Introduction to special section: 'Jazīrat al-Maghrib': North Africa as an island (original) (raw)

North Africa from the Almoravids to the Algerian War

1969

North Africa was for generations a preserve of Francophone scholarship, with English writing on the area a rara avis. The situation has changed somewhat in recent years, and as a result British and American styles of constructing problematics and forging solutions have begun to penetrate the field. The present volume represents a special issue (itself growing out of a conference held in 1998) of The Journal of North African Studies, issued at the same time as the book in 2001. This format for publication leads one to ask why: Does its release as a book enhance the journal publication and does it have benefits for the world of learning and for readers more broadly, rather than just for publishers? In this case, one can give an affirmative, if slightly qualified, response to that question. There can be no doubt that such a publication will bring the book’s contents to people who would not normally see the journal and thus to a wider readership. Moreover, the collection of studies pres...

Society and Politics of North Africa

2018

This is a five-week two-credit course to be conducted in Morocco. The goal of the course is to provide a thorough introduction to North African societies and politics. The Maghrib (the “farthest west” in Arabic)—encompassing Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya—has historically been a critical frontier zone linking Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. This cross-roads region continues to remain strategically important with sub-Saharan and North African migration, political Islam, terrorism/counter-terrorism, the Sahara question, Islam-West relations, and Mediterranean trade relationships among the current pressing international concerns related to the Maghrib. The course will meet ca. five days a week (in classroom or on field trips), with each week exploring a prominent theme related to North African society and politics, including an overview of Maghrib history, the legacies of colonialism and nationalism, political systems and opposition, Islam in North Africa, and the Maghrib in the 21st century. To maximize the opportunity of being taught on site in the region, the course’s subject matter will be interwoven with multiple field trips, including visits to the four historic imperial cities of Morocco (Fes, Meknes, Rabat, and Marrakech). It will also immerse students through meetings with local experts, interaction with Moroccan university students, and optional home stays with Moroccan families.

TRADITIONS OF GOVERNANCE IN NORTH AFRICA 1

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.

North Africa: Power, politics & promise

Review of African Political Economy, 2006

Security' extends beyond 'terrorism'. It extends, as Baldwin-Edwards's essay illustrates, to such things as both people and narco-trafficking. Keenan's essay touches on two aspects of this area of 'putative terrorism', as the US's regional security analysts define it. One is that much of this trafficking-people, cigarettes, hard drugs and arms-is run in most of these countries, notably Algeria, by agents of the State. Much of the data, as for example on 'illegal' migrants, on which Europe

The African struggle continues: The awakening of North Africa

Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 2012

2011 will be remembered as a momentous year in North Africa when the sclerotic dictatorships of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya collapsed. Until then, the region seemed implacably immune to the democratic wave that began sweeping across the continent at the turn of the 1990s. Bookended by democratic transitions in Benin in 1989 and Nigeria in 1999, the 1990s witnessed tumultuous political changes across the continent characterized by tantalizing successes and tortuous setbacks. In 1991, for example, there was the victory of the opposition in Zambia and the implosion of the state in Somalia, and, most memorably, in 1994 the continent celebrated the triumph of South Africa and mourned the tragedy of Rwanda. The twists and turns in the struggles for political transformation that came to be dubbed the "second independence" engulfed North Africa as well. But the violent suppression of the 1992 elections in Algeria and the country's descent into civil war paralyzed the prospects of democratic transition in the region and fed into the narrative of North African exceptionalism. These developments reinforced the calcified division of Africa into two, Sub-Saharan Africa and Arab Africa, one supposedly pre-modern and the other anti-modern, the former capable of democratization and the latter irredeemably mired in autocracy. In reality, there were different trajectories within and across regions that defied the cartographic certainties of this tattered Eurocentric and Orientalist discourse. In this article, I seek to remap the historical geography of the North African revolutions by placing them in their rightful African context of struggles for the "second independence". After examining the general conditions and characteristics of what the Western media has dubbed the "Arab Awakening" and others call the "African Awakening" (Manji and Ekine 2011), the article will briefly outline the trajectory of the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. At appropriate junctures, their continental and international dimensions and implications will also be examined. The similarities between the democracy movements and processes in North Africa and the rest of the continent are unmistakable in their causal dynamics, social composition, and political visions. Equally evident are the complex connections and demonstration effects from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to other countries within and outside the continent. The reverberations of struggles among Africa countries go back to the nationalist struggles