In this paper, I focus on the ambiguities and ultimately contradictions that are inherent in the Moroccan state discourses about citizenship, exploring their incompatibility with the nature of the political regime and placing the phenomenon in historical and constitutional perspective as well as connecting it with what I call the continuous quest for citizenship. The nature of relations between people and state in political and historical contexts marked by histories of authoritarianism and subjugations of individuals may not be as amenable to the principles of citizenship that require real ruptures with an archaic political culture that is reminiscent from the past. However, the quest of citizenship by individual Moroccans has never ceased as it historically revolved around a number of interrelated issues including human rights, the politics of identity and gender rights.

Recent years have witness a global phenomenon of mass mobilizations for either policy or system change in established democracies and not-so democratic ones and in economically developed country and developing ones. Last year, they spanned many continents, going from Chile to Hong Kong, and including the Gilets Jaunes in France, and the Catalonia independence mobilization in Spain. This Global Protest Wave of 2019, as it is known, has also affected many parts of the Middle East and North Africa, including Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Lebanon and Iraq. Most comments on, and accounts of, these social movements tended to focus on what triggered the protests, who the protesters are and what their goals are. This paper will take these as givens and will instead focus on what happens to the most sustained movements in North Africa, Algeria’s Hirak movement, and Morocco’s Rif movement. The key question the paper will address is: To what extent these social movements have forced—or are likely to force-- a restructuring of the existing political and economic order? Another way of asking the question may be: Are these movements likely to be simply an “ineffective interlude in the status quo”? The answer to these questions will be informed by examining past social movements pursuing similar aims, such as the 10 cases studied by the Civic Research Network, and by theoretical works on social movements, especially those on the cycles of protest. This paper will analyze the protesters’ action choices, including that of holding out until the main goals are achieved or opting for a satisfacing compromise. Both are risky as the governing systems, short of repression, try to stifle the movements with a few concessions, cooptation or some guarantees that end up dividing and weakening the social action. As the Algerian and Moroccan protest movements show, protesters face a series of decisions, including increasing the protest efforts, changing tactics, or slowly dispersing after some demands are met, but not the main ones. Regardless of the immediate outcome, it is important to also look into the impact these contentious confrontations have on state-society relation, on the defining characteristics of the governing regime, and on the structured and unstructured political opposition. The findings of this research, which will include field work, might inform us on whether the outcome will result in another regime adaptation, some transformation, or permanent crisis.

Social mobilization, Collective action, and the Struggle over Libyan National Symbols after February 17, 2011 Uprising This paper investigates the process of social mobilization based on Libyan historical cultural symbols before the civil war in 2014. Three symbols were used to mobilize popular support for against the regime: 1) the image of anti-colonial resistance Omar al-Mukhtar, 2) the old Libyan flag of the monarchy was adopted and viewed as the flag of independence; 3) the old national anthem was adopted after the name of the king was replaced by the name of the Libyan anti- colonial resistance hero, Omar al-Mukhtar. This is remarkable after four decades of the Qaddafi‘s regime rituals of presenting itself as the legitimate culmination of the Libyan anti-colonial movement and especially Omar al-Mukhtar. In other words, the national question, which is linked to the brutal colonial, period, is still persistent in Libyan society. Yet this successful mobilization was followed by outside NATO intervention, and a military civil war against the regime which unexpected consequences especially the spread of arms and which came to the cities of Benghazi, Misurata, and Zentan, and groups such as Jihadi and militant Libyan fighters in Afghanistan, and the previous Islamist fighters such as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. The armed militias became the power brokers in Libya despite the fact that The Libyan people participated in three impressive civil elections in 2012, and 2014.

During the past decade, sustained actions of protests in different parts of Morocco have been expressed through peaceful means. Popular mobilization has occured mainly outside formal spaces of participation, online and offline. Moroccans mobilize as groups of different kinds (as social movements, informal groups, professional groups, or simply as individuals). They make demands in response to both governmental action and inaction. For example they protest against social exclusion or in favor of more rights for a particular social or professional group. Myriad issues and diverse actors have driven the mobilizations. However, they all converge around social and economic rights, more civil liberties and more democracy and social justice. This paper will examine the dynamics of contention in Morocco with a focus on youth mobilization and demoblization during the past ten years. This is specifically an important phase in the nature of mobilisation because it followed the the February 20th movement as a Moroccan version of the Arab Spring. To capture the complex and multi-layered phenomena of mobilization and demoblization, this paper takes an approach that is informed by macro, meso and micro levels of analysis. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, I will look at the interplay between these different levels and their subsequent impact on the processes of mobilisation and demobilisation. I argue that frequent popular mobilization are indicative of how the power of existing structures and agencies is questioned and that there is a long term risk of instability in Morocco.

North African collective action before, during, and after the “Arab spring” exhibits both cross-cutting characteristics and national and local variations. Central to these contestations—and what may be called an “Arab spring ethos”—are an explicit rejection of traditional identity-based politics (in part as a result of state manipulation) in favor of inclusive notions of citizenship that both reject and attempt to reconcile extant contestations with state power (whether secular/left/labor-oriented, Islamist, feminist, Amazighist, etc.). These previous contestations to a large degree came of age in the 1980s and competed both with the state and with each other, often aggravated by divide and rule strategies. New notions of identity and citizenship that surfaced in the late 1980s and 1990s and emerged with the Arab spring rejected Western/colonialist, nationalist, and existing contestatory identitarian rhetorics and political formulations and attempted to reconcile and reinvent national identity and citizenship. This often provoked confusion (poor assessment/analysis), frustration, dismissal, or even "disciplining" both at the state and at the organizational level (by parties, organizations, unions), as the flipped-scripts of youth protest challenged existing notions of both protest and citizenship. This has contributed, for example, to low voter turnouts and new forms of anti-establishment and populist politics. The quest for newly defined citizenship—that, among other things, attempts to embrace subalterneity (with varying degrees of success)—is central to contemporary collective action. These cross-cutting ideas often transcend local contestations and national boundaries and have fueled successive regional protest waves. Based on interviews and conversations with over 5000 young Libyans, Tunisians, Algerians, and Moroccans in over 20 countries since the 1990s, primarily in Arabic and French, gathered in the form of qualitative and quantitative data in addition to secondary sources analyzed by the author, this paper attempts to synthesize and theorize what the emerging ethos is, has been, and might become. Among a variety of features of these new inclusive, category-busting conceptions of citizenship and identity are 1) increasingly plural conceptions of what women can be both with in protest movements and more widely in society (including across the spectrum from Islamist to anti-Islamist), 2) the increasing acceptance, and sometimes embrace, of LGBT identities, including by some young Islamists, and 3) other category-busting identities and ideas. With varying degrees of success, young people are challenging and redefining both citizenship and contestation, and analysis of youth contestation needs to reflect these reformulations and also re-theorize identity and citizenship.