After the ‘Arab Revolutions,’ the notion of the ‘local’ has taken a prominent place in area studies. However, depending on their disciplinary background and theoretical perspective, scholars use the concept of the ‘local’ in ambiguous, sometimes even contradictory ways. Thus, the definition, content, and implications of the ‘local’ still remain largely unreflected and unexamined. To make this polysemous concept more precise, this paper suggests a conceptual and a methodological notion of the ‘local,’ in which both notions are not mutually exclusive but are considered to be complementary. First, we suggest conceptualizing the ‘local’ in spatial terms and understanding it as a territorialized small-scale locality demarcated from and interlinked to the regional, national, and global scale. Drawing on empirical examples from Jordan and Morocco, the paper illustrates that the ‘local’ is a sociopolitical spatial construction shaped by ‘multiplex relationships’ between agents with different interests, strategies, and dispositions. At the same time, these agents share a localized imagination of togetherness and belonging, even as the local scale is always related to other scales of power. Second, we argue that analyzing local politics not only requires conceptual innovations that help overcome structural perspectives, but also methodological tools that enable researchers to grasp political actions beyond the regime level. Elaborating on political actions through ‘local lenses’ entails in-depth ethnographic research and demands attentiveness to social and political location, as Gupta and Ferguson (1997: 5) have pointed out. Taking the local perspective makes political interactions tangible and abstract categories such as the ‘state’ observable. Furthermore, the local research perspective allows us to trace different formal and informal ways in which the ‘state’ is continuously constructed, de-constructed, and re-constructed. Indeed, the local space is where the ‘state’ and citizens interact visibly, where participation becomes concrete and the unequal access to resources materializes. Hence, it is on the local scale that relations of power and domination become visible and thus analyzable and ultimately understandable. This holds especially in an authoritarian context, where access to resources is less a right guaranteed by citizenship than the outcome of various struggles. Taking empirical findings from politically and economically marginalized spaces in Jordan and Morocco, this paper elaborates on the ways in which the authoritarian state is contested from below.

Attempts to understand the wider context of the Arab Spring in Morocco mainly focus on the dynamic created by the 20 February Movement which originated in the wake of the events of early 2011. A group of young, mostly middle class, urbanites called upon the Moroccan people via social network sites to protest against continuing corruption, the lack of political freedom and socio-economic deprivation. Yet, there has been a long history of increasing socio-economic struggle in Morocco that tends to be underestimated. We have seen a consistent increase of social protest over the past decade, especially in the smaller towns and villages where social misery, despair and inequality among the country’s population are felt much stronger than in the large cities. I argue that the political and democratic protests of the last two years and the history of socio-economic protests cannot be viewed as unrelated phenomena but must be understood as part of the same process, a longer historical process. Attempts to understand a phenomenon such as the Arab Spring and its impact in a particular country cannot be limited to the ‘simple grand rising’ itself, the ‘critical moment’, but have to take into account the history of the numerous and seemingly insignificant cases of local protest in the years leading up to that grand rising. Rosa Luxemburg, in her analysis of the Russian revolution, demonstrated how over a longer period of time, strikes or protests that may have begun over what appear to be small and local socio-economic struggles can rapidly evolve and grow into a challenge on a broader political level. At the same time, she argued that a rise in political struggles – such as in the course of the year 2011 – can feed back into local and dispersed sites of struggle and boost their fighting spirits. Amongst other examples, I focus on the recent disturbances in the phosphate mining region of Khouribga to show the particular dynamic between political and socio-economic struggle.

This paper looks at reconfigurations of statehood and development in southern rural Jordan, focusing on two sub-districts that have recently been designated as poverty pockets and thus as special areas of intervention. It maps the agencies that engage in different improvement schemes, including government departments, the Jordanian military, royal NGOs, donors, the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority, and local cooperatives. All of these seek to activate, empower or provide for the local population in different ways. The paper explores the fragmented character of the new institutional ensemble that has emerged, which overlays rather than replaces previous forms of governing the social. Looking at the ambivalent practices of a number of the agencies listed above, it argues that two contradictory tendencies are at work. On the one hand there is a continuous attempt to create an image of the state as a coherent, encompassing entity, and to frame local concerns as individual grievances that do not undermine the broader validity of the respective interventions. On the other, numerous frictions arise within and between the different agencies involved, providing entry points for policy-shapers from the area to negotiate the terms and actual forms of intervention in the name of social welfare and development.

The events of the Arab Uprisings that started in the provincial Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid in December 2010 have challenged the prevalent focus in political sciences and area studies on regime elites and formally institutionalized politics as it neglected the sometimes silent but significant transformations unfolding at the societal level. Though Algeria did not experience its “Arab Spring” in the context of the regional upheavals (Baamara 2012, Belakhdar 2011) and while the institutionalized opposition still struggles to constitute itself as a credible counter-power, ordinary Algerian citizens nonetheless continuously challenge the state by everyday practices of resistance and thus contradict the picture of a “blocked society” (Droz-Vincent 2004). Drawing on Migdal’s state-in-society approach (Migdal 2001), on the broad research on resistance and participation in authoritarian contexts (Bayat 2009; Beinin/Vairel 2011; Bennani-Chraibi/Filleul 2003; Al-Hamad 2008; Scott 1990) and on ethnographic data collected during fieldwork trips to Algeria in October 2012 and March-April 2013, the paper aims at researching dynamics of contention at the local scale. In particular, it will offer insights into how the state is challenged by non-conventional forms of political participation in two different localities. In doing so, I will highlight the ambiguous state-society relations and the ways the post-colonial social contract is renegotiated. Thus, the paper will examine forms of political participation around and beyond the polling station that predated and accompanied the legislative elections of May 2012 in the berberophone city of Tizi-Ouzou. It will reveal that parts of the Algerian population, through massive abstention and reinvestment of traditional local institutions, continuously perform a strong rejection of the central state, undermine its authority and not least, challenge the very definition of national identity. This perspective will be completed by an analysis of the regular praxis of localized protests and riots in Bouhadjar, a small locality in the province of El Tarf (East Algeria). The paper will illustrate how young protest actors, often decried as violent and apolitical, address a particular imaginary of the state, reclaim its reengagement against the backdrop of neoliberal policies and in a sense, force it to take into consideration their demands and finally contribute to renegotiate the social contract.