What are the pressings questions that the scholarship on the Maghreb is asking? Through what conceptual and methodological framework does this scholarship rethink power and marginality, a decade after the uprisings?
This double session seeks to highlight the places where marginality and power coalesce, intersect and become productive. As the Algerian protests show, subterranean dynamics are still in play, changing politics/as usual while enabling the rise of marginal players, claims, and areas of inquiry. The geographical location of the Maghreb as the actual fortress of Europe and the ongoing struggles for power in Libya put also this region at the crossroads of displaced, racially marked populations. This urges scholars to rethink marginality and power, race and racism, both from within and without. Race acquires new meanings not only as it pertains to migrating bodies but also as the new terrain for feminist identifications and tensions. The emergence of the identity category of "Black Tunisian Feminism" enables feminist groups to appropriate race and "intersectionality" as a place to speak about marginality as a gendered and classed category infused with racial symbolism. The Libyan uprising was unique in the way the rising margins triggered ongoing confrontations but also enabled subtle "proxy-wars of communication". Tiny peripheries in Morocco and Tunisia have produced counter-hegemonic narratives and alternative modes of governance that resisted state centralized power and capitalist accumulation while traveling capital is constantly creating new centers of power and dispossession.
Hence, while the nexus power/margin is the main thread running across the papers, it is examined at various scales and registers and beyond the rhetoric of success and failure, and stability and unrest. Case studies from Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia explore the circulation of bodies, emotions, knowledge, and capital in relation to geopolitical interventions, post-colonial laws, memory and justice, communication strategies, feminism, and state violence and resistance.
In 2010 the Moroccan state bought over 3000 kilometers of collective land near the city of Ouarzazate to install the largest solar energy plant in the World, Noor. Since 2010 the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (MASEN) built four plants in the same region, utilizing different technologies and implicating global capital, and foreign expertise. During the first phases of construction MASEN proudly employed between 2000 and 5000 people from neighboring villages and from the city of Ouarzazate. In its managing teams’ narratives, MASEN is changing not only the ecological landscape but also the social environment by engaging in development projects, employment, infrastructure, and delivering education and health care services. This paper, however, narrates the story of MASEN from the lens of the lives entangled with it. Those living near the extraction zone, the groups whose land was privatized, the individuals searching for employment, and those targeted by MASEN’s development projects. My goal is to excavate the emotional, raced, classed and gendered layers of the implication of the local population with renewable energy by attending to the affective dimensions of their daily dwelling and struggles in and around the extraction zone. I will use Feminist Affect Theory to account for the dimensions that rarely make it to sociological analyses of renewable energy and bring time and temporality to the center of my analysis.
This paper examines the experiences of the activist families of thousands of Algerians who were forcibly disappeared during the country's 1992 - 2002 civil war in their efforts to locate the whereabouts of their loved ones. It looks at the causes behind the activists' successes and failures in demanding justice from the government and explores the impacts of the nationwide popular uprising that began in February 2019. The paper will be based on secondary research, including reports published by international and local human rights groups and local and international media sources, and will incorporate interviews conducted remotely with activists and advocates. Where appropriate, the paper will also compare the experiences of Algerian families of victims of enforced disappearances with families in other countries, in order to draw conclusions about the conditions under which human rights advocates do or do not succeed vis-a-vis national governments.
This paper examines Morocco’s golf tourism sector in a comparative context. It assesses the redoubled emphasis on golf tourism – and the broader ecological demands of the country’s tourism. It challenges the assumptions that the sector is sustainable. Morocco is a middle-income country that is already hydrologically challenged; water provision is deeply fraught throughout the country. And future climate change projections are that temperatures will increase, rainfall further diminish, and winds will intensify.
The paper assesses the significant and ongoing “bureaucratic politics” concerning water access – with powerful ministries such as agriculture and mining vying for ground water. And it sets the sector in the broader international political economy: golf tourism is very remunerative for balance of payment accounts; European, North American, East Asian, and Persian Gulf tourists are a prized source of foreign exchange.
The paper relies on mixed-methods research. In this early stage of the project the work will rely on secondary materials and data from official sources – e.g., the UN World Tourism Organization and Moroccan government sources. Ultimately, subsequent work in a long-term project (that builds on this initial paper) will involve interviews with officials in Rabat and visits to golf courses in the Middle Atlas and in the Marrakech region.
The regime that has ruled Algeria since independence has always seemed invincible. After the Arab Spring, scholars provided various explanations as to why the regime did not face large protests. One of the key factors that journalists and scholars pointed to was fear among Algerians due to their previous experience with civil war. But, starting in February 2019, fear no longer dominated and was replaced by anger. Algerians from different segments of society participated in large numbers in protests across the country. In this paper, I will use process tracing, participant observation, and qualitative interviews to explain how Algerians’ fear turned into anger and led them to prevent Abdelaziz Bouteflika from being elected for a fifth term. Borrowing from the women and politics literature on women parliamentarians, I will focus on how “critical actors” engaged in “critical acts” that helped maintain the silmya of the Hirak and stopped the Algerian army from using violence against protesters. In particular, I will focus on the interactions between these critical actors and the Algerian army or Le Pouvoir during the uprising. These critical actors included young men, women, and women from La Kabylie. Their presence not only transformed public space but sent a powerful message to the Algerian army that groups which it had excluded from the real centre of power posed a serious threat to its survival. The presence of women in particular transformed public space. This is important in the context of Algeria where it is rare to see women out on Fridays. Finally, inspired by Black feminist work on intersectionality, I will focus on the role played by women from La Kabylie who defied state orders and waved the Amazigh flag proudly. One particular woman became a hero and was recently released from prison. In the conclusion, this paper will call for future research on everyday acts of resistance in Algeria in the aftermath of the uprising.
