On the night of April 15, 1869 a group of Algerians aligned with the French military, the Nememcha, raided a caravan primarily made up of Hammama, a rival group from the Tunisian side of the new colonial border. The raid cut down twenty-seven people, including children and women. The Nememcha were not initially punished. Only after an outcry raised by the father of an unrelated merchant killed in the raid did the Military Tribunal launch an investigation. Both sides claimed that hardships arising from the environmental calamities of the previous years – drought, locust invasion, epidemic disease – had heightened tensions and led to the confrontation. This “Affaire of the Oued-Mahouine,” as it came to be known, remained a touchstone in colonial politics. For instance, in 1899, in the French Chamber of Deputies, Mr. Marchal brought it up as proof that Muslim Algerians did not deserve full rights as French citizens. Through an examination of contemporary military correspondence, administrative reports, and newspaper coverage, this paper argues that environmental catastrophe combined with a new organization and expansion of state power to heighten frontier tensions and finally make concrete the colonial border between Algeria and Tunisia. The Affaire of the Oued-Mahouine had salience not only in the immediate political situation, but also in debates about rights and power in Algeria thirty years later. Study of this Affaire highlights the constructed and contested nature of colonial borders: the creation and policing of the new Algerian-Tunisian border calcified antagonistic relationships and shifted power relations in the region, determined legal status and protection for certain groups over others, and brought new territories and tactics into the realm of colonial state action. The environmental disaster of the preceding years only exacerbated these processes, as state institutions such as the military and police expanded their reach and adapted new tactics in response to these crises. This expanded state apparatus redefined Algerian and Tunisian subjectivity in ways that contributed to the creation of this important Affaire.

January 25, 2011 is a date that will forever be imprinted on the memory of all Egyptians. For the Muslim Brotherhood, however, the nation’s largest and best-organized social movement, it is a date that serves as a mark of its shrewd political calculations. For it was not until three days later, on January 28, that its leadership decided to join the popular protests raging from Tahrir Square across the entire Egyptian landscape. In the year since the revolt in Egypt, much of the public discourse has focused on the Muslim Brotherhood’s emergence as the leading political party in a democratically elected government. What is often ignored, however, is that the organization did not necessarily derive its legitimacy from actions related to the revolution itself. Rather, to compensate for its failure to play a leading role in the events that precipitated the overthrow of the Mubarak regime, it has attempted to seize upon its legacy of anti-state resistance and network of social services to solidify its gains in a post-authoritarian Egypt. This paper seeks to examine what role the Muslim Brotherhood played in the recent Egyptian revolution. It employs a historical approach, attempting to place the group’s actions within the context of its long and complex relationship with political authority in Egypt. It particularly singles out the generation that came of age during the 1970s, which had to contend with the legacy of the movement’s prior eras of opposition, while forging a new path of accommodation and inclusion into the political system. The paper then traces how the period immediately leading up to and during the 2011 revolution affected the decisions of several leading figures within the Muslim Brotherhood, some of whom became more deeply entrenched within its leadership hierarchy and emerging political party, while others were cast out of the organization altogether, left to pursue their activist mission independently for the first time in their lives. That the revolution has had a transformative effect on all facets of Egyptian society, including the Muslim Brotherhood, comes as no surprise. However, by utilizing the social movement theory concept of “political opportunity structures,” this paper provides the necessary tools with which to comprehend these changes and the future developments within the Egyptian public square. This study relies on newspaper archives, as well as interviews with key figures, and historical works examining the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egyptian society.

The four mountain ranges that cut through Morocco and the desert that sweeps across its southern regions have controlled the movement of people, resources, and power for centuries. Since the pre-colonial era, the governing powers have etched their own imagined boundaries into the landscape, manufacturing a center and a periphery. In this paper, I argue that the drawing of these boundaries is an assertion of power, both over the landscape and over threats to the government’s control. Further, I describe how the contemporary territorial approach to development is a continuation of these same policies. For the pre-colonial government, the mountains divided bled makhzen, the lands over which they had complete control, and bled siba, the lands they ruled only indirectly. After militarily pacifying the entirety of the country, the colonial powers similarly let the mountains divide between maroc utile, the lands which could be “civilized” and benefit from modernization, and maroc inutile, that which they believed could not. Drawing on studies of pre-colonial and colonial policy, particularly the work of Mohammed Naciri, I will describe how creating these dichotomies granted the government the power to redefine the environment and contain perceived and real threats. In doing so, they implicitly denied that these were underlying or widespread threats and were thus able to address them through targeted policies. I will then combine analyses of recent state policy, most notably those by Myriam Catusse, with my own fieldwork researching the implementation of Morocco’s National Initiative for Human Development (INDH) to show that the monarchy continues to follow a similar pattern of power assertion through boundary drawing. By demarcating the “poorest and most marginal” areas of the country, the monarchy is once again symbolically containing poverty to certain quarters and communes. Once contained, it reasserts control and minimizes unrest through two parallel processes. First, it enhances the role of local authorities representing the Ministry of the Interior at the expense of elected officials. Second, the government provides many highly visible grants to individuals in an attempt to reshape both the recipients and their environments.

The military’s abandonment of Mubarak’s regime provided an opportunity for the January 25 Revolt to unseat the ruling elite. The position of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) was welcomed at first, but the frustrations associated with the transitional period invited comparisons with the July 1952 coup. Once again, a vibrant opposition was reduced to making demands and waiting for a council of officers to respond; once again the country was ruled via military communiqués. Are we back to square one, some justly wonder? Will this popular revolt end with officers back on the political saddle? I contest this claim through a historical institutional analysis of the changes that had occurred within the military itself between 1952 and 2011. It is true that in both instances officers held enough professional grievances against the regime to contribute willfully to its overthrow. Yet a crucial difference between the two ‘revolutions’ is that in 1952 a secret society of politicized officers (the Free Officers) rode the crest of military support to consolidate its power, and succeeded in doing so by immediately installing its trusted lieutenants in the security apparatus. In 2011, by contrast, this same security apparatus had effectively sealed the army from politics, and had become too entrenched for seizure from above. Soldiers had no recourse to an in-house political movement with the ambition and organization of the Free Officers, nor could they rein in Egypt’s unruly security agencies and turn them to their purposes. So while the January uprising presented a golden opportunity to dismantle the regime, no political group within the corps had the agility to see it through. Instead, the military behaved as a self-centered institution narrowly concerned with its corporate interests, which had been undermined by the political and security components of Mubarak’s regime. Thus, while the military might certainly enhance its leverage in future Egyptian politics, it simply has neither the vision nor the tools to restructure the established order. The evidence so far, based on a careful analysis of primary sources and historical accounts, points to the fact that the revolt is being thwarted to reproduce the same type of police state that had governed Egypt during the last few decades – another sad reminder of the difficulty of instituting radical change in the absence of a concrete revolutionary organization.