Social Mobilization in Morocco: Lessons Learned for a Historically Informed Activism

This collected volume investigates the ways in which historical training supports current activism and advocacy in global times by highlighting models of social activism and political representation in different parts of the world, with diverse social actions, strategies, and protest spaces.

Morocco is a fascinating society to examine protest movements in an authoritarian regime. For the first time ever, the contributors reply in detail to questions, challenges and findings regarding the implications of historically informed activism in Morocco. The cooperative perspective is the key to a better understanding as it reinvigorates a conversation between social scientists―sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists―and historians about how to analyse social and political activism.

The main findings relate to the great structural transformations that have shaped the current power regimes in a longue durée perspective. How are social movements born, how do they mature, and how do they die? Through the dynamics of social mobilisation, we discover the structure of the power regime, the responses (strategies), and its forms of survival (resources and capacities).

How does history inform and empower current activism? The book covers 22 scenarios of popular revolts -urban, rural, and peripheral. Casablanca (1907, 1965, 2000), Fez (1907, 1990), the Eastern Rif (1909, 1921, 1958, 1984, 2004), Meknes (1937, 2011), Tangiers (1952, 2011, 2015), Salé, (1930, 2008), Taza (1915), and Imider (2011).

Natalia Ribas-Mateos is Maria Zambrano Senior Researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Spain, and Visiting Fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), Denmark. She has led and participated in numerous major projects related to migration, mobilities, gender, and borders. She has conducted fieldwork in Southern Europe, the Mediterranean, and at the US-Mexico border. Her most recent publications are: Handbook on Human Security, Borders and Migration (Edward Elgar 2021; with Timothy J. Dunn), Social Mobilization in Morocco: Lessons Learned from a Historically Informed Activism (ibidem Press 2022 [French  edition, forthcoming, Le Croquant]; with Laura Feliu, Josep Lluis Mateo, and Ferran Izquierdo Brichs), The Elgar Companion to Gender and Global Migration (Edward Elgar 2022; with Saskia Sassen), and The Encyclopaedia on Global Migration (Edward Elgar, forthcoming; with Laura Oso and Melissa Moralli).