What are the pressings questions that the scholarship on the Maghreb is asking? Through what conceptual and methodological framework does this scholarship rethink power and marginality, a decade after the uprisings?
This double session seeks to highlight the places where marginality and power coalesce, intersect and become productive. As the Algerian protests show, subterranean dynamics are still in play, changing politics/as usual while enabling the rise of marginal players, claims, and areas of inquiry. The geographical location of the Maghreb as the actual fortress of Europe and the ongoing struggles for power in Libya put also this region at the crossroads of displaced, racially marked populations. This urges scholars to rethink marginality and power, race and racism, both from within and without. Race acquires new meanings not only as it pertains to migrating bodies but also as the new terrain for feminist identifications and tensions. The emergence of the identity category of "Black Tunisian Feminism" enables feminist groups to appropriate race and "intersectionality" as a place to speak about marginality as a gendered and classed category infused with racial symbolism. The Libyan uprising was unique in the way the rising margins triggered ongoing confrontations but also enabled subtle "proxy-wars of communication". Tiny peripheries in Morocco and Tunisia have produced counter-hegemonic narratives and alternative modes of governance that resisted state centralized power and capitalist accumulation while traveling capital is constantly creating new centers of power and dispossession.
Hence, while the nexus power/margin is the main thread running across the papers, it is examined at various scales and registers and beyond the rhetoric of success and failure, and stability and unrest. Case studies from Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia explore the circulation of bodies, emotions, knowledge, and capital in relation to geopolitical interventions, post-colonial laws, memory and justice, communication strategies, feminism, and state violence and resistance.
For more than eight years, the inhabitants of the municipality of Imider, a group of seven villages located near the town of Tinghir, in south-eastern Morocco, occupied a water valve on Mount Alebban. In August 2011, they established a permanent camp and took control of the water pumps that serve a silver mine a few kilometers from the villages. Faced with economic marginalization, continuous pollution of their agricultural land and a serious water shortage, the villagers decided collectively to climb the mountain and cut the water supply to the mine. They hve refused to leave since and continue to resist the mining company in what has become the longest sit-in in the history of social protest in Morocco. Since the start of the 21st century, we have seen a steady increase in the number of socio-economic events in Morocco, especially in small towns and villages, somewhat emboldened by the new political climate. Peripheries like Imider are dynamic spaces, capable of preserving and reproducing counter-hegemonic narratives and alternatives that challenge central power in the long term. Therefore, if we really want to understand the dynamics and the deeper context of the 2011 uprisings, we must take its "margins" very seriously. This article focuses on the case of Imider and understands the dynamics of protest and its confinement in a new context of power and government in Morocco.
Much has been said about feminist groups’ bifurcation during the Tunisian revolution. The latter brought to sharp relief struggles over the meaning of democracy and women’s rights as it pertains to Islamists and secularists. These identity categories are still salient and have been relevant to “state feminism” under both Bourguiba and Ben Ali. However, the appropriation of “intersectionality” by Islamist women in the post-revolutionary state-building process, complicates this bifurcation by locating race and class at the center of Islamist feminists’ representations of themselves. As the two popular identifiers “Black Tunisian Feminism” and “Grassroots Feminism” show, “marginality,” “Blackness,” and “anti-secular sentiment” are now the terrain upon which new generations of feminists forge new identities and discourse. What kind of work does race do in this new positioning of Islamist feminists in Tunisia? Why is race a more relevant category to speak about class, gender, and women's rights than “Islam”? What kind of ruptures does the notion of race bring to “Islam as usual” discourse? What kind of transnational solidarities or bridges does the notion of intersectionality authorize in the Tunisian context?
I propose to critically assess the shifts and continuities in Islamist feminists’ new positioning as the (black) voices of the “grassroots” and the "marginal.” I show the strengths and limits of an intersectional analysis and racial positioning by confronting it to a reality of feminist elites’ migration, the traveling discourse of racism these women bring with them from Europe, and the concrete policies against racism, classism, and gender inequities, that “Black Tunisian feminists” promote and support.
This paper is part of a larger research project analyzing the linkages between processes of postcolonial state-building in the Maghreb, land tenure and property regimes, the types of conflict that arise from the tensions between them and the forms of resistance these tensions elicit. More specifically, this paper addresses the changing state-society relations in Tunisia from the perspective of the margins. Since the uprising of the Tunisian people in 2010, there has been a momentous rise of political an social mobilizations that are sustained by marginalized segments of the population. I focus particularly on the rise of mobilizations that are linked to issues of land tenure and property in relation to resource extraction and environmental degradation. By centralizing the mobilization of marginalized people, this paper reconsiders the weight given to urban and middle-class led forms of mobilization. People in impoverished areas – whether in rural or urban contexts – were and are at the forefront of different forms of protest. Hence, the ‘margins’ and the ‘marginalized’ constitute important sites of political change and social transformation. Based on original fieldwork data collected by the team of researchers (comprising two pre-doctoral researchers, two postdocs and two established researchers), this paper reflects on how marginalized communities resist processes of dispossession and challenge the state’s abilities to define property rights.
Russian-style influence operations are being replicated throughout the Middle East and North Africa at an alarming rate. In August 2019, Facebook announced the discovery of nearly 3,000 false and misleading posts linked to hubs in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The posts deployed what Facebook describes as “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” a strategy comparable to ping-ponging in which “groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they are doing.” The strategic deployment of misinformation has impacted virtually every major flashpoint in the Arab world but perhaps nowhere more acutely than in Libya where the information ecosphere has proven particularly susceptible to bad actors. In the following I examine some of the aesthetic and rhetorical dimensions of the proxy-communications war being waged in Libya, laying out ideas on how the country and the conflict, as a case study, illustrate broader patterns in the global struggle for influence in the Middle East and North Africa, the role of social media in the midst of violent conflict and possible avenues for resolution in the years ahead.
