A recent analysis of resilient urban design in marginalised American neighbourhoods found that residents' message – 'We like our neighbours, we like the character of where we live' – revealed that resilience is fundamentally about people and community. Design interventions succeed when they preserve and strengthen these social bonds, rather than imposing external visions. Stramurales embodies this principle. The democratic voting mechanisms ensure art reflects genuine community values rather than artist or curator preferences. This prevents the cultural displacement often accompanying urban regeneration, where improvements benefit newcomers while alienating existing residents. By centering resident agency, Stramuralesbuilds what researchers describe as 'critical resilience' – capacity addressing underlying inequalities rather than merely adapting to them. The Participation Gap and Universal Access These findings resonate profoundly with longstanding concerns about arts accessibility. The 2015 Warwick Commission documented that the wealthiest, most educated 8 per cent of the UK population accounted for 44 per cent of live music attendance and 28 per cent of visual art visits. This participation gap particularly affects communities that would benefit most from arts engagement for health and wellbeing. But Stramurales challenges this narrative. Street art as public health infrastructure requires no admission fees, no advance booking, no cultural capital to appreciate. It exists where people live, transforming daily commutes into encounters with beauty and meaning. The democratic selection process ensures accessibility extends beyond consumption to co-creation – residents don't just view art, they determine what appears on their walls. Recent research on participatory arts and social cohesion emphasises that successful interventions share common features: delivery in local communities, non-stigmatising approaches, flexibility, promoting social engagement, involvement of exhibitions, and delivery within specific timeframes. Stramurales incorporates all these elements while adding genuine democratic governance. This matters urgently. Mental health conditions among young people globally are rising, and traditional mental health services remain chronically underfunded. If we cannot scale clinical interventions to meet demand, we must invest in preventive public health approaches targeting social determinants. From Stornara to the World: Implications for Practice The Stramurales model offers a replicable template requiring modest financial investment but substantial community participation. Essential elements include voluntary engagement, democratic decision-making, strategic social media use for marketing, and integration of local narratives with global artistic practices. Several cities have implemented variations with promising results. Research on artistic interventions in urban spaces across Europe and Asia demonstrates that participatory art projects can serve as 'social prescribing', improving psychological resilience and enhancing public engagement. Tactical urbanism approaches – small-scale, low-cost interventions improving public spaces – increasingly incorporate art as core rather than supplementary elements. The implications extend beyond individual communities. International frameworks including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights enshrine rights to health and cultural participation. State obligations to conserve, develop and diffuse culture should support community-driven cultural initiatives demonstrably impacting health outcomes. As pandemic governance analyses emphasise, future health policy reforms must address not only biomedical preparedness but underlying vulnerabilities in community resilience and social cohesion. Street art operating through participatory structures directly strengthens these dimensions. What Psychologists Can Do We have roles to play at multiple levels. First, we must conduct research documenting the mental health impacts of participatory arts interventions. While promising evidence exists, methodologically rigorous studies with adequate sample sizes and long-term follow-up remain scarce. We need experimental designs, not just observational studies, examining mechanisms through which environmental transformations affect psychological outcomes. Second, we should advocate for policy recognising arts engagement as health intervention. This means supporting public health funding for community arts initiatives, particularly in economically deprived areas where traditional development approaches have failed. We should work with urban planners, architects, and artists to integrate participatory arts into neighbourhood regeneration from inception, not as afterthoughts. Third, we must ensure interventions embody genuine participation rather than tokenistic consultation. The Stramuralesmodel succeeds because residents hold real power. Without this, arts interventions risk replicating existing power structures and potentially accelerating gentrification that displaces the communities they ostensibly serve. Fourth, we should employ arts-based research methods that centre community voices. Collaborative approaches like participatory theatre, photovoice, and collaborative poetics enable communities to articulate their experiences and aspirations in ways traditional psychological assessments cannot capture. These methods acknowledge that communities possess expertise about their own needs and potential solutions. Finally, we must situate arts interventions within broader frameworks addressing social justice. Art should not function as a 'sticking plaster' masking underlying inequalities. Instead, we should harness arts' disruptive potential to promote what researchers term 'critical resilience' – capacity challenging systemic injustices rather than merely helping people adapt to them. This means addressing not just symptoms (mental distress) but causes (structural violence, economic abandonment, policy failures). Reimagining Health Infrastructure The Stramurales case compels fundamental reconsideration of what constitutes health infrastructure. We typically envision clinics, hospitals, pharmacies – biomedical institutions delivering treatments for diagnosed conditions. But what if the most effective mental health intervention for a declining community isn't a new psychiatric facility, but democratic processes enabling residents to transform their visual environment? Walls covered with democratically selected art, created through genuine community participation, demonstrably improve community mental health while operationalising cultural rights described in international law. The modest financial investment required pales beside costs of clinical services treating preventable distress. For communities experiencing decline where traditional economic development has failed, participatory street art may offer the most cost-effective, accessible, and sustainable mental health intervention available. This isn't about romanticising art or dismissing serious mental illness requiring clinical care. It's about acknowledging that population mental health requires addressing social determinants – and that participatory arts targeting built environments, social capital, and collective agency directly address these determinants. The question facing psychology isn't whether art can function as health intervention – Stramurales and growing evidence demonstrate it can. Rather, the question is whether we possess imagination to rethink health infrastructure, recognising that effective mental health promotion may require democratic decision-making and community participation as much as clinical expertise. As we watched Stornara residents voting on murals that June afternoon, we witnessed people exercising a fundamental human capacity too often denied in our field: the power to shape their own environments and, through that shaping, to heal. Perhaps that's the most vital lesson Stramurales offers psychology – that sometimes the most therapeutic intervention isn't administered by professionals, but created by communities reclaiming their agency… one democratically selected wall at a time. Dr Luciano Magaldi Sardella holds a PhD in Cognitive Leadership at Aspire Institute, Harvard Business School. Professor Matteo Mantuano is Professor of Social Sciences and Psychoeducational Health, Unitré University of Milan, Italy. Photo: 'Kid trapped in a box' mural by Leticia Mandragora References: All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing (2017). Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing (2nd ed.). Belfiore, E. & Bennett, O. (2024). The social impact of the arts: An intellectual history. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bone, J.K., Bu, F., Fluharty, M.E., Paul, E., Sonke, J.K. & Fancourt, D. (2024). Who engages in the arts in the United States? 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What was the first Social Network in History? In Italy: Dada or InterNetWork City? SOURCE: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-first-social-network-history-italy-dada-city-sardella-ph-d--ngw2f/ When discussing technological primacy, historical precision is fundamental. Particularly when too many narratives from the web risk generating confusion. Contenuto dell’articolo Abstract This article critically analyses contemporary narratives on the origin of social networks, distinguishing between journalistic reconstructions and academic historiography. It clarifies that platforms such as Internetwork City and Dada/SuperEva, whilst innovative, cannot be defined as "first Italian social networks" according to criteria recognised by international research. The text reconstructs the genealogy of social media from early digital communities (Usenet, BBS) through to modern social networks, highlighting the anticipatory role of systems such as Plato. Finally, it demonstrates how certain Italian publications have attributed primacy unsupported by historical sources, underlining the necessity for a rigorous and documented approach. Keywords: digital historiography, Italian proto-social platforms, Internetwork City, Dada/SuperEva, origins of social networks In recent years, various narratives have circulated regarding the origin of social networks, some of which attribute primacy to projects that, while innovative, do not correspond to the effectively documented chronology. To reconstruct with precision the history of global social networks, it is necessary to begin with academic sources and verifiable testimonies, excluding retrospective reconstructions devoid of historical corroboration. But first and foremost, let us provide an encyclopaedic British definition: social media constitute a form of communication on online platforms through which users share information, ideas, personal messages and other textual and audio-visual content. This should not be confused with social networking, that is to say, the modalities by which Internet users construct virtual communities amongst themselves by sharing their textual and audio-visual content; social media, conversely, concerns web-based platforms that enable one to build a friendly, familial and professional audience. The earliest forms of social media appeared almost as soon as technology could support them: electronic mail and chat programmes débuted in the early 1970s, but the first virtual communities did not emerge. They did not emerge until the creation of the Usenet discussion group network in 1979: these permitted users to post and receive messages within thematic areas called newsgroups. Usenet and other discussion forums, such as privately hosted Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), allowed individuals to interact, but each was essentially a closed system. With the release in 1993 of the Mosaic web browser, those systems were provided with an easy-to-use graphical interface. Furthermore, the architecture of the World Wide Web made it possible to navigate from one site to another with a click, and faster Internet connections permitted richer multimedia content than that which could be found in text-heavy newsgroups. The First Modern Global Social Network: SixDegrees.com Contenuto dell’articolo As the prestigious Encyclopaedia Britannica cites, the first globally known companies to create modern social networks based on web technology were Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com. Between these two, in truth, the academic community and historians of digital media concur in identifying SixDegrees.com as the first true modern social network: it was the first to introduce the fundamental characteristics that would define the sector: personal profiles, friends lists and an integrated private messaging system. Indeed, Classmates.com, founded earlier in 1995, employed an aggressive advertising campaign with pop-ups to attract web browsers to its site based upon connections between students from secondary school and/or university classes, branches of the armed forces and places of work. SixDegrees.com was launched after it, in 1997, but with most of the functionalities that would characterise such social networks: members could create profiles for themselves, maintain friends lists and contact one another through the site's private messaging system. After claiming to have attracted more than three million users by the year 2000, it failed to translate those numbers of success into revenue as it subsequently collapsed along with numerous other internet companies when the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. The First Italian Social Network: Which One? Contenuto dell’articolo In recent years, a widespread narrative has emerged on the web according to which the first Italian social network would have been Internetwork City, a project born in May 1995 from the intuition of Claudio Cecchetto with the technical guidance of Perl and Java programmer Marco Camisani Calzolari. Other sources from the websphere (the totality of all globally accessible websites) narrate of the Dada/SuperEva group as the first Italian social network. In the first case, it was certainly, for the era, a story of radio and digital innovation made in Italy: in this interview with Giornalettismo from 29 June 2022 given to Gianmichele Laino (https://www.giornalettismo.com/marco-camisani-calzolari-internetwork-city/), Internetwork City is defined as the "first social network in history made in Italy". Contenuto dell’articolo And reading further, the interviewee, Marco Camisani Calzolari, a contract university lecturer and radio-television communicator on digital themes, states: "In May 1995, in a basement in Via Melzi D'Eril, a truly revolutionary idea was being born. Behind it was the intuition of Claudio Cecchetto and the guidance of Marco Camisani Calzolari: Internetwork City is the first social network in the world, a space within which users managed to interact, in an era when the network was a place where possibilities for interchange were still a futuristic eventuality." And whilst in the pioneering basement of Via Melzi D'Eril in May 1995 Internetwork City was being born, perhaps unbeknownst to its inventors, in January 1995, a full four months earlier, DADA (Design Architettura Digitale Analogico) had already been born, another entirely Italian social network, founded by four young Florentine architects (Paolo Barberis, Alessandro Sordi, Jacopo Marello and Angelo Falchetti), as one reads on the ZeroUnoWeb portal. The four Florentine friends transformed their architecture studio into a company in which Barberis and Sordi drew in the other two entrepreneurs, spending all their savings on the purchase of computers and multimedia equipment. It was not simply a matter of creating yet another web portal but a true digital ecosystem that anticipated many functions of contemporary social networks: profiles, communities, interaction and shared content. This narrative of DADA, however, is "once again refuted" if we read the journalistic article in La Repubblica of 27 May 2021 bearing the signature of journalist Riccardo Luna, entitled "In Milan, Claudio Cecchetto (and Marco Camisani Calzolari) launch a social network," readable by clicking the following link: https://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2021/05/27/news/a_milano_claudio_cecchetto_e_marco_camisani_calzolari_lanciano_un_social_network-302961639/ Contenuto dell’articolo The subtitle echoes: "It was the first social network in history and it was born in Italy. And in 1995 the web had practically only just been born," in addition to "In May 1995 the first social network in history was born and it was born in Italy. Perhaps the first. Who knows. But if one considers that Facebook is from 2004, Second Life and MySpace from 2003, one understands perfectly well the enormity of what I have just written. In 1995 the web had practically only just been born." But here, strangely, the discourse is not entirely clear: if in the subtitle one asserts decisively "it was the first social network in history," why does one then read: "Perhaps the first. Who knows." It seems to me a contradiction, quite frankly. But let us leave the arduous decisional task to impartial readers. Therefore, let us proceed with the rest of the article: "In the meantime, in Italy someone constructs a social network. Who? Claudio Cecchetto. Yes, him, the author of Gioca Jouer, the inventor of Radio Deejay and of another way of making radio. He was also a pioneer of the Internet. In May 1995 he launches a social network called Internetwork City, the city of the Internet network. It had been built, one line of code after another, by a young programmer who, thanks to this story, would become a brilliant communicator of digital matters (for some time he has been one of the faces of Striscia la Notizia): Marco Camisani Calzolari. When he thinks back to those times, MCC becomes enthusiastic: 'It was a social network in every respect. A place where one could register, have a profile and speak with others. It was one of the first in the history of the web, and Claudio Cecchetto had invented it. He had conceived it whilst navigating with Videotel, but then the World Wide Web had arrived. At the time I worked as a programmer for a fashion company: I had learnt to do it by downloading the instructions for writing code in Perl and in Java from the BBSs that were on the network'." Contenuto dell’articolo From this it emerges that the idea for the project was supported by the media personality of Claudio Cecchetto and brought to fruition by programmer Marco Camisani Calzolari: the two pioneers of the Italian web have (also in this journalistic article) confirmed how InterNetwork City was, in their opinion, the first social network in the world created precisely in the Belpaese. But will this be objectively and impartially true according to the historical historiography of Internet history? To ascertain this, we must analyse academic historiographical sources: these lead us back to the surprising computational history of a great (and semi-unknown) precursor of social networks present as early as the 1960s and 1970s: Plato. PLATO: The Precursor of All Social Networks in the World Contenuto dell’articolo PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) represents one of the most fascinating cases of anticipatory technology in the history of computing: developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1960 by Donald L. Bitzer, this system initially had purely didactic purposes, but evolved rapidly, becoming a true digital social ecosystem decades before the advent of the Internet as we know it. It introduced the concept of "Personal Notes" in 1973, a system of forums organised by subject where users could post messages, reply and create structured discussions. This anticipated by over twenty years web forums and Usenet newsgroups in accessible form. The "Talkomatic" system, created in 1973 by Doug Brown, permitted simultaneous conversations between multiple users in separate channels. Each user saw the letters of other participants appear character by character as they were typed, creating an unprecedented immediate communication experience. "Personal Notes" functioned essentially as an internal email system, permitting private communications between system users, with storage and reply capabilities. Users could create "term-talk," personal messages visible to others, sharing thoughts, updates or information: a conceptual precursor of modern social media posts. Plato was not merely technology: it was a true community. Thousands of users, primarily university students, teachers and researchers, connected through dedicated terminals with characteristic plasma screens: To play: it hosted some of the first multiplayer video games in history, such as "Empire" (a precursor of space games), "Moria" (one of the first dungeon crawlers) and "Airfight" (multiplayer aerial combat). To socialise: friendships, romantic relationships and communities formed around shared interests. To collaborate: study groups, research projects and academic discussions flourished on the platform. Despite its innovative capabilities, Plato remained confined principally to the academic environment and to certain business applications for several reasons: Plato terminals were extremely costly and the system required powerful mainframes; and unlike the Internet, it was a closed system, centrally controlled; dedicated terminals or specialised connections were required, not available to the general public; and whilst the Internet developed on open protocols, Plato remained an isolated ecosystem. In conclusion: even though the unknown Community Memory (1973) preceded Plato as a publicly accessible social system but with more limited functionalities, Plato had social functionalities as early as 1973. It was the first true precursor of modern social networks, but in a technological context that was solely academic, not mass-market, owing to prohibitive costs and the extremely rare and extraordinarily slow computer connections of those years. Therefore, all the first prototypes and first social networks born from the 1990s onwards (including the Florentine project Dada/SuperEva and the InterNetwork City of Claudio Cecchetto and Marco Camisani Calzolari) reinvented the same concepts in a technological and economic context that permitted their planetary diffusion shortly before the advent of the new millennium. Now, given that we live in a context of great development of large language models upon which artificial intelligence is based, just out of curiosity, I shall ask Microsoft's chatbot, Copilot (in my opinion, the most reliable to date) what it thinks about the journalistic narrative of Giornalettismo and La Repubblica in favour of InterNetwork City; therefore, this is my question: "Is it correct to assert, impartially, that Internetwork City of Cecchetto and Camisani Calzolari was the 'first social network in history Made in Italy'?" The answer emerges from the following photographs. Contenuto dell’articolo Contenuto dell’articolo I now report word for word the text generated by the large language model (LLM) Copilot: "Here is the most balanced and rigorous answer that can be given today, based on available sources and digital historiography. Is it correct to define it as 'first social network in history Made in Italy'? 🧭 Brief answer No: it is not correct to assert it impartially as an ascertained historical fact. It is, however, correct to say that certain publications and certain protagonists of the era present it as such, while the academic community and international historiography on social networks do not recognise Internetwork City as 'first social network in history'. 🔍 What the sources say The Italian journalistic sources consulted present Internetwork City as: "the first social network in the world" (Giornalettismo) "the first social network in history and it was born in Italy... perhaps the first. Who knows." (La Repubblica) "the first social network" (Giornalettismo) These are, however, journalistic narratives, not historical classifications shared by international research. 🧠 Why it is not possible to assert it as an impartial historical fact To be recognised as 'first social network in history', a project must satisfy criteria shared by the scientific community, for example: technical definition of social network (user profile, network of contacts, persistent interaction, user-generated content, etc.) international academic recognition verifiable technical and historical documentation comparison with previous platforms (e.g. The WELL, 1985; Usenet, 1979; Minitel, 1982; GeoCities, 1994) Internetwork City does not appear in any international academic taxonomy of social networks, nor in reference works on the history of the web. The sources that define it as 'first social network' are interviews, popular articles and narrative reconstructions, not historical studies. 📌 What can be correctly asserted An impartial and accurate formulation could be: Internetwork City (1995), conceived by Claudio Cecchetto and developed by Marco Camisani Calzolari, is one of the first Italian experiments in interactive online community. Certain journalistic publications have described it as 'the first social network in history Made in Italy', but this definition is not recognised by international historiography on social networks. This sentence is balanced, truthful and does not attribute undemonstrable historical certainties." In summary: in the impartial opinion of Microsoft Copilot, the assertion according to which InterNetwork City "was the first social network in history and was born in Italy" is enunciated only as a journalistic narrative but has no corroboration in reality whatsoever, not being in any way supported by international academic historiography of the history of social networks. Now, however, other articles taken from websphere publications assert that the first (and true) Italian social network was, instead, conceived and created by the Dada group and subsequently through SuperEva in January 1995, anticipating by four months the aforementioned Milanese InterNetwork City. But let us read it all directly in the StartUp Italia article bearing the signature of writer Aldo V. Pecora, which I shall report from this link: https://startupitalia.eu/education/scuola/quando-prima-di-facebook-4-italiani-avevano-inventato-un-social-network-la-storia-di-dada-e-di-supereva/#:~:text=Alla%20base%20di%20questa%20visione,il%20valore%20aggiunto%20del%20sito. Contenuto dell’articolo "When Zuckerberg was still at college there were those who, in Italy, had already invented social networks. A story, that of SuperEva and, above all, of those four 'madmen' of Dada, that would truly deserve a film. A story that we today attempt to recount by making a leap backwards of twenty years, whilst those who wrote it, or rather, designed it, had with every evidence made a journey into the future. Dada, the Martians come from the future The 'back to the future' of Paolo Barberis and Alessandro Sordi begins in the early 1990s, as young students at the University of Florence. It is 1992 when they decide to go before the examination board without even a sheet of paper, a drawing, nothing. Only a computer and a multimedia project, one of the first in Italy and perhaps in Europe developed in 3D. 'The board remained closeted for over an hour — recalls Sordi today — and we didn't know whether shortly thereafter they would send us packing.' Instead it was a success and the beginning of an adventure. Barberis and Sordi involve two other friends, Jacopo Marello and Angelo Falchetti, spend all their savings on the purchase of PCs and multimedia equipment and together open an architecture studio: Dada, acronym for Design Architettura Digitale Analogica. How Dada connected Florence to the Internet Year 1995. Things change. Dada becomes a limited company: 20 million initial investment (the computers purchased for the architecture studio). And the project of creating a multimedia city, Florence, becomes that of bringing the city online. Few know it, but it was precisely Dada that connected the Tuscan capital to the Internet. ADSL and so-called broadband connections did not yet exist. What years, those years. Whilst Alessandro Sordi reviews them, on the telephone he betrays a little emotion: 'Commercial internet was beginning, the first nodes in Rome and Milan, but in Tuscany there was nothing. We decided to purchase the cable and brought the first CDN to Florence.' It is the era of providers, or rather, ISPs, and anyone who manages to make a client dialogue with a server can sell dial-up connection services. Sordi and partners involve family and friends. Everyone does everything: Barberis answers the telephone and provides help desk support, the others concern themselves with making professionals and companies understand the potential of the Internet and sell annual subscriptions at 249 thousand lire. The web that found (and changed) Dada These are the years of a single browser, Netscape Navigator. It was conceived by that same Marc Andreessen who today can be called literally papa by people like Zuckerberg and half of Silicon Valley. It is web 0.0, that before Google, where the search engines are Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo. In Italy for a couple of years a gentleman from Cagliari by the name of Nichi Grauso, founder of Video On Line, has been putting tremendous amounts of money into the Internet, whilst in Milan Marco Negri and Stefano Quintarelli launch I.Net and Joy Marino ITNet. The national telephone company, SIP, is reborn under the acronym Telecom Italia. A monopoly that begins to creak with the launch by Olivetti of Italia Online and, above all, of the first Italian search engine, Arianna, which will soon find itself duelling with Virgilio, the first creation of the Matrix of Paolo Ainio, Carlo Gualandri and Marco Benatti. Dada understood before others in which direction the web would go. 'From there a business model was born — recounts Sordi — because the provider collected network subscription fees in advance and we used that money to finance research on web services, something that was science fiction for those years.' 'One world alone, one network alone' Science fiction that was the fortune of the group of Tuscan architects. After a year turnover rises to 500 million and Barberis's company delineates the future of the web: content and, above all, community. On the Internet there are not only professionals and companies but people, who begin to use it daily and to focus on groups, first in mailing lists and newsgroups, but shortly thereafter also on websites. Dada intuited before others that there is a market, certainly formless, like water, but immediately monetisable, thanks to advertising. A large public company, SMA 2002, enters the capital of the Florentine company, and together the two entities found one of the very first Italian advertising concessionaire companies entirely focused on the Internet. 1997: Dada's phase 2 begins. The government passes new communications regulation and the Florence provider obtains authorisation to scale its core business of Internet access across the entire national territory. Sordi recalls, smiling. These are the years in which one thinks of monetising another business, that of so-called 'housing'. In the meantime, someone already has his head in the future. It is Paolo Barberis, who imagines a network where beyond computers being connected, people above all can be connected amongst themselves. 'I had something of a mania for putting things in the right place with respect to the order they would have in the future,' he tells us. An order that according to Barberis passes through the 'desk metaphor'. 'Many years ago — he recalls — it was clear to me that soon we would move from our desktop, with file management, archive, rubbish bin et cetera towards a map. What today we call "map as a service". We started from connectivity but then gave services, and as architects we wanted to construct the new places. Design the house imagining the use that must be made of it every day, how many people will pass through it, with attention also to the smallest particular, to individual objects. Those who design must focus, because a house must be beautiful but must above all make us live well and better.' From SuperEva to the Stock Exchange At the base of this vision the birth, in 1999, of a website that would make the history of the Italian web: SuperEva. The first embryo of Dada's portal comprised a search engine and the famous guides, which would become the backbone and added value of the site. Because, as always, the true novelty at the beginning of every great experience is camouflaged in a little corner. Through the guides, Dada begins to create thematic micro-communities that stand thanks to advertising. From there onwards Dada will begin to churn out millions upon millions. Of euros and no longer of lire. The Dada ecosystem counts more or less one-fifth of Italian web traffic, has consolidated its own technological asset and encounters various investors along its path: 'Today we would call them angels — says Sordi — but at the time they were enlightened entrepreneurs.' It is they who will help the Tuscan company take the great step: the Stock Exchange. It is 29 June 2000 when Dada SpA is listed on the Nuovo Mercato index of Piazza Affari. An injection of liquidity that brings tens of millions into the coffers of the Florentine internet company. In a few months the employees become 400, and there is almost no longer room to keep them all, in what was once the headquarters of Libreria Cima. Meanwhile, Barberis & Co. also begin to keep an eye on the foreign market, searching for partnerships to internationalise. Always keeping their feet on the ground. It survives (magnificently) the dot-com bubble 'At the time — recalls Alessandro Sordi, who in Dada was Vice President — they told us "spend everything, spend everything immediately". The tendency was to spend all the money that the stock exchange had given you. We were prudent but at the same time aware that we should not buy to satisfy the stock exchange.' And they did well, because shortly thereafter the so-called dot-com bubble would burst, which saw illustrious giants like Cisco lose in one blow something like 86% of their own value. In parallel, many Italian ISPs were forced to close their doors, crushed by Telcos, which in the meantime took control of the connections market, sweeping away with one stroke of the sponge the 'old' dial-ups in favour of broadband. Few know, however, that there was also a gift that Dada had given to all employees: stock options. They were given to all, but truly all, from secretaries, to developers, to graphic designers, to sales. Today for startups they are called equity; at the time the options of quoted companies like Dada were real money. From provider to internet company But the vision, the maniacal passion for the creation and consolidation of vertical communities and the development of a second asset dedicated to B2B services allow Dada to sleep soundly. Sordi recalls: 'In large companies the concept of pivot is not a rigid thing. It was very natural to ask oneself daily "what is the best thing to do today".' Because it is a large startup where things happen, before others. And where you can make them happen. If the BlackBerry arrives in Italy, for example, it is thanks to them, who had direct contacts with RIM as well as with the greatest tech companies in the world. The startups conceived by employees They experiment, they have fun, and greatly so. They launch themselves into the market of paid services (music, ringtones, WAP), which will become the third pillar of the new Dada, and constitute a small internal incubator, Dada Lab: 'We didn't know it was called an incubator. Every six months we set up a process where employees could propose new ideas. Pitches were made but they weren't called pitches. We decided to carry forward the best project,' recounts Sordi. Projects that, once launched, were followed scrupulously: 'We received an hourly email, with the metrics of all the business models. There were systems hooked to the models that recorded every hour. In short, a sort of automatic Analytics that informed us constantly and in real time of the progress of individual projects. Something that we maintain today, albeit in different form (monitors attached to the walls, editor's note), in Nana Bianca.' The Dada ecosystem, recounted by those who lived it We are in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. At that time Dada experiences the epoch of maximum splendour. It enters the digital asset of the RCS Group, and acquires various startups and companies, such as Register.it, the first Italian registrar, the Wireless Solutions of Massimo Ciociola (now CEO of Musixmatch), free hosting communities like Freeweb.org and then the Clarence portal, and then the first Italian blog platform, Splinder, the Blogo network and so many other companies that, all together, will compose the galaxy of the Dada Group. It is the startup that becomes increasingly 'a platform from which to launch services. There were people of great talent, with whom you enjoyed working, stimulating changes,' recalls Paolo Barberis, who when he goes back with memory transmits even telephonically a mixture of emotions between nostalgia and pride: 'Marco Argenti, who in Seattle at Amazon is head of AWS mobile, Amazon's store, Max Pellegrini, now head, in New York, of mobile entertainment at Real Networks (those of the noted Real Player, editor's note), and then again Antonio Tomarchio (founder of Beintoo), Francesca Lerario, Mariano Di Benedetto, Roberto Barberis (now CEO of 4W), Filippo Satolli (COO of Instal.com), Stefano Sordi (marketing director of Aruba), Carlo Meglio (CEO of Moqu Adv), David Casalini...' Disclaimer: David Casalini, a name that is not new to us at Startupitalia, given that he is also our publisher. At this point a telephone call with him is obligatory. 'I was 23 years old when I arrived at Dada,' recalls Casalini. 'I was truly in another world: I had my office in Empoli, which for me was already the office of a lifetime, a 16th-century tower with my beautiful Linux server... The dream of my life was to be able to run the Empoli provider (Empoli Net, editor's note).' Then, one day, the telephone call from Angelo Falchetti arrives. 'In short order I found myself managing a team of 30 people. All talents with whom working was a spectacle. Dada was doing what today startups are not doing; it grew continuously, 40–50–60 million. There was a moment in which Dada was hiring people all over the world, like Brian Buschmann, who today is head of the UX unit of Gucci.' David is truly a torrent in flood, he begins to reel off on the telephone (and then on Messenger) a series of names and anecdotes that becomes truly difficult even to manage to note down, let alone recount them all. When Dada was truly scaling, in the USA Much abroad, USA, above all. In 2005 Dada had already consolidated for at least a couple of years what without fear of contradiction can be considered the first Italian social network, amongst the largest in Europe: Incontri di SuperEva, a community for lonely hearts with 2 million members, when the various Facebooks and, above all, Tinder did not yet exist. Social networks are discussed, and we have proof in the slides (see above) that Marco Argenti and Paolo Barberis will bring to Dada-Day 2004 and 2005. Precisely when, across the ocean, an unknown Harvard student by the name of Mark Zuckerberg was attempting to explain, to an empty hall, a website called The Facebook. And again through Dada passes one of the first experiments in competition with iTunes and iPods. A joint venture, in the United States, with Sony: 'Dada US — recalls Barberis — made a merger uniting its own mobile assets with those of Sony.' A deal that generated turnover only in the USA of something like 100 million dollars. The Dada model: 'design it as if you were already living it' The former twenty-year-olds of Dada, in short, had become adults and seemed almost to transmit the idea of being a group of Martians come from the future: 'I believe — recalls Barberis — that our difference with respect to that historical moment lies in what then consolidated itself in the broader reasoning of design thinking: having answers in the short term, whilst you are executing things, with visionary work. Imagining how the world will be in a few years and trying to design it as if you were already living it. Making certain, in short, that things respond to a vision and do not remain circumscribed to something imminent and nothing more. A bit like making the digital agenda today: you can set yourself the objective of 10 things to do, or else first imagine how the country will be in 10 years and then begin to do things, to create the conditions that will take you there.' However, like every most beautiful love story, that of Dada with its founders will also end. From the progressive farewell of those who had given it birth to the sale to the Buongiorno group, passing through the dismemberments of the various assets. Thus it happens that, by a strange trick of fate, today what remains of SuperEva coexists under the same roof as historical competitors like Virgilio and Libero, reunited in the new Italiaonline galaxy. But that is another story. Now, for intellectual objectivity, I shall pose the same question that I posed earlier to Copilot, but regarding the Florentine narrative of Dada/SuperEva: "Is it correct to assert, impartially, that Dada/SuperEva was the 'first social network in Italy'?" The answer emerges from the following photographs. Contenuto dell’articolo Contenuto dell’articolo I now report word for word the text generated by the large language model (LLM) Copilot: "Here is the most balanced, rigorous and historically founded version of the answer — with punctual citations to the sources you requested. Is it correct to assert, impartially, that Dada/SuperEva was 'the first social network in Italy'? 🧭 Brief answer No: it is not correct to assert it as an objective historical fact. It is, however, correct to say that certain journalistic sources and communications of the era presented SuperEva as a 'social network', but international historiography and academic studies do not classify it as such, nor as 'first Italian social network'. 🔍 What the sources say The available sources show two levels of narrative: 1. Journalistic and corporate narrative (post-2004) In 2004 a Marketpress communiqué announced: 'The social network lands in Italy: it is called SuperEva.com and bears the Dada marque' This is a communicative and promotional definition, not a historical classification. StartupItalia, in an article from 2016, recounts the story of Dada and SuperEva as Italian pioneers of the social web, but in narrative tone: 'When Zuckerberg was still at college there were those who, in Italy, had already invented social networks.' Here too: narrative, not historiography. 2. Historical and academic sources International historical reconstructions of social networks (Boyd & Ellison, 2007; History of the Web; Internet Histories) do not include SuperEva amongst the foundational social networks. Furthermore, Dada itself — in corporate reconstructions — describes SuperEva as: • a portal • a community • a content aggregator • a system of personal spaces and web services but not as a social network in the technical sense (profile, network of contacts, feed, structured interaction). Example: ZeroUno defines Dada as 'the most important Italian player for communities and social networks', but referring to the subsequent period and to the overall ecosystem, not to SuperEva as 'first social network'. 🧠 Why it is not correct to define it as 'first Italian social network' To be recognised as such, the following would be required: • technical criteria (profile, explicit social network, feed, internal messaging, declared relationships) • academic recognition • comparison with previous platforms (Clarence, 1996; C6, 1997; Digiland, 1999; Italian IRC and BBS communities already active from the 1980s–1990s) SuperEva does not satisfy these criteria and is not recognised as 'first Italian social network' by any academic or historical source. 📌 What can be asserted in an impartial and correct manner A balanced formulation could be: SuperEva (1999), developed by Dada, was one of the largest Italian portals and communities of the era. Certain journalistic sources and corporate communications presented it as a 'social network', but this definition is not recognised by international historiography nor can it be considered, in the technical sense, the first Italian social network. This sentence is accurate, documentded and does not attribute unsupported historical certainties." In summary: neither the Dada/SuperEva project nor InterNetwork City can be individually classified as "the world's (or Italy's) first social network", given that precursors to such platforms already existed, such as the aforementioned case of PLATO in the 1970s. Moreover, internet history confirms that Dada.it (1995) and SuperEva (1999) came to serve over 30 million private users and 500,000 companies across 11 countries: SuperEva became a veritable "mythical place" of the Italian web, one of the first major communities in the Bel Paese, while Dada transformed into a multinational corporation listed on the Stock Exchange from 2000 to 2018. Conversely, InterNetwork City (1995), created by Marco Camisani Calzolari with Claudio Cecchetto, remained a pioneering, experimental project, without a diffusion comparable to the major portals that followed, and never achieved the scale or notoriety of SuperEva. In this context, finally, we return to the matter of official digital historiography and the international academic taxonomy of social networks, which have never officially recognised the respective journalistic/corporate narratives that we have sought to document impartially in this article. In conclusion, at the international academic and digital historiographical level: The first social network in the pioneering computing history of the 1960s–1970s was Plato. The first modern social network was SixDegrees.com. In Italy in the 1990s, both InterNetwork City and Dada/SuperEva can be defined as the first two pioneering experiments of the Italian social web (of precocious, innovative and anticipatory nature in the Belpaese), whilst not being recognised by international historiography as 'true and proper social networks' in the modern sense.

A Crown Instead of the Barracks: An Idea From Outside the Box Could Egypt’s exiled opposition use constitutional monarchy to dismantle the legitimacy of the 1952 coup? By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands To understand what follows, a reader unfamiliar with Egypt needs one basic fact: since 1952, Egypt has never been governed by anyone who did not first wear a military uniform. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and today Abdel Fattah el-Sisi four men, four eras, one common origin. All rose through the armed forces. All inherited a state built by a coup that year, when a group of officers calling themselves the "Free Officers" overthrew King Farouk I and, within a year, abolished the monarchy altogether and declared a republic. For seventy-three years, the underlying equation has not changed: the army rules, power passes from one officer to the next, and legitimacy is drawn from the barrel of a gun rather than the ballot box. Every conceivable form of opposition has been tried legal parties and banned ones, Islamist movements, liberal and leftist coalitions, the 2011 popular uprising, and the 2013 elections whose result was overturned by force within a year. All of them hit the same wall: a military institution that reproduces itself under different names, while the core of the system remains untouched. So what if the problem, all along, has not simply been who rules, but the constitutional framework that makes military rule possible in the first place? And what if the answer lies not in swapping one president for another, but in dismantling the underlying equation itself, through a framework Egyptian opposition movements have never seriously tried: a purely ceremonial constitutional monarchy, on the model of Belgium, the Netherlands, or Spain where the head of state becomes a symbol above the political fray, while the army is permanently expelled from politics and returned to its barracks. This is not a call to revive a particular family, nor nostalgia for a golden age that never quite existed. It is a proposal for a political and strategic tool that has not yet been used in the intellectual arsenal of Egypt’s opposition in exile a tool that deserves serious discussion, regardless of whether it is ever literally realised or simply serves to expand the boundaries of what is politically thinkable. I. Why 1952, Not 2013 or 2011, Is the Root The strategic error made by most Egyptian opposition movements from the Muslim Brotherhood to the April 6 Youth Movement to the various civil opposition parties has been treating each political crisis as an isolated case: Mubarak was corrupt and had to be toppled; Sisi staged a coup that must be condemned; the interim military council was a transitional phase to be endured. This piecemeal approach treats the symptoms while leaving the original illness untouched. That original illness is the very structure of legitimacy established by the coup of 23 July 1952. The Egyptian republican system, from Nasser to today, has never built its legitimacy on a genuine democratic social contract. Instead, it has rested on a fixed trinity: the rhetoric of "revolution against feudalism and colonialism," charismatic individual leadership, and military protection of the regime framed as the guarantor of stability. This trinity has repeated itself from Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak to Sisi, with only cosmetic variations. Each new president was never a break from the system he was its continuation. When the opposition says "let us return to the constitutional framework that preceded the coup," it is not criticising a particular policy. It is declaring that the legal foundation of everything that came after 1952 was illegitimate from the start. Here lies the rhetorical power of "returning to the pre-1952 order": it does not merely demand swapping one ruler for another. It withdraws historical legitimacy from the entire republican military system including today’s regime, which draws its own declared legitimacy from that same "1952 legacy." II. Why a "Ceremonial Crown," Not "the Return of a Ruling Family" Here is the most important distinction anyone advocating this idea seriously must grasp: the project does not rest on restoring any particular individual from the Muhammad Ali dynasty, nor on nostalgia for King Farouk or his ancestors. The real power of the idea lies in the constitutional form, not in the person who happens to sit on the throne. Three successful European democracies illustrate the model clearly. Belgium, where King Philippe is a purely constitutional symbol with no real executive power, while the state is run through an elected parliament and a complex coalition government reflecting the country’s linguistic and political diversity. The Netherlands, where King Willem-Alexander formally opens the parliamentary year and signs laws, but where actual decision-making rests with the prime minister and the elected parliament. And Spain, where the king represents symbolic continuity of the state above party politics, while the military and security services answer entirely to civilian authority a transition achieved after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, when King Juan Carlos I voluntarily relinquished the extensive executive powers he had inherited and backed free elections, most dramatically in February 1981, when he personally ordered the armed forces to remain loyal to the constitution during an attempted military coup, causing it to collapse within hours. The common thread across these three models is not "the presence of an ancient royal family." It is the principle of separating symbol from power. The monarch in these countries does not rule; he represents. He issues no political decisions; he provides the continuity and symbolic stability that allows party political competition to revolve beneath him, without every transfer of power becoming an existential crisis of legitimacy. This is precisely what Egypt’s military republican system lacks: a neutral mechanism for guaranteeing state continuity that does not depend on the person of the ruler or his security apparatus. When Egypt’s military-republican president is absent, it is always the army that fills the vacuum, because it is the only institution built to be the "guarantor of stability." Under a ceremonial monarchical model, by contrast, it is the king not the army who represents that symbolic guarantee, genuinely opening the door to removing the military institution from the political equation altogether. III. Egypt’s Standing Under the Monarchy: An Honest Reckoning, Not Blind Nostalgia For a Western reader with little prior knowledge of Egypt’s monarchical period (1922–1952), it helps to know this: Egypt was nominally independent under its own king from 1922, but Britain retained enormous informal control over the country’s foreign policy, military bases, and the Suez Canal throughout the period a reality that shaped everything that follows. Any honest invocation of "Egypt’s standing under the monarchy" must avoid the trap of mythologised nostalgia that many advocates of this idea fall into. Egypt in that era was no lost paradise, and any honest article must say so plainly. The Egyptian pound, for instance, often invoked as a symbol of "national currency strength" in that period, was not strong because of independent Egyptian monetary policy. It was pegged to the British pound sterling as part of Egypt’s complete colonial financial dependency until 1947, with Egypt exercising no independent oversight of its own currency whatsoever. The pound’s strength, in other words, was not a sovereign Egyptian achievement it was a reflection of British imperial power ruling Egypt from behind the throne. But this does not mean Egypt lacked a genuine regional standing worth studying. Cairo, in the 1930s and 1940s, was the undisputed cultural capital of the entire Arab world: the Egyptian film industry produced more than half of all Arabic-language cinema; its theatre scene, led by figures like Youssef Wahbi and Naguib al-Rihani, and its music, with Umm Kulthum and Mohammed Abdel Wahab, set the standard across the region; Cairo University was the first modern university in the Arab world; and the Egyptian press was the reference point for Arab public opinion from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Cairo was, quite simply, to the Arab world what Paris was to Francophone Europe: an unrivalled centre of cultural and intellectual gravity. This standing was not necessarily a product of monarchy itself, so much as a product of a relative space of political and press pluralism that allowed Egyptian civil society to flourish, despite all the flaws of the political system and the interference of both palace and occupier. The lesson here is not "bring back the king and the standing will return." It is: when even a limited margin of civic freedom exists, Egypt flourishes culturally and intellectually almost by its own nature. And that margin is precisely what has been entirely absent across the past seven decades of unchallenged military rule. IV. What Reform Would Actually Require Not Repeating the Old Mistakes Any serious advocacy of this model must include, even briefly, a clear vision for avoiding the flaws of the old monarchical system itself otherwise the proposal collapses into simply replacing one form of authoritarianism with another wearing a different crown. First, the armed forces would need to be placed fully under a civilian ministry of defence, with its budget subject to transparent parliamentary oversight the exact opposite of its current status as a state-within-a-state, and equally opposed to its role under the monarchy, when it often served as an instrument of British influence. Second, a judiciary fully independent of both palace and government alike, unlike the old model, which saw direct royal interference in political life as when King Fuad I dismissed the elected government of Prime Minister Saad Zaghloul’s successor, Mustafa al-Nahhas, in 1928, in one of the clearest "constitutional coups" in modern Egyptian history. Third, a parliament that genuinely represents the people rather than landowners and the aristocracy, as was the case before 1952, when membership in the Senate was effectively conditional on the ability to pay land taxes meaning political representation was, by law, restricted to the wealthy. Fourth, genuine economic sovereignty, with a truly independent national currency rather than one pegged to a foreign power’s currency, unlike the historical dependency of the Egyptian pound on sterling. These four principles are enough to clarify that the project on offer is not a literal "return to the past," but a borrowing of the constitutional form (symbolic monarchy) combined with an explicit rejection of its old substance (colonial dependency, palace interference, parliamentary feudalism). V. The Role of Egyptian Movements in Exile: Between Goal and Instrument This raises the most practical question of all: how might Egypt’s opposition abroad actually adopt this idea, and in what capacity? The honest answer is that the power of this proposal does not necessarily lie in its literal fulfilment, but in its dual strategic function. On one hand, it can be advanced as a genuine political goal adopted by broad coalitions of Egyptian movements coalitions that might include Islamists, liberals, leftists, and traditional monarchists, united around a single shared premise: rejecting the legitimacy of the 1952 order and everything that followed from it, even if they later disagree over the precise final shape of the state. On the other hand and this matters more in practice the idea can be deployed as a rhetorical instrument of pressure to widen a Egyptian political debate currently trapped between two false choices: "continued military rule" or "no alternative, chaos awaits." When the opposition puts forward a clearly defined third model a European-style constitutional monarchy it breaks this false binary and opens new intellectual space in Egyptian public discourse, even if the project is never realised in its literal form. This kind of "leverage idea" is common in the history of political movements worldwide: it is not necessarily proposed to be fulfilled immediately in full, but to redraw the boundaries of the politically possible, and to force the existing regime to defend its legitimacy rather than simply assume it. Conclusion: An Invitation to Debate, Not a Ready-Made Prescription This article does not claim that restoring a monarchical form would magically resolve Egypt’s chronic crisis of legitimacy, nor does it ignore the immense difficulties facing any transformative project under a military institution as economically and securitywise entrenched as Egypt’s is today. But it raises a question that deserves serious debate among Egypt’s opposition in exile, rather than automatic dismissal simply for being unfamiliar: Has the Egyptian opposition exhausted every available tool for dismantling the legitimacy of 1952, or has it remained trapped in the same old binary swapping one ruler for another while the framework that makes military rule possible remains untouched? The idea is on the table now, not as a finished solution, but as an overdue invitation to think outside the box.

🚨 Changer l'histoire pour changer les inégalités : 10 ressources clés 📒 Transformer le discours sur l’équité en santé : une liste de lectures essentielles ✍️ Centre de collaboration nationale des déterminants de la santé (CCNDS), Université St. Francis Xavier, Antigonish (Nouvelle-Écosse, Canada) — liste préparée par Meriko Kubota. Production financée par l'Agence de la santé publique du Canada. I Capsules Audio de Pratiques en Santé 🎙️🎥 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ucGvZfmnQ 🔍💡 Récits & équité en santé : la manière de raconter un problème oriente les responsabilités, les priorités… et l'argent. Une sélection outillée pour repérer les discours qui culpabilisent et les recadrer vers les causes structurelles. 🧭 Analyse de Pratiques en Santé et lien vers la source ℹ️➕ https://www.pratiquesensante.com/blog/pratiques-15/transformer-le-discours-sur-l-equite-en-sante-une-liste-de-lectures-essentielles-6100 📌 Ce document part d'un constat que tout acteur de terrain connaît : la façon dont on raconte un problème de santé décide de qui est tenu pour responsable et de ce qu'on juge « faisable ». Il donne un cadre pour repérer les récits qui rejettent la faute sur les personnes elles-mêmes et les remplacer par des cadrages centrés sur les conditions de vie. On y trouve des ressources directement mobilisables — dont un cours gratuit — pour retravailler ses affiches, rapports et prises de parole. Utile à quiconque veut arrêter de « responsabiliser l'individu » sans le vouloir. 🇬🇧: Transforming the discourse on health equity: a list of essential readings - https://www.pratiquesensante.com/en/blog/practices-15/transformer-le-discours-sur-l-equite-en-sante-une-liste-de-lectures-essentielles-6100 #️⃣ #ÉquitéEnSanté #ChangementDeDiscours #DéterminantsSociaux #SantéCommunautaire #Empowerment #Plaidoyer #LittératieSanté #pratiquesensante

A Generation That Forgot the Shape of the Square On memory left to die alone By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands In a house near mine, there is a boy of thirteen. Born in 2013 just a few months younger than the July coup itself, younger than the new republic under whose shadow we now live. I asked him once, with no preamble, no test, out of nothing more than passing curiosity: do you know what January was? He answered simply, without hesitation, without any sense that he was missing something: "An old revolution, against Mubarak, right?" Not entirely wrong. But it is everything he knows. The name Tahrir Square means nothing specific to him. The sound of the crowd chanting has no echo in his mind. He does not know that his own family whom he sees every day saying "thank God for stability," who warn him against "chaos" whenever a political headline crosses the screen once, at a moment two years before he was born, went down into the street, betting their entire lives on the possibility that something might change. This article is not about politics. It is about memory, and about who decides what gets told and what is left to die in silence. I. Who Erases the Picture? The first question that comes to mind is the easiest and most deceptive one: who erases this memory? And where do we begin holding them accountable? But the truth is too complex to reduce to a single actor. No one actually erases memory, in the literal sense of the act. There is no ministry called the "Ministry of Forgetting," no presidential decree ordering January struck from the collective consciousness. What happens is simpler than that, and more dangerous at once: the subject is simply never told. School says nothing. The textbook leaps from one period to another without pausing on January for more than two faded lines, composed with deliberate neutrality, devoid of any detail that might make the event feel alive to its young reader. Television no longer has any reason to return to it; the programmes that once hosted witnesses and activists stopped years ago, replaced by an official discourse that mentions January only in passing, as an unfortunate prelude to the "stability" that supposedly followed. And the home the most dangerous link of all has become afraid of the subject. Speech now carries a price, and many families, whether consciously or by sheer survival instinct, have decided that silence is safer than the story. The father who marched fears passing on to his son a curiosity that might one day lead him into trouble the family cannot afford. The mother who lost a friend in the events prefers not to reopen the wound before a child who does not yet grasp the weight of loss. And so, generation after generation, the circle of those who know shrinks, and the circle of those who do not even ask because they do not know there is anything worth asking widens. No one decided to erase the memory through an explicit decision. The memory was simply left to die alone, with no one tending it. And it is precisely this decentralised absence of responsibility that makes this kind of erasure more dangerous than any direct official ban: there is no single decision to challenge, no single body to hold accountable. Responsibility is distributed across thousands of small decisions made by thousands of individuals, each within their own context, each seeming reasonable when viewed in isolation. II. Why This Is More Dangerous Than Direct Repression An objection might be raised: is direct repression arrest, imprisonment, publishing bans not far more lethal than mere gradual forgetting? The answer is complex, and deserves calm unpacking. Direct repression can be seen. It can be documented, and the victim can know they are a victim, can tell their story, and their pain can become a testimony added to the collective memory, even if it never reaches justice. The political prisoner knows he is a political prisoner. The journalist banned from writing knows he is banned, and can tell the world he is banned. Direct repression, for all its cruelty, leaves a trace that can be followed. But a generation that has forgotten something happened at all does not even have a starting point from which to ask. This thirteen-year-old boy will never ask "why were we repressed?" because he does not know there is anything deserving that question in the first place. He feels no absence, because he does not know there is anything absent. He simply lives in a version of reality stripped of an entire chapter of his country’s history, and never for a moment suspects that this void is a void at all. Here lies the essence of the danger: direct repression creates victims who know they are victims. Erasure of memory, when it succeeds, creates a generation that does not even know it has been deprived of anything. And deprivation that is not felt cannot be resisted, because resistance always begins with an awareness of loss. The regime that came after 2013 does not need to convince the new generation that January was a mistake. That would be an arduous, costly task, requiring sustained propaganda and continuous effort to persuade each individual one by one. It is far easier, and strategically far more efficient, simply to ensure they never know it was anything at all. The void requires no defence; it requires only silence, and silence is free and always available. III. The Four Mechanisms of Erasure Four complementary mechanisms can be identified working together to produce this collective void not as an organised conspiracy, but as a system of incentives that pushes each party, consciously or not, to contribute to the same process. The first mechanism: formal education. The curriculum, as currently designed, treats January as a passing footnote rather than a founding event deserving detail and analysis. The student memorises two dates the start of the revolution and its presumed end without understanding why people took to the streets, what they were demanding, or how they felt in that pivotal moment. The second mechanism: broadcast media. The channels that once hosted live discussions on January, featuring varied perspectives, have gradually disappeared, or transformed their discourse entirely. Today’s televised image either ignores the anniversary altogether, or invokes it only to frame it as a prelude to chaos that must be avoided. The third mechanism: the silence of homes. This is the most dangerous of all, precisely because it is the most human and understandable. Parents who lived through the experience protect it with silence, not out of aversion to the story, but out of fear of its price. This silence, however legitimate its motives, achieves exactly the same effect as official censorship: it blocks the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The fourth mechanism: the absence of alternative spaces. Even those among the new generation who wish to know cannot easily find places to look. Archives are scattered, trustworthy websites are blocked or require effort to reach, and personal testimonies are dispersed across corners of the internet that an ordinary student at an ordinary school will never stumble upon. These four mechanisms require no central coordination to work together. Each naturally serves the others, and all converge on a single result: a growing void in the consciousness of every new generation. IV. Memory as an Act of Resistance If erasure operates without a centre, then resisting it must also be decentralised. No one waits for a government decision to restore January to the curriculum, nor for a television programme to revive the testimonies. Resistance here is necessarily individual, happening in small details, in passing conversations, in the simple decision to tell rather than to stay silent. This is exactly what I try to do, without any claim to heroism, without any grand mission. I try, whenever I can, to tell the thirteen-year-old boy and others like him details that are never written in official reports or in schoolbooks: what the voices in the square sounded like, how someone felt the first time they realised change was possible, what that moment of hope was like before everything changed. The goal is not to bring back the past; the past cannot be brought back. The goal is that this boy, when he grows older and asks again and he will ask, because the questions always return at some point finds someone to tell him the full story, not two faded lines in a schoolbook. That he knows the stability he is told is the fruit of "wisdom" has a prior history, that this history carried other possibilities, and that real people bet their lives on those possibilities. V. Why This Matters Now Talking about the memory of a generation not yet aware might seem an intellectual luxury next to more urgent matters: arrests, a collapsing economy, regional wars. But the truth is that this issue is the foundation on which every other issue is built. A people who do not know they once rose up will not understand why they should ever think of rising again. A generation raised to believe "stability" is the only natural state possible will never ask itself what drove its own parents, shortly before it was born, to risk everything for an alternative that was never guaranteed. Memory is not a luxury; it is the reference point by which every generation measures its present, and through which it determines what is possible and what is not. And whoever understands this understands why erasing memory, not direct repression alone, is among the most important tools of any regime seeking to guarantee its permanence: because a people who have forgotten they were once free will not even know they are missing freedom. Memory, like the word, needs someone to tell it in order to survive. And when the tellers stop, memory does not die suddenly; it withers slowly, generation after generation, until the day comes when a boy asks an innocent question, and finds no one to answer him but two faded lines in a schoolbook.

| JULY 2026 | The Guard State How the largest Arab nation became a security contractor at the gates of its own people By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands In June 2025, hundreds of activists from forty countries landed at Cairo airport. Doctors from France, lawyers from Australia, students from the United States, pensioners from the Netherlands. They carried no weapons and no banned slogans; they carried backpacks, walking shoes, and a single intention: to march from Arish to the Rafah crossing — entirely on Egyptian soil — to demand that food be allowed through to a people starving behind the gate. Not one of them reached Rafah. More than two hundred were detained before the march could begin. Around five hundred foreign nationals were deported from airports, hotels, and checkpoints. Passports were confiscated, activists were pulled out of downtown Cairo cafés, and the Global March to Gaza was cancelled on 16 June without taking its first step. And the world watched. This was no secret operation in a dark basement; it happened in the open, documented by the deportees’ own phone cameras, carried by every international news agency. The world watched an Arab state arrest Europeans, Americans, and Africans for wanting to walk towards Palestine. A state guarding the gate of a siege — from the side that was supposed to be the side of rescue. Hold that image, because it is the key to everything that follows. This was not an aberration in Egyptian policy, nor an isolated security decision. It is the function — the complete function around which the Egyptian state has been redefined over the past decade, and which it is time to call by its proper name: the Guard State. I. The Name — What Do We Mean by the Guard State? Political economy has long described states that live off the rent of their location rather than the production of their people. But what has crystallised in Egypt over the past decade goes beyond traditional geographic rent — the Suez Canal, say — into something far graver: the conversion of sovereignty itself into a commodity for hire. The Guard State does not sell its location; it sells its function. It collects its wages not for what it produces, but for what it prevents: it prevents the refugee from reaching Europe, the activist from reaching Gaza, its own people from reaching politics, and the resistance’s weapons from reaching their destination. Four gates, guarded by a single machine, whose wages are paid in loans, deposits, and perpetually renewed rescue packages. This is not a rhetorical metaphor; it is an economic structure with numbers attached. When the Egyptian economy collapsed in 2024, it was rescued not by productive reform but by a single deal whose subject was location: Ras el-Hekma — thirty-five billion dollars for a stretch of coastline. And whenever negotiations with the IMF stall, the tranches are unlocked by explicit European pressure whose subject is migration: nine billion euros from the European Union in the 2024 “Strategic Partnership,” whose own documents place “migration management” at its core. Europe does not pay Egypt to prosper. It pays Egypt to guard. Thus the model is complete: income in exchange for prevention, external legitimacy in exchange for guarding, and international silence about domestic tyranny in exchange for keeping the gates controlled. To see how the model works on the ground, consider the bloodiest gate of all: the gate of Gaza. II. The Gaza Gate — The Guard Who Is Himself Searched The first paradox must be nailed down with facts: Egypt is not a sovereign guard of its own crossing; it is a searched guard. Egyptian relief trucks — ninety-two thousand food parcels in a single convoy this month — are subject to Israeli inspection before entering the Strip: from Egyptian soil, through a crossing that bears an Egyptian name. The state that guards the gate does not hold its key. It owns the threshold, but not the door. Then the October 2025 truce added a new layer to the function. Under the fifteen-point roadmap sponsored by the international envoy together with the “guarantor states” — Egypt foremost among them — Cairo is to train the civilian police force that will replace Hamas in administering the Strip, under the slogan of “one authority, one law, one weapon.” Let us call things by their names: the state that could not — or would not — deliver a loaf of bread without Israeli permission is now qualifying to graduate the security apparatus that will oversee the disarming of the resistance. From guarding the siege to administering what comes after the siege — a promotion within the same project. And meanwhile, what is happening behind the guarded gate? Since the truce, more than one thousand one hundred Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire — the latest, just two days ago, a ten-year-old boy named Motaz Abu Shaar, carried to his grave in Khan Younis by his mother, Warda. A United Nations commission of inquiry has concluded that Israel is “deliberately targeting children in an ongoing genocide.” This is what the guarantors’ official language calls a “ceasefire.” What meaning is left in the word “guarantor”? A guarantor that the gate stays firmly shut — however high the dead pile up behind it. III. The Mediterranean Gate — The Guard Europe Pays For The second gate faces north. Since 2016, Cairo has boasted — through its officials at every European forum — that “not a single irregular migration boat has departed from Egyptian shores.” This is very nearly true. But the forbidden question is: at what political price has this “efficiency” become an instrument of mutual blackmail? Europe — which condemns Egypt’s human rights record in its parliamentary resolutions — is the same Europe that signed the nine-billion-euro partnership, and the same Europe that stays silent about sixty thousand political prisoners because the alternative, in its calculations, is boats that never stop. And Cairo understands the game and has mastered it: whenever human rights pressure intensifies, the official discourse turns up the volume on “Egypt hosts millions of refugees” and “the last line of defence.” The result is a perfect structure of mutual blackmail: Europe buys its conscience’s silence, the regime sells its location, and the people — Egyptian and refugee alike — are the commodity in the transaction. The democracies that lecture on values are financing the guard who keeps the victims from knocking on their doors. This is not passing hypocrisy; it is a structural partnership in the Guard State model — one that makes Brussels and Berlin shareholders in everything this state produces, from domestic repression to external siege. IV. The Interior Gate — Guarding the People Against Politics But the most dangerous gate is not on any border; it is inside. The Guard State cannot perform its external function unless it first guards an internal gate: the people’s gate to politics. The function requires a people that does not ask: why are we guarding the siege of our brothers? Why are our trucks searched on our own soil? Why are guests deported for coming to walk in peace? To guarantee the question is never asked, the largest silencing machine in the country’s history was built: sixty thousand prisoners of opinion, a press ranked 166th out of 180 worldwide, and a state security case number waiting for anyone who writes. I write these lines from experience, not from reading reports. When I continued writing from my Dutch exile, the machine reached me across continents: accounts shut down by coordinated mass-reporting campaigns, documented threats, a family harassed inside Egypt as leverage — and my name entered into Case 1282 of 2024, not for any act I committed, but for opinions written from free European soil. This is not a personal complaint; it is a job description: the Guard State guards even beyond its borders, because the free word — wherever it is written — threatens the entire contract of guardianship. The logic is perfectly self-consistent: a regime that sells “stability” abroad cannot tolerate a voice revealing that the stability on offer is the stillness of graveyards. This is why the arrest of the foreign activists in June 2025 was inevitable, not incidental: a peaceful march reaching Rafah would have revealed, before the world’s cameras, that the gate opens when it is wanted open — and that the one keeping it shut is a partner, not a mediator. V. What Has Egypt Lost? — The Guard’s Bill An apologist might argue: what is the harm? A state monetising its location as Norway monetises its oil. The answer lies in the essential difference: Norway sells a resource; Egypt leases its will. And the difference between the two is the difference between trade and bondage. Let us tally what Egypt has paid for this model, in bare facts. It lost its water sovereignty: the Renaissance Dam was completed and filled without the state — owner of “the largest defence headquarters in the world” — daring anything beyond statements of concern; for the guard does not make trouble for the international order that employs him. It lost its regional standing: in the Iran–America war halted just weeks ago, Cairo was neither party nor mediator nor even consultant — Pakistan brokered the deal, while Egypt absorbed the economic shrapnel of Hormuz’s closure like a bystander caught in a battle whose parties it does not know. It lost its place in the conscience of its nation: the state that liberated its land in 1973 and led the Arab world for a century has become, in the eyes of the Arab street from the Atlantic to the Gulf, the gatekeeper of the siege. This loss, specifically, no loan or deposit can repay — because it is the only capital that cannot be printed. And it lost — here is the crux — the very national security in whose name the guarding is justified. The model proved its fragility at the moment of testing: when Israel feared an Iranian response last year, it cut off Egypt’s gas by unilateral decision within hours. The guard who believed himself a partner discovered he was merely a hireling whose wages stop the moment danger arrives. VI. The Alternative Is Not a Slogan — It Is the Recovery of the Original Function I will not close with an essay on “the solution lies in Arab unity”; worn-out words kill more surely than silence. The alternative is specific, and it begins with redefining the function. The state is not a guard; the state is the agent of its people’s will. Every foreign policy not derived from that will is — by definition — functional servitude, however it is wrapped in the language of wisdom and moderation. And the Egyptian will is known and needs no referendum: no people in this region accepts that its country serve as warden of the siege of Gaza, or as Europe’s border post. Practically, the recovery begins with three measurable steps. Open the Rafah crossing fully and sovereignly, by purely Egyptian decision — that alone would overturn the equation of the siege. Break the negotiating bondage by linking any cooperation on migration to concrete European positions on Palestine, not statements of concern. And open the interior gate — release the prisoners and lift the hand from the written word — because a state that fears an article will never dare face an occupier. I know the current regime will do none of this; guarding is its founding contract and its financial artery. But this article is not written for the regime. It is written for memory, and for the generation that will inherit the gates — so that it knows that what is presented to it today as “the fate of geography” is no fate at all. It is an employment contract, signed by a regime without a mandate from its people. And contracts, however long they run, end when one of their parties does. And the world — I return to where I began — is a witness that requires no further proof. It watched the deportees at Cairo airport; it watched the searched trucks; it watched Warda Abu Shaar carry her son to his grave behind a firmly guarded gate. The question is no longer: what is happening? The only question left is: who dares to name it? This article is a naming. Adham Hasanin is an Egyptian journalist and political writer based in the Netherlands, covering Arab and European political affairs.

Poverty Is the Problem. Success Is Not. Much of modern political discourse is built on the assumption that inequality is the problem. I believe this is a profound mistake. The true enemy is not inequality—it is poverty. There is a reason the commandment “Thou shalt not covet” #Poverty #Inequality #Success #Nospecificcountriesarementionedinthetweet.

In just two sentences, my friend Shany Mor (@ShMMor) captures the utter cluelessness of so much supposedly "learned" discourse about Israel's strategic predicament in both Gaza and the West Bank: "Israel can neither continue to occupy the West Bank nor consider withdrawing from #Israel #Gaza #WestBank #IL #PS

Perhaps climate anxiety and energy dehrowth are not the main drivers of A/C resistance among the European population at large, but they very much are at the level of government regulation and elite discourse. Governments keep discouraging it — including my own city of Ghent, https://t.co/g9bF6ctw4v #ClimateAnxiety #EnergyDegrowth #ACResistance #BE #EU

No, non discuto con bot e provocatori, con "Paperottolo" che scrive che più fa caldo meglio è per la Vita, con chi pretende che senta Zichichi (deceduto) e che parli di scie chimiche, con chi insulta. Blocco e muto. Così X torna ad essere un luogo dove scambiare idee per davvero #Discourse #ClimateChange #RespectfulDebate

Despite ongoing heavy strikes on Ukraine, President Putin remains steadfast in his uncompromising stance on the war, while signs of shifting public discourse and discontent regarding the prolonged conflict emerge in Russia amidst economic strain and escalating frustrations. #Russia #UkraineWar #PublicDiscourse

In the context of an unyielding stance toward the ongoing war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin maintains that Russia's military objectives are being met, while public discourse on the conflict is subtly shifting amid the nation's escalating economic challenges and continued military aggressions. #Putin #UkraineWar #PublicDiscourse

Farage loses viral touch to Musk-backed Lowe via @FT The founder of far-right party Restore Britain now has greater reach on social media platform X than Farage, in a sign of how Elon Musk is pulling Britain’s political discourse towards extreme content https://t.co/F1N9OXjO3k #Farage #ElonMusk #Politics #GB

Yes, Andrew Tate is a vile misogynist. But the broader discourse around the “manosphere” and “toxic masculinity” on the Left is starting to resemble a moral panic. A reality check: “In response to every question we asked about changing gender norms, younger men were more #Misogyny #ToxicMasculinity #Manosphere #Nospecificcountrycodesarementionedinthetweet.