Since their independence from colonial rule, the five Maghreb states have interacted bilaterally with foreign powers rather than as an integrated region. Despite the 1989 foundation of the Arab Maghreb Union, they have pursued discrete foreign policies that reflect their anticolonial struggle and ideological choices they made following, or prior to, their independence. While Algeria and Libya chose ostensibly nonalignment as the foundation of their foreign policy, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia remained attached to the West. Since 2011, all have faced numerous political and socioeconomic challenges which resulted in complicated geopolitical constraints. Thus, even if they wished to reduce their dependency, primarily on the EU, their pressing financial constraints and security imperatives prevented any change of direction or transgression of the existing patterns of their foreign policies. Structure prevailed over agency. Now, the region is diversifying away from subordinate relations with Europe and the US. The pandemic and other factors have accelerated these trends and created new geopolitical dynamics as outside powers showed increased interest. While the United States neglected the Maghreb, Russia, China, the Gulf countries, and Turkey have increased their presence. China has extended its Maritime Silk Road, which requires access to ports, and deepened its footprint. Russia has returned in search of new opportunities in arms, agriculture, and infrastructure, including access to bases, positioning it within NATO’s southern flank. The competition among the GCC states (Qatar v. UAE), on the one hand, and the rivalry between Saudi Arabia/UAE/Egypt, Turkey, and Israel (since normalization with Morocco), on the other, have spilled over not only into Libya but the entire Maghreb. Applying and problematizing neorealist theory, the paper utilizes new work on rivalry, especially in MENA (Mansour and Thompson, 2020). Additionally, the paper draws on decades of primary research on Maghreb foreign policies and five dozen new interviews with policymakers. The paper will look at the new geopolitical dynamics and explain how domestic challenges have compelled the Maghreb regimes to seek the support of outside powers to offset internal instability and regional rivalries. It will provide a thorough analysis of the drivers and interests of external powers in the region. It will address whether the current geopolitical dynamics will induce new political alliances. For example, is it conceivable that Algeria breaks its long-standing nonalignment policy and enters a quasi-alliance with Russia and China to face off a seeming new axis of the US, Morocco, Israel, and the UAE?

Except Libya’s and Algeria's hydrocarbons, the Maghreb is largely resource-poor and has faced economic difficulties while eschewing the benefits of regional integration. Difficult economic conditions and high youth unemployment persistently threaten regional stability. The Libyan and Tunisia leaders were overthrown by protests—and a NATO intervention—but Morocco and Algeria weathered the storm thanks to a semi-authoritarian governance, mighty security apparatuses, increased social spending to keep social peace, and patronage networks. However, the Maghrebi states were not spared by external shocks—e.g., recurring global recessions, commodity price volatility, and the Covid-19 pandemic—which reduced exports revenues, increased import costs, curtailed tourism, and reversed economic growth. Global geostrategic and economic changes since the 1990s did not spare North Africa and include the increased economic presence of Russia, China, Turkey and Arab Gulf countries. Notwithstanding the interdependence of economics and politics, this paper will focus primarily on the impact of global and transregional economic dynamics on the Maghreb. It will look particularly at the interplay of key economic actors including the European Union, France, Spain, China, Russia, the United States, GCC countries and Turkey. The paper will examine the extent to which Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, through trade and investment, are able to steer the interest of new and old global partners toward fulfilling these Maghreb countries’ growth and development goals, including job creation, energy independence, export diversification, and increased outward investment opportunities. The paper will also discuss the extent to which the Maghreb states can resist extra-regional ploys aiming to use them as pawns in the shifting formations of global economic competition. It will argue that, given their dire need for capital, foreign investment and export outlets, and short of implementing cleaver strategies, they may fall prey to the external actors’ designs, and that their integration into the global economy may exacerbate inequality and increase the political costs of the ensuing social tensions. This argument will be tested by examining the Maghrebi foreign economic policies and the goals of external economic powers in North Africa. An IPE approach will reveal how external constraints feed into domestic dynamics with undesirable outcomes. The neoclassical growth theory will be used in the Maghrebi cases to debunk some of its own premises and predictions. This study will draw on data and information collected in field works done in Morocco and Algeria in 2018-19 and will use 1990-2020 UNCTAD, UNDP, OECD, IMF and World Bank data.

This paper deals with evolving relations between the Arab Gulf States and the Maghreb since 2011 during a delicate stage of reorganization, marked by great uncertainties and risks. Dynamics related to political, ideational, economic and security dimensions have been in flux, though some systemic- structural realities and historical facts impact the most recent events. The ‘Islam factor’ will be analysed, including relevant links between the Maghreb and the Arabian Peninsula. Religious, humanitarian, political and business aspects in Gulf-North African relations are expressions of both state and non-state actors. Political Islam and the Islamist thought in its complexity and various expressions are examined, since they influence Arab Gulf States’ approaches to evolving politics in North Africa (from the war in Libya to the situations in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco) and their economic and financial engagements. The paper will focus on Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar, the most involved Arab Gulf actors in the region. The paper will also provide an analysis in light of the changing balances and political environments both in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and in North Africa, ten years after the ‘Arab Spring’. A multi-contextual analysis will allow to identify some areas of cooperation between the parties, without neglecting the differences, which are certainly more evident with some North African countries such as Algeria and post-2011 Tunisia. Morocco’s case is important, for its relations with the GCC countries have grown during the last decade because of the convergence of economic and political interests. Given that Morocco is the main economic and trade partner of Europe in North Africa, Morocco’s role as a ‘bridge’ between the Gulf and Europe may contribute to the creation of integrated markets in the area. Coordination with the European Union seems to be crucial as a pre-requisite to pursue some integrative partnerships on a trilateral basis that have the potential to contribute to sustainable economic development, human security, and prosperity in and around the Mediterranean. Given the scant literature on this theme, the paper will take an international political economy approach and draw from several dozen/over 100 interviews conducted by the author in two/three/four languages in Europe, the GCC, and the Maghreb.

Global mis-representations of the drivers and nature of youth protest, political culture, and "alienation" drive a wide array of poor analysis and misconceived interventions, but with discernable patterns. One common theme of these mischaracterizations in the Maghreb is analysis by way of asserting ideological absence or confusion or impurity, strategic lacunae and immaturity, and grafting projections of outside realities both from other MENA countries and from other faraway spaces of conflict onto unfamiliar or unintelligible terrain. This analysis by projection onto perceived absence, or lack, this production of intellectual simulacrum, has led since the Arab spring to a vast output of disciplined and academic-disciplinarily-responsive scholarship that filters and distorts youth protest and political cultural production in predictable ways that render the unfamiliar falsely familiar and the familiar falsely unfamiliar. So, for example, unfamiliar complex, historically grounded political and cultural grievances are routinely distorted, mischaracterized, and reduced to present-focused socio-economic demands. Conversely, familiar citizen- and justice-oriented democratic and inclusive discourses are routinely distorted and mischaracterized as the intellectual meanderings of the marginalized unemployed or Weberianally alienated youth. Or worse, youth movements and demands dangerous by association with Islamis content or Islamism, or, conversely dangerous by association with secularism and the hegemonic West. Or dangerous by association with socialism, or neoliberalism, or other imposed interpretive frames. Observers, analysts, and project designers of youth interventions then project from their own national and institutional experiences, ideologies, and orientations onto local realities, that then are often pressured to contort themselves to fit these misguided and misplaced interventions. These might include unnecessary or illconceived vocational training or rights or civics education, or misplaced efforts categroized as preventing violent extremism or normative mainstreaming that produce youth trained for a local realities that do not exist as imagined. Based on structured and semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with over 8000 young Libyans, Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans and Mauritanians over 11 years spent in the five countries and another 24 years visiting them for shorter analytical and programmatic trips-- data analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively, as well as a large literature review of post-Arab spring analysis--this paper will reveal interconnected patterns of misinterpretation and failed youth intervention. The objective of such analysis is to overhaul and reinvent youth analysis and interventions in ways much better grounded in local self-representation, rigorous youth-informed and -guided needs analysis, and incorporation of the actual life narratives and lived experience of Maghreb youth.