Globalized Authoritarianism: Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco by Koenraad Bogaert (review)

Readers may remember Casablanca as a place where European refugees (played by Humphrey Bogart) could find a passage to allied territories or get stuck in the Vichy-controlled enclave. For Koenraad Bogaert, it is one of the cities in which global neoliberal politics are produced. More specifically, they are constructed through urban projects and in conjunction with authoritarian rule.

A political scientist by training, Bogaert goes against much of the established literature in that field in defending his triple thesis, i.e., that neoliberalism is not a global model imposed from above but produced locally and with local specificities; that politics happen not only through parties and elections but through urban demolition and construction; and that globalization does not always mean democratization but often quite the contrary. Globalized Authoritarianismexplores these theoretical themes through the concrete cases of the upgrading of Casablanca slums and the retooling of the Bouregreg Valley between Rabat and Salé. The book engages extensively with literature on urban and political theory, Arab politics, and global capitalism, as the author declares himself heir of Marx, Foucault, and Lefebvre. And yet he succeeds in building an analysis of his own for this much-understudied region of the world.

The introductory chapter explains the book's argument. At its core is the reinterpretation of neoliberalism as a "set of projects." It depicts global capitalism as being produced in different places through concrete, local transformations by agents that operate both in global markets and in local politics. While in the 1980s, neoliberalism worldwide meant dismantling state developmentalist and welfare structures, in the last two decades, it has a more active and creative approach to biopolitics that consists of turning all citizens into consumers. Converting slums and traditionally run-down cities into gentrified theme parks, major ports, and financial centers is both a way of producing surplus and of managing populations. The state, understood as a plurality of actors with various interests, becomes a major force in moving class projects forward (and class is here not an essentialist notion to define social strata as much as, again, a number of projects aimed at stratifying society).

Chapter 1 sets the argument in the context of Arab politics and discussions of the "Arab regime." It pleads to stop seeing liberal democracies as the end point of globalization and all other societies as deviations from that rule. Instead, we need to look at varieties of capitalism in their own terms. Chapter 2 offers a history of neoliberal biopolitics from the 1980s to the present worldwide but also in Morocco with the transformations initiated by the monarch Hassan II and, even more importantly, by his son Mohammed VI. Cities were at the center of some of these changes, particularly Casablanca with the 1980s riots and the 2003 bombings, which were blamed on the radicalization of slum dwellers. This serves as the historical foundation for the analysis of class politics developed in chapter 3.

The Bouregreg Valley occupies chapter 4, which looks at the financial and political intricacies that made the Valley's funding possible. This sets the stage for chapter 5's revisiting of the historical shifts discussed in chapter 2. Chapter 6 explores the book's second example—Casablanca slums—again very attentive to financial procedures and to the actual consequences that these projects had on the inhabitants of bidonvilles, including impoverishment and displacement.

Historians of technology will appreciate Bogaert's approach to political theory and analysis through concrete studies of material transformation. They are likely to miss, however, both more history and more materiality. Most of the chapters consist of (subtle and solid) theoretical discussions. When the examples finally come up (the first one on p. 123), the analysis is still peppered by theoretical points and largely economic and political analysis. Further studies might benefit from a closer look at practices of demolition and construction (materials and tools, construction designs and elements, labor organization) and at wider geographical and...