The COVID-19 epidemic hit Italy particularly hard, yielding the implementation of strict national lockdown rules. Previous modelling studies at the national level overlooked the fact that Italy is divided into administrative regions which can independently oversee their own share of the Italian National Health Service. Here, we show that heterogeneity between regions is essential to understand the spread of the epidemic and to design effective strategies to control the disease. We model Italy as a network of regions and parameterize the model of each region on real data spanning over two months from the initial outbreak. We confirm the effectiveness at the regional level of the national lockdown strategy and propose coordinated regional interventions to prevent future national lockdowns, while avoiding saturation of the regional health systems and mitigating impact on costs. Our study and methodology can be easily extended to other levels of granularity to support policy- and decision-makers.

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The livelihoods of Egypt’s agrarian working classes have been under attack for at least 30 years by policies dispossessing them of natural and economic resources. This process accelerated in the mid 1990s when a domestic land grab took place, eradicating tenure rights for poor tenants. Rural Egypt was part of the 2011 revolutionary process, although heavily marginalised in narratives about the ‘Spring’. Land occupations, farmers’ protests and unionisation were part of the revolutionary landscape, in direct continuity with previous struggles, but also showing signs of rupture and innovation. Reactions from below against dispossession have been variegated and developing, but their determinants remain largely unaddressed. The article retraces the trajectories of these struggles, pointing at the crucial role that the peasants’ allies (leftist civic activism, NGOs and political parties) have played in enhancing and/or undermining agrarian movements at particular historical conjunctures.

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