Scripting Citizenship: Crime and Investigation in Egyptian Television Drama in the 2010s

A forensically researched yet compulsively readable study of how Egyptian television crime dramas visualize and contest ideas of law, justice, and agency—and what their verdicts reveal about the country’s politics and culture

What has citizenship come to mean in Egypt after 2011? Since 2007, constitutions have proclaimed it as the foundation of Egypt’s democratic system, yet the everyday workings of citizenship often unfold in the shadows of legal texts. Gianluca Parolin thus turns to Egyptian television drama—specifically, the emerging crime genre of the 2010s—to explore how ideas of law, justice, and agency are visualized and contested on screen.

Unlike its prominence elsewhere, crime drama has not historically been acknowledged as a distinct genre on Egyptian television. Yet during the 2010s, a recognizable crime formula began to take shape across a large number of incarnations. This book identifies the emergence of this formula, which embodies ways of imagining the relationship between citizens, law, and the state. Through depictions of investigation, policing, and civic intervention, these dramas portray citizens stepping in to restore justice when law enforcement fails to deliver on its most basic promise.

Combining distant readings of broad trends across the decade’s television output with close readings of key series, Scripting Citizenship examines how this formula flourished within Egypt’s tightly regulated media landscape, and how it displayed formidable resilience through the transformations of the late 2010s.

In doing so, the book develops a jurisprudential reading of the Egyptian crime formula—a legal theory in which drama casts its own light across the shadows of legal texts, revealing a visual definition of citizenship for viewers and scholars alike.

Gianluca Parolin writes at the intersection of comparative constitutionalism, legal theory, and law and culture. His work is marked by a persistent effort to approach foundational questions of citizenship through unconventional theoretical frameworks. He is the author of Citizenship in the Arab World (2009).