The theme of my research paper is the military-run "regroupement" camps in which hundreds of thousands of inhabitants in Kabilia -an important center of armed resistance against the colonial powers- were relocated during the Algerian war. 2, 350,000 inhabitants of rural villages were dislocated and displaced, as a result of a process that started in the beginning of the onset of the war in 1954, and reached its height in 1961. In my paper, I focus on one example: the village of Mansourah, situated in the district of Bordj Bou Arreridj, in which my own father spent his childhood. Using the testimony of my father and other relatives who live in Algiers, I explore the memories of violence. How violence was exerted, and conceived by the French colonial powers and the nationalist insurgents? And more relevantly, how is violence remembered? How have the practices of regrouping engendered, and made possible, a different set of social relations in the camps? And, how are these subsequent changes remembered and valued? The recollection of personal experiences which necessarily involves aspects of memory provides valuable information about the impact of events on the lives of ordinary people. Since oral history is based on memory, which is by definition fragile and selective, I raise the question about its reliability, and about memory itself. What do these subjective accounts tell us about memory and history? In short, what is present and absent in these testimonies? Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice, the enclosed space of the camp is approached as a field within which the French military and the Liberation National Front (FLN) were competing to impose their capital as the most legitimate claim to authority. Based on oral testimonies, I argue that the resettling of Algerians from diverse ethnic clans and the resorting to symbolic and physical violence by the French army and the FLN have accelerated the emergence of new identities in disarray. Drawing mainly on Michel Cornaton's pioneering research on regroupement camps in Algeria "Les regroupements de la décolonisation en Algérie" (L'Harmattan. Paris. 1967), and Pierre Bourdieu's study "Le déracinement": la crise de l'agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie" (Paris, Edition de Minuit, 1964), I explore the question of uprooting, as well as of destructuration and restructuring of social links in this peculiar context. I also use Foucault's theory to conceptualize the idea of power and the control exerted upon the population in regroupement camps.

Through a close examination of British policy toward native legal institutions in colonial Sudan, I argue that many theorists of the modern state [Scott 1998; Tilly 1990; Mitchell 1991] have made a fundamental mistake about how states behave. These theorists claim that the state, colonial or otherwise, is primarily interested in rendering the law “legible” – that is to say, predictable, calculable, and easily replicated across time and territory. Indeed, this “standardization” (and often outright codification) of the law is generally regarded as one of the hallmarks of state formation and constitutive of the very definition of what it means to qualify as one. [Messick 1996; Spruyt 1994] This paper challenges those assumptions and shows their limitations in the colonial context. Drawing primarily from the case of early 20th century Sudan, it shows that under certain conditions, a regime will intentionally create a realm of “legal ambiguity” in which the behavior of the law becomes impossible for even the state to predict. In such situations, the state actively encourages non-state actors to behave in “illegible” ways. This conclusion is reached through a close study of British policy toward Ali al-Tom, chief of the Kabbabish Arabs and a linchpin of colonial policy in central Sudan throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As in many of their other colonies, British colonial administrators adopted a policy of formalizing and standardizing the legal powers of Sudan’s judicial institutions and actors. Yet curiously, Ali al-Tom was exempted from this countrywide policy – indeed, colonial administrators actually lobbied aggressively for his legal powers to remain as uncodified and unpredictable as possible. As a result, the course of law in al-Tom’s jurisdiction was, for the British, essentially “illegible.” To properly explain why al-Tom’s authority was allowed to remain ambiguous when that of all others was standardized, I employ Carl Schmitt’s concept of “exceptionality,” as well as the vast literature on “states of emergency” – situations in which the normal rule of law is suddenly suspended. [Wedeen 2008; Honig 2009] When read alongside the larger body of scholarship on British policies in Sudan, it becomes clear that colonial officers were unwilling to explicitly define al-Tom’s legal powers for the simple reason that doing so would have constrained his ability to respond to unexpected threats to British rule. This tension between colonial hegemony and colonial knowledge, usually thought to be closely intertwined, marks an important critique of how most theorists claim states behave.

Contemporary analysis of Egyptian emergency legislation and the military courts system typically reaches back only as far as the beginning of Mubarak era or the Free Officers’ courts of treason and revolution of 1952-53. Employing legal and news media and parliamentary, diplomatic and court documents from Egyptian, British and American archives, this paper will argue that the Egyptian government’s first long-term, autonomous administration of an exceptional legal system under the state of siege of 1 September 1939 to 4 October 1945 represented a significant expansion of the state’s political and social security objectives and triggered a wide-ranging renegotiation of local power with the British. It therefore set important precedents for governmental and legal strategy, social and economic goals and the role of security in nationalist discourse in the republican era. The state of siege, required by the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in case of war, gave six successive Egyptian prime ministers power as military governors to issue more than 600 proclamations defining myriad new security regulations and infractions and placing many existing crimes under the jurisdiction of military-civilian mixed tribunals in which defendants had the right neither to habeas corpus nor to appeal. At first contented with war legislation imposing cooperative censorship and interning Axis citizens, the British authorities were forced to concede expanded Egyptian state economic control to areas formerly dominated by private foreign firms, and for the first time ever, Egyptian jurisdiction over British citizens in infractions of military proclamations. Parliamentary debate and military court records from the Egyptian National Archives illustrate a stark discrepancy between the objectives of war legislation and reality. Corruption in the new war bureaucracy and scant resources for the expanded police led to frequent failures in air raid defense and rationing and in preventing war profiteering, drug smuggling, theft and rioting between troops and Egyptians. Despite this, the crisis of war allowed the Egyptian government to reframe the issue of domestic security as a reserve of its nation-state and even redefine and nationalize aspects of time and space. This paper therefore elaborates a theory of emergency law in a neocolonial context: the state of siege became a subversive declaration of sovereignty that challenged British hegemony in the Egyptian security system. As it was based on liberal-legal discourse, it would have lasting consequences for state-society relations after the war.

Drawing on a broad range of primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and English, such as governmental correspondence, travelogues, and local petitions this paper explores the connections between Ottoman politics of knowledge production and imperial governance in the Province of Yemen, one of the most strongly contested frontier regions of the empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I focus on the struggles between Ottoman bureaucrats and local actors, including “tribal” leaders and the Zaydi imams, over the issue of what constituted knowledge of local society and what it meant to fashion governmental practices according to it. Historians have shown that new types of population counts and cadastral surveys played a key role in government efforts to build a more intrusive Ottoman state from the reign of Mahmud II (1808-1839). However, knowledge production in Ottoman frontier regions where neither censuses nor cadastral surveys could be carried out has remained virtually unexplored. I argue that whereas the above-mentioned forms of knowledge did not play a role in Ottoman Yemen, knowing local society was nevertheless a crucial element of Ottoman notions of mastering this province: debates over what the “customs and dispositions” (‘adat ve emzice) of the local people were and into which governmental practices they should be translated were central to the struggles over policy-making toward Yemen. Ottoman officials resembled European colonial rulers of the time in arguing that local society could be controlled effectively through the use of “accurate” knowledge about their “essential qualities.” Yet, in contrast to what occurred in parts of the British and Russian empires, Ottoman efforts at knowledge production in Yemen were not carried out by scholars-cum-administrators within the frameworks of scholarly societies. Rather, memoranda authored by locals or government officials or their oral testimonies remained the principal conduits of producing knowledge about local society whereas gazetteers or detailed ethnographic studies were the exception. These memoranda remained largely concerned with identifying social groups (e.g. descendants of the Prophet Muhammad) that could be co-opted for the purpose of maintaining Ottoman rule at the local level. While scholars have shown that local actors manipulated categories of rule by “inventing” customs for the consumption of Ottoman bureaucrats, I demonstrate that administrators competed both with each and with local power figures over who “accurately” interpreted local culture. Looking at Ottoman knowledge production in Yemen adds to a growing literature on late Ottoman imperial governance and state building.

The paper presents and analyzes Morocco’s Roadmap to regionalize the country and provides recommendations for the plan’s implementation. The explanation, including from a comparative perspective, of the principle elements of Morocco’s Roadmap to regionalization is based on an exhaustive review of the literature, while the recommendations for regionalization’s implementation draw from project development experiences in Morocco. Morocco’s intention – taken from public statements by King Mohammed VI and interviews with officials involved in the planning process – is to decentralize decision-making authority and management regarding socio-economic development, but also political affairs and other responsibilities. Morocco’s regionalization expands to the whole of the country the basic idea of the Kingdom’s 2007 “autonomy within Moroccan sovereignty” proposal to the United Nations Security Council as a way to resolve the Western Saharan conflict. If successful, regionalization would not only promote human development, but also potentially resolve the conflict and enable deeper cooperation among the Maghreb Union on critical issues such as security, trade, migration, and pollution. The Roadmap incorporates three of the four approaches to decentralization that have been applied in cases in the world, including: 1) devolution, or transferring responsibilities to sub-national government agencies; 2) deconcentration, or enabling provincial and district level bureaucracies to work closely with other sub-national groups within a democratic framework; and 3) delegation, or the participatory method, which includes interactive, information-gathering activities that help local community members jointly evaluate their conditions and then plan and implement projects that are most important to them. The Roadmap does not include privatization. Combining the three above approaches to decentralization builds a framework that transfers authority from the national to the sub-national levels (particularly the regional and provincial levels), where public, civil, and private sectors work collaboratively – with continued national level support – toward implementing development initiatives that ultimately local communities determine and benefit from. The recommendations contained in the essay to implement Moroccan regionalization describe: 1) Moroccan professional positions (local government extenstionsists and politicians, civil society workers, teachers, among others) which are strategically placed to receive training in participatory methods and then apply them with local communities; 2) necessary reforms of the Ministry of Interior in order to build an effective decentralized system; 3) the need and role for a proposed agency of regionalization; and 4) a projection of the cost to implement decentralization based on the Roadmap. Regionalization’s success depends on if it can genuinely advance the fulfillment of local people and communities.