Phd in POLITICAL STUDIES

Thesis title: Gramsci nel mondo arabo: la categoria di rivoluzione passiva e gli Accordi di Oslo

This study aims to critically examine the ideological and political transformations that led the so-called Palestinian Revolution and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with Fatah at its helm, to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. The theoretical framework is grounded in Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “passive revolution,” employed here as a tool to interpret the apparent paradox of a political process that, while formally framed as a national achievement, ultimately served to neutralize the transformative potential of the Palestinian liberation movement. The originality of the research lies in its engagement with Gramscian theory in dialogue with the Arab context, particularly in light of debates that emerged within activist and academic circles following the 2011 uprisings. The concept of passive revolution is thus revisited in relation to the formation of the modern state in colonial and post-colonial settings, and applied to the Palestinian case to interpret the Oslo process as the result of a bourgeois hegemonic transformation. The central aim is to demonstrate how the adoption of the Gramscian category enables a nuanced reading of the Oslo Accords' ambivalent nature: as both transformation and containment, revolution and conservation. This approach allows for a complex analysis of Palestinian state formation—not as the realization of an autonomous national project, but as the outcome of a convergence between internal interests and external constraints imposed by the international order.