Growing insecurity in North Africa following the Arab revolts of 2011 has raised important issues that this panel will address based on first-hand interviews and fieldwork by established academics and scholar-practitioners from four continents. While human security has increasingly been the focus of the international organizations and scholarly research, political and geopolitical problems related to decreasing legitimacy of central states at the periphery, poor governance, and incomplete or failed democratization have palpably increased human insecurity across the Maghreb and Sahelo-Saharan region. The first paper will discuss state level security re-alignments following the Arab uprisings with Algeria's growing and pivotal role at the center despite the country's longstanding irresolution of its own internal security and political issues that themselves have helped destabilize the region, especially in peripheral areas, where there are political, socio-economic and ethnic grievances and turbulence. The second paper will contrast a similar set of dynamics in Morocco pitting the center's focus on political and socio-cultural issues against the periphery's focus on socio-economic and environmental issues--issues of basic human security and survival. The third paper will look at the limits of governance and democratization efforts across North Africa to address these issues, with a focus on extra-constitutional governmental changes, at the center, and the limited reach of electoral outcomes, both at the center and periphery. The fourth paper will look at human insecurity during the Libya conflict of 2011 and its aftermath, both in the uneven (mis-)application of R2P to various communities during the initial conflict and the effects of that misapplication on ensuing communal conflicts, which are causing wider regional instability or fears of it. The fifth paper will analyze the effects of that Libyan instability on the entire Maghreb-Sahel region and will recast the entire region as one fluid and dynamic space, looking at an array of human security issues including arms flows, Tuareg issues, water resource management, uranium and petroleum mining, and movement of labor. Common themes across the papers will be issues of power and marginality, governance, and the limits of national and international efforts at democratization and stabilization. Some approaches by central states will be shown to be aggravating the very problems they are intended to alleviate. The panel will feature the participation of prominent individuals directly engaged in public debate and will draw for its analysis and recommendations from political science, international relations, social history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, and environmental studies.
International Relations/Affairs
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Dr. Ricardo Rene Laremont
The demise of Leader Qaddafi's regime in 2011 had negative consequences for security structures in North Africa and the Sahel. This paper examines the interrelatedness of security questions in North Africa and the Sahel, arguing that the region is fluid and dynamic and needs to be understood in this context. Particular attention will be given to arms flows, marginalization of the Tuareg, water resource management, uranium and petroleum mining, and movement of labor.
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Dr. Yahia Zoubir
The paper will analyze the changing aspects of North African security relations since the 2010 uprisings. The analysis will make use of theoretical perspectives on balance of power and inter-state rivalries to decipher the events unfolding in the region. Following the Arab Uprisings that swept across the Middle East and North Africa, threats to the incumbent regimes and/or the insecurity prevailing domestically and at the borders have compelled the North African states to seek greater cooperation to overcome the hardships with which they are faced. Because of the regional threats in the Sahara-Sahel, on the one hand, and the menace that militias in Libya and Jihadists in Tunisia and Egypt are posing in the neighborhood, new security alignments have emerged. Increasingly, threatened neighbors have turned to Algeria, which has greatly flexed its regional military muscles and also eluded new uprisings, to help not only to secure the porous borders, but also to assist politically. For instance, Egypt, which has been suspended from the African Union due to the coup against Morsi, has sought Algeria’s assistance to reintegrate the continental organization. The transitional government in Tunisia has relied on Algeria’s mediation to find political compromise, while Libya is now partly dependent on Algeria for some of its domestic and external security. Yet, Algeria itself faces domestic political (contentious presidential election) and internal security issues (communal conflict in Ghardaïa, terrorist attack in Tigantourine…). In the late 1980s, prospects for integration, particularly in the Maghreb, were high; the process of integration reflected the aspirations of states and societies; now calls for unity have re-emerged, but under very different circumstances. Analysis shows that the inter-Maghreb rapprochement in the 1980s was in many ways a response to internal and external events, namely, economic difficulties, ‘fortress Europe’, and the rise of radical Islamism. A similar rapprochement took place following the Arab uprisings; however, calls for unity n the wake of the revolts, after a long period of tense relations are unlikely to yield long-term reconciliation, since, like in the 1980s, once the threats abate, inter-states rivalries resume and worsen, as has been the case between Algeria and Morocco.
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Prof. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman
The Amazigh identity movement, which has made considerable strides in advancing its demands in recent years, has always included a socio-economic component in its master narrative of neglect and repression by the state authorities, including the absence of basic infrastructure and appropriation and exploitation of tribal lands and forests. It has called for fundamental change in national priorities and policies that address the concrete issues of human insecurity. However, there has always been a certain disconnect between the urban based movement spearheaded by intellectuals and educated professionals, who largely focused on socio-cultural demands, and the concrete health, economic, infrastructural and environmental problems of the villages and towns of the mountains and valleys in the hinterland, which have placed a break on the movement’s mobilization capacities. Morocco is ranked 130 among the countries of the world in the UN’s Human Development report for 2013, below the other four Maghreb countries. The report dryly quantifies the deep insecurity of health, food and livelihood faced by much of its population, particularly those living in the country’s primarily Amazigh-populated peripheral regions.
Although the energy of the “February 20th” 2011 protest movement has largely dissipated, Morocco has entered into a new and more contentious era, one in which the traditional huf min al-makhzen (“fear of the authorities”) has weakened, resulting in an increase in protests, strikes and social mobilization on local and sectoral levels.
One particular manifestation of this trend is the ongoing protest by villagers in Imider, in the Atlas Mountains, against a large silver mine, owned by a company which is ultimately controlled by the royal family. The grievances are many, from the lack of employment opportunities for locals to the damaging of the area’s water supply. The protests have now taken on a life of their own, gained international media exposure and feature the symbols of the Amazigh identity movement.
This paper will examine the Imider protests and a number of other “local” issues which have generated public protests (e.g., health care issues in the town of Bouzikarne, the death of infants from severe cold in the village of Anifgou), the ways in which the Amazigh movement is attempting to deepen its base through the foregrounding of human security issues and the efficacy of their efforts. It is part of an ongoing project analyzing the dynamics of the Arab Spring and their relationship to the Amazigh movement.
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The new international norms of “human security” and “responsibility to protect” suffered serious blows following their (widely perceived) misapplication in the Libyan conflict of 2011, leaving the international community once again hamstrung and in great consternation as to how to react to mass atrocity crimes and the threat of such crimes. This paper will assess the arguments pro and con regarding the application of R2P in Libya based on interviews and discussions in New York, Washington, Brussels, Tripoli, Benghazi, and elsewhere with many of the stakeholders directly involved in the decision making process that led to its application, along with and assessment of expert opinion on both sides of the very partisan debate with regards to the first time R2P was applied internationally. In addition to common geopolitical and academic/historical arguments within the debate are considerations of how deliberately targeted populations, both at the center of conflict and on its periphery, fare in national- and international-level assessments and in international military actions designed to protect civilians. From forgotten massacred youth protesters in Zuwara and Tripoli to internationally mediatized rape victims in Misrata, from the revolutionary widows and children of the prison massacre at Abu Salim in Benghazi to the both victimized and victimizing civilians involved in communal conflict in Twergha and among the Tebu and Twareg, various subaltern groups fared differently in the Libyan conflict when it came to the un-evenhanded application of R2P. Data will be presented based on fieldwork in Libya among these different populations, populations that continue to skirmish and mistrust each other in an evolving insecurity that impacts Libya’s neighbors as well. Debates over R2P’s application in the Libya case also caused deep discord at the United Nations and the African Union and within other international organizations that have yet to be adequately resolved and which have hampered humanitarian interventions in Syria and esewhere. The lessons of R2P in Libya have yet to be learned, and a proper assessment of these lessons with recommendations on how to improve R2P in its application will be necessary before it can take its place as a viable international norm. One of these lessons is a proper assessment of the degree to which national and regional stability and security depend on the human security of subaltern groups, and a careful re-assessment of who is responsible for that security and of how to ensure it.
