Urban politics in Morocco: uneven development, neoliberal government and the restructuring of state power

Abstract

How do you start the introduction of a PhD on political change in the Arab World – with Morocco as a specific case study – right in the midst of rapidly changing political evo- lutions? Less than two months before the deadline of this study, the people of Tunisia hit the streets and chased away president Ben Ali. Soon after, revolutionary politics un- folded in Egypt. Also in the rest of the Arab world, the people would not sit quietly and watch how everything went back to normal. “Leaders in the rest of the Arab world are nervous—and so they should be”, stated The Economist, “the mobile telephone, satel- lite television and the internet all have the potential to weaken their capacity for keep- ing their people in the dark and under their control”.1 In other words, the Tunisian and Egyptian upheavals were be just the beginning. The events that followed in Libya even turned extremely violent compared to the ‘relatively’ peaceful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. As such, the question whether the Arab World was (finally) experiencing its own genuine democratic transition will surely spark the debates – yet again – between believers and non-believers.2 The issue of democratization has dominated the study of political change in the Arab world over the last 20 years. Despite the wide range of different opinions and explanations, a bulk of the political analyses can be divided into two broader branches. First of all, transitologists believed that the Arab World was, just as elsewhere in the world, subject to a linear transition to (liberal) democracy. For sure, the current events will inspire some of them to see a confirmation of – what they consider to be – a global logic. Already during the first days of the Egyptian revolt, Amr Hamzawy of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argued that “Egypt stands today assuredly on the threshold of transition toward democratic governance”.3 Secondly, and opposed to the first branch of scholars, a growing group of sceptics be- gan to criticize this ‘transition paradigm’ and argued that we should rather pay attention to “what in fact is going on” in the Arab World (Valbjørn & Bank, 2010: 188). Accord- ing to these scholars, Arab authoritarianism had proven again and again its renewal, resilience, persistence, robustness, etc… (Ibid.). Evidently,