Rethinking Civil Society

This chapter draws on Antonio Gramsci&s;s theory of hegemony to explore how civil society challenges state crime through cultural resistance and ideological struggle. Focusing on post-revolutionary Egypt, it examines how the Mosireen Collective used grassroots media, digital documentation and visual testimony to expose state violence and disrupt dominant narratives. The 2011 uprising marked a crisis of hegemony that created openings for oppositional media to reclaim narrative authority and contest authoritarian power. Mosireen&s;s practices are analysed as forms of counter-criminology that challenged the impunity sustaining repressive rule. The chapter also traces the infrastructure of digital surveillance, showing how law, corporate complicity and new technologies enable the criminalisation of dissent. Using Gramsci&s;s concept of a ‘war of position’, it argues that Mosireen&s;s interventions fostered critical consciousness, preserved contested memory and resisted ideological erasure. In reclaiming the means of representation, the collective helped reimagine civil society as a site of resistance and political possibility under authoritarian rule.