ISBN: 978-1-84904-285-7. Hardback £ 30.

Sunni Islamist militancy—of which Al-Qaeda is perhaps the best-known example—did not pioneer suicide terrorism. In the decade since 9/11 however, the group and its ideology have become intimately a...

The May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, alongside the dramatic events of the Arab Spring, prompted widespread speculation about the direction and fate of the Islamist militancy. After Bin Laden: A...

The violence of the petrodollar regimes: Libya, Algeria and Iraq, by Luis Martinez, London, Hurst, 2013, 288 pp., £35 (paperback), ISBN 978-0231703024 £35 Despite their markedly different histories...

colonial (and postcolonial) ethnographies on their own terms marks a contemporary moment when Moroccan anthropologists, trained both at ‘home’ and abroad, have increasingly made the field their own in close collaboration with an international scholars. In general, Rachik’s close readings of the various texts are engaging and insightful, and the unevenness of his critical engagement with more recent works no doubt belies his own theoretical dispositions. His detailing of the productive constraints of the practical ‘ethnographic situation’ in which the various authors operated in the field provides a nice counterpoint to prior studies that have focused on the texts as primarily intellectual or ideological creations. Perhaps a bit more attention could have been paid to the broader political environment; for instance, Geertz’s privileging of the national scale is deeply tied to Cold War concerns over developing countries like Indonesia and Morocco and his participation in a Ford Foundation-funded project on the politics and economies of such ‘new nations’. Finally, Rachik glosses over contemporary anthropological trends, ending his century of anthropology of Morocco with a critical analysis of the postmodern, dialogic ethnographies of Crapanzano, Dwyer, and Rabinow published in the late-1970s and early 1980s. His two sentence conclusion that anthropology of the 1990s ‘resolved the question of generalizing about Moroccans as a whole by simply abandoning the effort’ fails to take into account new insights into Moroccan experiences of gender, ritual, power, urbanity, and globality provided by, among others, Elaine Combs-Schilling, Abdellah Hammoudi, Deborah Kapchan, Susan Ossman, Philip Schuyler, and Hassan Rachik himself.

"Exit Gaddafi: the hidden history of the Libyan revolution." The Journal of North African Studies, 18(2), pp. 380–381