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Four algerIan STrIfe, MoroCCan hoMeoPaThy, and The eMergenCe of The aMaZIgh MoveMenT At its outset, the decade of the 1980s had been envisaged by Arab leaders as the “decade of development.”1 However, matters turned out differently. These years were marked by a steep decline in the price of oil at mid-decade, the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, which bled the two countries white (causing an estimated one million casualties and costing hundreds of billions of dollars, at the very least), renewed violence in the Arab-Israeli sphere (the 1982 Lebanon war and the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada), and further internecine sectarian violence in Lebanon. By its end, most Arab states appeared to be suffering from a broad commonality of ailments: unproductive and uncompetitive economies, expanding , youthful populations that placed great stress on state capabilities, and stunted political systems, in which ruling elites were overwhelmingly concerned with maintaining their privileged positions. Over the preceding decades, state capacity, reflected in both the military-security and bureaucratic-civilian spheres, had expanded exponentially . As a result, the balance between state and society had tilted decisively toward the authorities, who had managed to dominate society in the name of the state. Gone were the days when regimes could be swiftly overthrown by a small coterie of army officers. Indeed, between Colonel Muʿammar al-Qaddafi’s overthrow of the Libyan monarchy in 1969 and the military coup in Sudan in 1989, not a single one of the fifteen core member states of the Arab League had experienced regime change.2 However, it was clear that preserving a regime’s hold on power was a simpler matter than genuinely coping with underlying social, economic, and political problems, which threatened to eat away at the legitimacy of the ruling elites, even if they still possessed the aura of having led their countries to independence. Some analysts spoke of “stalled” states unable to mobilize their societies for concerted and lasting development;3 others, such as Nazih Ayubi, spoke of the emergence of “fierce” states, which dominated Algerian Strife, Moroccan Homeopathy, and the Amazigh Movement 103 their populaces through all-pervasive and heavy-handed mukhabarat (intelligence and security services). For Ayubi, the Arab state was now “overstated ”: it had become too strong, in one sense, enabling it to dominate society in unhealthy ways, while lacking the capacity to provide the answers to society’s problems.4 By the end of the decade, these problems appeared all the more intractable in light of concurrent far-reaching changes that were underway in other parts of the world: the collapse of Communist regimes and the end of the Cold War, and the so-called “third wave” of democratization being experienced in Latin America and elsewhere.5 From another angle, Moroccan sociologist Mohammed Guessous spoke of the phenomenon of “azmatology” (azma is the Arabic word for “crisis”), namely, the continuous preoccupation among Arab writers and thinkers with understanding the nature of the crisis confronting Arab states and finding ways to ameliorate the situation. While being unable to tender game-changing solutions, Arab states, oil producers and non–oil producers alike, were forced to adjust their policies to a more difficult reality. Emmanuel Sivan has written about the phenomenon of the Arab state in crisis mainly in the context of the expanded reach of Islamist movements .6 This would certainly be the case in Algeria, and eventually be so, albeit in a more attenuated fashion, in Morocco as well. But the necessity of state retrenchment and adjustment would also widen the civic space available for renewed Berberist assertiveness in both countries. In fact, the expanded reach of Islamist movements in both Algeria and Morocco posed challenges to the Berberists and provided new impetus for their activities, albeit in radically different contexts: Morocco’s was one of evolving, controlled expansion of civic space and political pluralism; Algeria’s was one of a sudden and large-scale political opening, followed by a violent implosion . In both countries, Berber cultural and political activism would substantially interact with, and impact upon, the larger political playing field. algerIa By the late 1980s, the bloom had long since been off the rose of the Algerian republic, as twenty-five years of independent existence had proven to be less prosperous and harmonious than nationalist ideology had promised.The precipitous fall in the price of oil and natural gas, beginning in 1985, left the Algerian authorities with far less largesse with which to pacify their restless and youthful...

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