Research: Gramsci in the Arab World: the category of passive revolution and the Oslo Accords.
Mattia Giampaolo, Master's degree in Oriental Languages and Civilisations with a thesis in Contemporary History of Arab countries with a focus on Egyptian political parties in the 2011-12 revolution.
Since 2017 I am a research fellow at CeSPI -Institute of International Politicas Studies- where I work within the Middle East and Mediterranean observatory. I work mainly on Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and Palestine. He has collaborated with international think tanks such as: ECFR -European Council on Foreign Relations-; IAI -Institute of International Affairs-; Sadeq Institute; ISPI -Institute of International Politics-.
This PhD research project focuses on the application of the Gramscian category of passive revolution within the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, known as the Oslo Accords.
The project will focus mainly on the analysis of Palestinian political strategy within the process in order to better understand the reasons leading the leadership to enter into an agreement that, since the beginning, has presented several political, territorial and economic ambiguities.
To this end, the research will be directed along two fundamental axes: the first will critically analyse both literature that conceives the Agreements as the only paradigm of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and that part of literature tending, although critical, to passivise the Palestinian element, making it a spectator before the Israeli supremacy in dictating the rules of the game. Moreover, within this first axis, we will analyse the analyses that see the Agreements under the geopolitical lens and the preponderant role of international actors, denigrating in fact the events that characterised the political, social and economic life within the Palestinian territories in the twenty years preceding the signing.
The second axis, a fundamental part of the thesis that will support our research, will instead analyze how the combination of internal and external factors led the Palestinian leadership to the signing of the Oslo Accords.
To this end, three milestones in the national and international context will be analyzed: the First Palestinian
Intifada (1987), the collapse of the USSR (1989-90) and the PLO's support for Saddam Hussein during the First Gulf War (1991).
These events outlined the historical context within which the Oslo Accords were structured; a context that was marked, especially at the international level, by the emergence of a new hegemony of the US neo-liberal doctrine that saw the State Building process as the paradigm of the stability of George Bush senior's 'new world order'.
A process which penetrated with force, since the years preceding the First Intifada, within the Palestinian political groups in which, principally in the political party of Al-Fatah, the influence of the Palestinian businessmen who saw in the future State an occasion to flourish their activities, became ever stronger.
In this context, according to our hypothesis, the Oslo Accords would represent a 21st century bourgeois revolution aimed at establishing a structure which, although not fully state-like and independent, would benefit not only the State of Israel but also the Palestinian national bourgeoisie.
The theory that will underlie this project will be Antonio Gramsci's category of "passive revolution", which today, thanks to the waves of protest in various regions of the globe, has opened the field to new interpretations, often the subject of criticism for the Italian intellectual and revolutionary's gradual departure from Marxism.
Our research will attempt to bring this category back to its original formulation, namely that of the formation of the national bourgeois state, within the context of the international chessboard.
This approach will not follow a mechanistic reproduction of Gramsci's conception as thought at the time by the Italian intellectual, but will attempt to translate it within the new paradigms of the historical context of the Agreements, especially in relation to the process of State Building.
The work is divided into three parts: the first part of the research will analyse the different studies carried out around the concept of passive revolution; a second part will be devoted to the critique of the literature that has dealt with the Oslo Accords; the third part will focus on the analysis of the national and international processes that led the Palestinian leadership to the signing of the Accords and how these can be understood as a passive revolution.