Mayor Giuliano Pisapia, President of the City Council Basilio Rizzo and municipal councillors, hold "Truth banner for Giulio Regeni" on the balcony of Palazzo Marino (Milan City Hall ) March 2, 2016. Wikicommons/Comune di Milano. Some rights reserved.I never knew Giulio Regeni personally. We corresponded briefly in 2014, as he was seeking advice on where to undertake his doctoral studies. We had quite a few friends in common though, as we were both young scholars from the same country, Italy, affiliated to institutions in the same country, the UK, and working broadly on similar topics, at the intersection between the neoliberal reforms of the Egyptian economy and authoritarian state power.
It is undoubtedly also for this reason that I felt directly affected by the long week between 25 January and 3 February of last year, between the moment in which Giulio disappeared and the one in which his body was found in a ditch on the desert road from Cairo to Alexandria, bearing the signs of a violence too many people have been subjected to in Egypt.
I was a lucky one, in many respects. I carried out the bulk of my research in Cairo in the spring and summer of 2010, when popular discontent was clearly brewing, but Egyptian elites were revelling in what they perceived as the success of the economic reforms they implemented under the supervision of international financial institutions. Those were the years of the neoliberal hubris, and this self-confidence among the economic and political elites meant that key people were keen to talk to a foreign researcher studying the effects of privatisations and liberalisations on the Egyptian economy.
