Abstract By the end of 2021 it will be a decade since the events of the ‘Arab Spring’ (al-rabīʿ al-ʿarabī) profoundly disrupted the Arab world, particularly in North Africa, raising hopes that the region overall would, through a permanent democratic transition, shake off its apparent exceptionalism in endorsing authoritarian governance. A decade later, such aspirations would appear to have been dashed, except in Tunisia, although fresh rounds of protest in Lebanon and Iraq, and especially in Algeria, during 2019 and 2020, might have suggested that this could be too peremptory a judgment. Nonetheless, authoritarian resistance appears to have been far more resilient than expected at the time. Yet, do the experiences of the decade therefore demonstrate that political liberalization within the region, specifically within North Africa, is not possible and, if not, what were the factors that made such an outcome seemingly impossible to achieve? This comment is designed to address some aspects of these concerns with particular emphasis on the theories behind democratic transition derived from different sets of hypotheses about the origins and principles of participatory socio-political action.
On 12 June 2021 Algerians turned out to vote in the country’s latest legislative elections, which had been called a year early after a constitutional referendum in mid-November 2020 and a presidential election eleven months before. In reality, however, few of them actually did take part, as the elections for 407 seats in the National Assembly – the lower house in Algeria’s bicameral system – saw the lowest turnout ever recorded in a national election in the country. Only 23.09 per cent of the 24.454 million registered voters bothered to take part and a fifth of them had spoilt their ballots in protest! (Algérie Presse Service 2021). Even the constitution referendum seven months before had managed a marginally better turnout at 23.14 per cent of registered voters, with 66.80 per cent of them approving the proposed amendments. By those standards, President Abdelmajid Tebboune had received what would have been considered a resounding endorsement at his own presidential election on 12 December 2019, with 58.13 per cent of votes actually cast on a turnout of 39.88 per cent. Even the two previous legislative elections – in 2012 and 2017 – had persuaded 43 per cent and 35 per cent of the registered vote respectively to take part (Direct Democracy 2020).
It is a profound irony that the Jasmine blossom of Tunisia’s democratic revolution should wilt, just ten years after blooming in 2011, despite widespread convictions that Tunisia, perhaps alone in ...
This book includes essays that have been brought together to commemorate the work of a significant geographer of the Middle East and North Africa, Keith McLachlan, whose work tied together the three themes upon which it is based: state, oil and agriculture. It brings these three strands of Keith McLachlan’s academic interests together as a cohesive whole, centred around the dilemma of the state as a static physical entity, whether defined by territory or in terms of community. The book examines issues on state boundaries and provides some reflections on the significance of oil in the Middle East, particularly in Iran. It presents a study of agriculture and water use in the Euphrates Valley in Iraq by Greg Shapland, a region that was linked into Iran in geographic terms despite the political tensions between the two adjacent states.
Ever since the Qadhafi regime collapsed in late October 2011, the survival of the Libyan state has been opened to increasing question. The causes are manifold; the collapse of the Libyan army in the wake of the NATO-led attacks, the hostility of Britain and France, the roles played by the Gulf states, Turkey and Egypt, and the growth of extremism against the background of the privatised violence of the militias have all contributed towards its impending collapse. Nonetheless, apart from the unifying role played by country’s central bank and national oil company, pressure for preserving the unitary state has been driven by two players from diametrically opposed positions; the United Nations which seeks a new constitution and nationwide elections and the leader of the major militia coalition in the country, Khalifa Haftar, based in Benghazi and now seeking to extend his autocratic control over Tripolitania too. Now Libya is being dragged into a proxy war, involving the UAE and Egypt as opposed to Qatar and Turkey and the regional level and, more globally, Russia, the United States, France and Italy. The ultimate victim, however, could well be the Libyan state!
Since mid-February 2019, Algeria has become the scene of massive, peaceful demonstrations against the prospect of a fifth presidential term for the country’s veteran president, Ahmed Bouteflika. Th...
At the end of June 2014, Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi, the leader of what was to become Da'ish or the Islamic State, announced at the main mosque in Mosul the creation of an Islamic caliphate' with himself as caliph. With its creation, he announced, the division of the Middle East, forced upon the region by the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, was ended, to be replaced by a territorially limitless caliphate for all Muslims. Despite the obvious political rhetoric that the announcement involved, al-Baghdadi's aspirations raised interesting questions of historical and legal interpretation. Quite apart from what the Sykes-Picot agreement actually established, to what extent, for instance, is there an innate contradiction between visions of state and boundary in international law and the Islamic concept of the caliphate? How have those concepts evolved over the past century and how inimical are contemporary views of the caliphate' to established principles of territorial delimitation? And, to what extent do the actual territorial delimitations of Middle Eastern states reflect pre-colonial patterns of spatial division rather than simply the consequences of colonial imposition? How distinct, in short, are the apparently opposed concepts of state and caliphate in the contemporary world? This article will attempt to show that the points of similarity between them are probably far greater than is usually recognised.
The vast majority of comment on the role of political Islam in North Africa focuses on the activities of extremist groups there, particularly with respect to Libya, the Sahara and the Sahel. There is, however, another reality which may, in the final analysis, have greater significance for the future of the region. This is the growth of quietist Salafism and its plans for the reconditioning of society in its own austere image, particularly in Libya and, to a lesser extent, Algeria. This is especially the casewith the role of oneparticularmovement–Madkhalism or the Madakhala, perhaps Saudi Arabia’s own Trojan Horse in the region.
Abstract One of the unusual features of the recent emergence of moderate Sunni Islamist political parties onto the formal political scene in the Arab world as a result of the Arab Awakening is that they nearly always emerge as elements in political dualities. Thus the party – a political movement – is wedded to a social movement and, sometimes, to a trade union as well. In addition, the social movement usually predates its parallel political movement. Furthermore, this structural duality seems to be confined to the Sunni world and often seems to be associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The question then is precisely why this dual structure has been generalized within the political arena now colonized by moderate Sunni political Islam; is it a consequence of formal legal constraints upon such movements or does it respond to their internal dynamics? A further question raises the issue of why these dualities are not replicated within the Shi’a context or amongst secular political movements. And, finally, have they been paralleled amongst political movements arising from different religious traditions and what are the likely outcomes?
In many respects the worsening water scarcity in the Middle East and North Africa has become an object-lesson in the water crisis facing the wider world as climate change becomes a reality. Although northern and southern temperate zones are likely to see increases in precipitation, the equatorial region will face increasing desertification as access to water declines in the face of continuing demographic growth. Competition over increasingly scarce resources will have major geopolitical and security implications and the Middle Eastern and North Africa region will act as a paradigm of what happens in a biome of water scarcity.
One question that has been unresolved since the current phase of extremism began in the early- to mid-1990s has been whether or not there is a global structure to the jihadi phenomenon. This paper argues that no such definable structure exists, although regional, national, and local networks may well share common objectives and ideological ambitions. There has, in short, been a process of global branding that has developed that, in structural terms, corresponds to a 'network of networks'. These objectives and the related praxis, moreover, have evolved over the years, going through three distinct stages of development, encapsulated in the strategic distinctions between al-Qa'ida, Ansar al-Shar'ia, and the Islamic State (Da'ish). Allied to this is a second consideration; namely that the formal ideological inspiration and justification for extremist activities is a set of integrated common insights that form a coherent ideology derived from a literalist interpretation of Islam, Salafism. A further aspect of the Salafi–jihadi phenomenon is to what degree this formal ideology is the real explanation of the appeal of these movements to their adherents, particularly to the so-called 'foreign fighters' – those who volunteer from countries not directly implicated in the specific conflicts in which they participate. This paper will argue that the phenomenon is far more complex than the superficial appeal of jihadist ideology would suggest. Finally, the paper will attempt to sketch out what the underlying causes of the intense wave of extremism sweeping the Middle East and North Africa might be and to what extent 'blow-back' from returning jihadis should be of concern to home governments.
Although the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is seen as a novel manifestation of Islamic extremism, it is in fact the latest, albeit perhaps the most effective, of a long line of revivalist movements in the Islamic and the Arab worlds. Its motivations - hisba and jihad - differ little from its predecessors and its ambitions - to create a state organised in accordance with the precepts of the Islamic caliphate - reflect a long-standing Islamic ambition. It differs, of course, in terms of the sophistication of its political and military strategies, which mirror the contemporary complexities of the world in which it operates, but its objectives recall long-standing Islamic ideals, even if articulated in radically brutal and extremist ways. More importantly, perhaps, ISIS or Da'ish, to give it its Arabic sobriquet, reflects the enormous degree of resentment inside the Middle East at the ways in which Western powers have intervened in regional affairs over recent years, particularly their support for regimes and economic systems there that have betrayed, in the popular imaginary, the essential principles of social justice that lie at the root of Islamic vision of ideal social order. Indeed, in many respects, its analysis of the world in which it operates and of the objectives it seeks differ little in essence from those any other resistance and rejectionist movement, whether religious or sectarian. More specifically, it has been the sectarian conflict that resulted from the reversal of political order in Iraq as a result of the 2003 American-led invasion that has driven the success of the movement in capturing widespread Sunni support. Whether it can manage the complexities of the administration of a state remains open to question.
The recent political convulsions in North Africa have usually been analysed as a binary confrontation between universalist political Islam and secularist democracy, with violent chaos as the price of failure. To a very large extent, this has been a reflection of analytical templates derived, respectively, from the arguments of the Salafiyyist movement of the late nineteenth century or from the European experience of the Enlightenment, as mediated through the colonial moment in the region. Both approaches have denied ideological agency to North Africa and North Africans themselves; yet, there is a long tradition of indigenous principles of governance there, both formal and informal. This paper examines some of these mechanisms, from the Khaldunian argument of the circulation of tribal elites, Moroccan concepts of communal consent and contract alongside mediation and arbitration, to Tunisia's constitutional experiment, Malek Bennabi's vision of democratic governance in Algeria or the Sanusi experience in Libya. It also considers more informal practices - the Ripublik in the Rif or the political system of the Ait 'Atta, based on egalitarian access to water. It concludes with some observations on the roles these experiences have played in establishing political cultures which informed the outcomes of recent political change in the region.
The removal of the Ben Ali regime from power in Tunisia raised fundamental questions over the future role and structure of the country's media. A new structural relationship with government would have to reflect changes in ownership patterns and a new narrative about the media's future function. The government too had to adjust to a new relationship with the media in a participatory political system in transition. This paper discusses how and why these concepts have developed in the way that they have. The learning processes involved have been more difficult than first imagined, especially for government, and the environment in which the media has operated has become more difficult, a factor which has affected, both the media and its relationship with government. The key events have been elections and the consequences of Ennahda's victory, the assassinations of two prominent political activists and Tunisia's new constitution approved in January 2014. Connected with these events has been the worsening security environment with the growth in salafi-jihadi extremism and Tunisia's declining economic fortunes. Yet perhaps the most difficult issue has been the actual development of media-government relations. Media professionals had assumed that the relationship under the former regime, in which the media served as the obedient handmaiden to government, would be abandoned and replaced by a genuinely free information space automatically encouraged by government. In reality, the coalition government, and its successor have realised the utility of a media subservient to government and have been reluctant to support proper freedom of information and communication. In short, they have repeated the practices of their predecessor, justifying such authoritarian action as an entitlement of government. In reality, they have revealed their own anxieties about media freedom and fears over the dissemination of opposition opinions. The arbitrary practices of authoritarian rule had not been eradicated and the media was still seen as a weapon in a political struggle, rather than as an essential vehicle of public participation in the construction of a new political order. This is, therefore, the major problem that must now be tackled by Tunisia's new media.
Eighteen years ago, the European Commission introduced a policy which sought to treat the European continent and the Mediterranean basin as a region – the Barcelona Process, or, to give it its formal title, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP). According to the Barcelona Declaration, which introduced the initiative, the policy was designed to create a zone of ‘peace, stability and prosperity’ in the Mediterranean basin.1 In other words, the policy sought to create shared economic and political security between two worlds – Europe and the Mediterranean littoral of the Arab-Islamic world – which, historically, had been characterised by mutual hostility. In formulating its regional objectives in such terms, the Commission’s new policy was an example of regionalism; the creation of a shared narrative of political, social and economic engagement between geographically contiguous states. It was, moreover, an example of ‘open regionalism’ in that the shared narrative did not impinge directly on the sovereign integrity of the participating states.2
One of the striking features of the study of nationalism in the colonial era in Morocco is the way in which the rural world hardly features in histories of the movement. Issues such as the Rif War and the Jaysh at-Tahrir (Army of Liberation), or even the Rif Rebellion, tend to be treated in isolation, not as integral parts of the overall resistance to colonialism that developed from the 1920s onwards. In part, this is the problem of the ‘subaltern’, in that the rural world has not enjoyed an autonomous historical voice in the same way as has urban nationalism. In part, too, it is due to a lack of professional interest and, until recently, access to the relevant sources. The archives of the French ‘Affaires Indigènes’ (the body responsible for rural administration after the French conquest), for example, were closed for many years. The article below is an attempt to begin the process of developing a history of rural nationalism by examining the ways in which nationalist awareness evolved in the countryside around the Jbala town of Wazzan, from the ‘primary resistance’ of the Rif War epoch to the ‘secondary resistance’ of the 1950s. It seeks to establish how a nationalist discourse was diffused throughout the Jbala region, divided as it was between the French and Spanish zones, by looking at the interactions of town and countryside and the role of markets as arenas of information exchange.
