Globalized Authoritarianism
Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco
Publication Year: 2018
A rich investigation into Morocco’s urban politics
Over the past thirty years, Morocco’s cities have transformed dramatically. To take just one example, Casablanca’s medina is now obscured behind skyscrapers that are funded by global capital and encouraged by Morocco’s monarchy, which hopes to transform this city into a regional leader of finance and commerce. Such changes have occurred throughout Morocco. Megaprojects are redesigning the cityscapes of Rabat, Tangiers, and Casablanca, turning the nation’s urban centers into laboratories of capital accumulation, political dominance, and social control.
In Globalized Authoritarianism, Koenraad Bogaert links more abstract questions of government, globalization, and neoliberalism with concrete changes in the city. Bogaert goes deep beneath the surface of Morocco’s urban prosperity to reveal how neoliberal government and the increased connectivity engendered by global capitalism transformed Morocco’s leading urban spaces, opening up new sites for capital accumulation, creating enormous class divisions, and enabling new innovations in state authoritarianism. Analyzing these transformations, he argues that economic globalization does not necessarily lead to increased democratization but to authoritarianism with a different face, to a form of authoritarian government that becomes more and more a globalized affair.
Showing how Morocco’s experiences have helped produce new forms of globalization, Bogaert offers a bridge between in-depth issues of Middle Eastern studies and broader questions of power, class, and capital as they continue to evolve in the twenty-first century.
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Series: Globalization and Community
Cover
Preface and Acknowledgments
Back in 2007, when I first arrived in Rabat, the plan was to study processes
of democratization in both Egypt and Morocco. What’s more,
the case of Morocco was actually more of a second option, a comparative
by-product of the real case I wanted to explore: Egypt.
However, parliamentary elections took place in Morocco in the first
year of this research and my colleague Sami Zemni convinced me to go.
I could postpone Egypt for a later date. “Rabat will be a soft landing
compared to Cairo,” he told me. The rest is history. In the concurrence...
INTRODUCTION: Morocco‘s Urban Revolution
On September 15, 2013, in the morning, while entering the station of Casa-Port, I saw the new high-rises of Casablanca Marina out my window. Although still under construction, they already transformed Casablanca’s skyline radically. Casablanca Marina is situated just in front of the old medina between the harbor and the impressive Mosque Hassan II. The medina, the old city that predates the French protectorate, with its robust stone walls, narrow streets, and numerous small shops, will be hidden from now on behind a new city panorama of concrete and glass....
Part I. Neoliberalism As Projects
1. Considering The Global Situation
Scholars on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region addressing the problem of democracy and political change have surprisingly, for a region that has always been the middle point of geopolitical interests, little to say about the global situation. Or, more precisely, they have little to say about capitalist globalization and the place of the region therein. I do not mean to suggest that there are no important contributions dealing with issues of neoliberalism or global capitalism. Yet when it comes to the understanding of politics in the MENA region, they often stay...
2. An Urban History of Neoliberal Projects in Morocco
Through the urban lens I want to understand other kinds of problems:
neoliberalism; the state; government in contemporary societies,
especially in the Global South; and, finally, uneven development.
One might say, compared to other regions in the world, that dynamics
of urbanization remain an overlooked topic within the broader literature
on political life in the Arab region. Nevertheless, there is a growing
group of scholars within a broad range of disciplines that look at different
aspects of urban life in the region to understand contemporary societal...
Part II. (State-)Crafting Globalization
3. Neoliberalism as Class Projects
Neoliberal urban projects are class projects that (re)produce uneven development and transform authoritarianism and state power in Morocco. Most visibly, neoliberal projects play a central role in the production of a wider geography of inequality and difference between a contemporary Maroc utile (mainly the large coastal cities) and a Maroc inutile (the rural hinterland and the smaller villages and towns). But also within large coastal cities, these projects reproduce and exacerbate social and...
4. Imagineering a New Bouregreg Valley
At the heart of two cities, the capital Rabat and its neighbor Salé, the valley of the Bouregreg River is the place for the largest urban renewal project in the history of Morocco. A historic natural barrier between the imperial city of Rabat and the notorious pirates of Salé, the river valley now portends the eventual reconciliation of two rival cities, a historic rivalry that shapes the identity of both the Rbatis and the Slaouis to this very day. While Rabat is the seat of government and central power, Salé, although larger in population, is a dormitory city in...
Part III. Transforming Urban Life
5. Changing Methods of Authoritarian Power
In chapter 2 I describe a transition from a phase of roll-back neoliberalism (with projects aiming to dismantle developmentalism) to a phase of roll-out neoliberalism (with projects involved in the creation of a new order). The latter was characterized not only by a transformation of state institutional power (e.g., the Bouregreg arrangement) but also by the aim to transform urban life itself. This entailed a fundamental shift in methods of power and techniques of government. While the reign of Hassan II and the policies of structural adjustment were predominantly...
6. Power and Control through Techniques of Security
A key argument in this book is that we can distinguish a governmental shift in the ways the city, and slums particularly, are governed over the last three decades and that this shift illustrates broader shifts within neoliberalism itself.1 More specifically, this governmental shift illustrates the transition from a phase of roll-back neoliberalism in which the governmental apparatuses and mechanisms of state developmentalism were dismantled to a phase of roll-out neoliberalism characterized by the creation of new “apparatuses of security” aiming to consolidate neoliberal...
CONCLUSION: A New Geography of Power
The aim of this book is to understand both neoliberal globalization
and the transformation of authoritarian government. Despite the fact
that these two abstract phenomena inform the work of so many political
scientists, geographers, anthropologists, economists, area specialists, and
others, their convergence in the Arab region remains understudied and
often poorly understood.
Of course, there is a strong awareness about the impact of globalization
in the region, especially when it relates to geopolitics. Nevertheless,...
E-ISBN-13: 9781452956695
E-ISBN-10: 1452956693
Print-ISBN-13: 9781517900816
Page Count: 312
Illustrations:
Publication Year: 2018
Series Title: Globalization and Community
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