Introduction
The opening session of the World Forum on Human Rights in Marrakech in November 2014 brought together prominent speakers such as the former President of the Spanish government, the Moroccan Minister of Justice and the President of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Yet these were not the speakers who attracted the most attention that day: the speech by Naïma Amar, a woman from the province of Errachidia in southeastern Morocco, was the most highly acclaimed both by the audience and later by the national and international press. Using colloquial Arabic to ‘better express’ – as she said – her problems and the problems of all the women that she represents, she started her speech by introducing herself as a representative of all Soulaliyate1 of Morocco and ended it with the following call: ‘We, the Soulaliyate – here we are, but where are our rights?’ Naïma Amar’s speech received a standing ovation.
The term ‘Soulaliyate’ appeared in Morocco’s public sphere in relation to a women’s movement that began in 2007. It refers to women who belong to communities with use rights to collectively owned land. As a legal status, collective land dates back to the time of the French protectorate (1912–56), which issued a royal decree in 1919 to give a status to land that belonged neither to individuals nor to the state but was used by communities (Bouderbala 1996). Since then this decree has regulated the property rights of the vaguely defined category of ‘tribes, fractions, villages or other ethnic groups’ (decree of 1919, Article 1) over agricultural or pastoral land that they use as a collective. Each community possessing such a right is represented by delegates who decide according to local customs how the land is to be allocated and how local conflicts are to be resolved. The state supervises this through the Ministry of the Interior, and more particularly through the Directorate of Rural Affairs.
The 1919 decree specifies that collective land is inalienable. Yet, changes introduced to this law enable it to be rented out or transferred under certain conditions. In the current context of an increasing neoliberal trend for large-scale land acquisition in the Global South (Bush, Bujra, and Littlejohn 2004), this process has intensified in Morocco since the end of the 1990s (Mahdi 2014). More and more collective land has since been transferred to private or public companies in exchange for different forms of compensation that are distributed to the communities to whom the land used to belong. The Soulaliyate movement began in 2007 in reaction to the quasi-systematic exclusion of women from the distribution of such compensation.
Naïma Amar joined this movement in 2009 and is one of its main representatives today. Her appearance and speech at the Forum contrasted greatly with those of the civil society actors whom one usually encounters during such international events. Until recently these were, as described by Catusse (2002, 303), university-educated individuals, often with degrees from abroad, living in Rabat or Casablanca, more at ease in French than in Arabic and representing a middle class that had developed in the 1970s within the university sector and in public and private enterprises. Naïma Amar’s profile clearly does not fit into this category. The headscarf covering her hair and the simple jellabiya-like tunic that she was wearing resembled those of any average woman in Morocco and indicated her modest social background. Her use of colloquial Arabic, rather than the standard Arabic or French used by the elite in such contexts, indicated her limited access to education. She lives neither in Rabat nor Casablanca, is a widow with very little income and has been engaged in multiple jobs to generate revenue for herself and her children since her husband died. Her last attempt was a small but unsuccessful women’s craft cooperative that she started in the village where she grew up in the province of Errachidia. How then did she manage to appear among the speakers of this opening ceremony, directing the spotlight onto the movement she represents?
The partnership on which the Soulaliyate movement rests is one major reason that can explain Naïma Amar’s presence on the stage that day. While the Soulaliyate movement is mainly framed as a grassroots movement representing the interests of rural, dispossessed and mainly illiterate women (Baines 2013), its making is the result of the interrelation of two different types of actors. On the one hand is the group of women referred to as Soulaliyate women, who have little previous political experience or capital and claim their rights over collective land in the name of belonging to the communities owning the land. On the other hand, actors and organisations that have been dominating Morocco’s civil society since the late 1980s have also been involved in the making of this mobilisation. Amongst these, a feminist organisation, the Association démocratique des femmes du Maroc (Democratic Association of Women in Morocco, henceforth ADFM), has played the most prominent und sustained role. This elite-based organisation was created in the 1980s, has close ties to international donor agencies and has become widely known for its stance and actions in favour of a reform of Morocco’s legislation to improve women’s rights. I will focus here on the making of the partnership that links this organisation with the women representing their local community.2
ADFM representatives use the term ‘support’ to describe the nature of their link to the Soulaliyate movement. This term reminds us of what has been referred to as the tendency of international donor organisations and national non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to ‘patronise’ grassroots women (Carapico 2014, 112–149). It does not however sufficiently express the complex interrelations of the actors, organisations, goals, strategies and interests on which the movement rests. It further underplays the inherent power hierarchies, distribution of roles, discourses and representations that both result from and shape these interrelations. As shown for instance by the literature on gender and social movements, such internal dynamics – while often overlooked by social movements studies – play a crucial role in shaping collective action (Einwohner, Hollander, and Olson 2000). I therefore analyse the Soulaliyate movement as the result of a coalition of women that crosses social divides, focusing mainly on the internal dynamics that characterised the alliance in the first years of its making.3 How did this multi-partner coalition, which crosses various social boundaries, come into being, and more importantly, remain active for several years? Through what mechanisms did these actors establish ties amongst themselves? How did these dynamics impact on the movement that emerged out of this coalition?
Studies analysing the making of alliances across social divides in North Africa and the Middle East are still rare. This is all the more surprising as coalitions between organisations and actors are a recurrent feature of advocacy movements in the region (Bush 2011). This article aims therefore to analyse the formation of coalitions by focusing on the processes of micromobilisation that led to the making of a women’s land-use rights movement and by highlighting the role played by intermediate organisations and actors in connecting and merging local, national and international norms, goals and practices. In looking at ‘the active social life’ of the Soulaliyate’s land-use rights movement (Abu-Lughod 2010), it sheds light on the inequalities and fluid power hierarchies that are constitutive of it. It therefore goes beyond interpretations that read women’s grassroots activism as the sole result of international and elite-led gender empowerment projects and norms, highlighting processes of cross-fertilisation and hybridisation instead. More generally, this paper aims to give insights into the transformations of contentious politics in Morocco, analysing the emergence and empowerment of new actors and the circulation and adaptation of norms. The Moroccan case illustrates, more broadly, how processes of intensified resource extraction and commodification of land that distinguish today’s neoliberal times have set in motion practices of resistance that contribute to a reconfiguration of power relations (Englert and Daley 2008; Sikor and Lund 2009).
It is finally important to note that what has become known as the Soulaliyate movement is not the only mobilisation that emerged in the current context of the intensified commodification of collective land in Morocco. A plurality of protest actions linked to the issue of land rights and led by women and/or men is observable throughout the country. They pursue different objectives and vary in size and degree of formalisation, and their actions range from one-time protest actions to long-standing mobilisations supported by established human rights organisations or political parties. The Soulaliyate movement was one of the first mobilisations to emerge in this context and is furthermore one of the most formalised and publicised, and thus it offers interesting insights into the dynamics that contribute to the making of a social movement across social divides.
I base my exposition on material collected through a collective research project conducted from 2011 to 2013 and completed with additional interviews in 2013 and 2014.4 This material includes interviews with representatives of ADFM and women belonging to communities owning collective land near the cities of Kenitra, Mehdia and Meknes and who joined the movement in its first stages; letters written by the latter; and press articles as well as pictures and videos of the demonstrations that were published online. On the basis of this material I first set the context, describing the factors that led to the beginnings of the coalition. I then analyse the roles played by ADFM, which defined a strategy, framed the movement and connected it to national and international norms before moving to the role played by the ‘bridge leaders’ (Robnett 1996), who acted as spokeswomen for the movement and recruited its constituents. The empowerment of this intermediate layer of leaders indicates a gradual inversion of the power hierarchy based on the conflictual temporalities on which the goals of ADFM and those of the Soulaliyate are set.
The beginnings of an alliance across social divides
The unequal repartitioning of resources in the context of collective land is not a new phenomenon in Morocco, where the land tenure regime applied to collective land is inherently gendered (Maher 1974). In almost all cases, the right to use land is limited to male heads of family with a patrilineal link to the community. Women, and especially those who are or were married to men who do not belong to the group, are de facto not considered legitimate owners of the land. While women may benefit indirectly from the usufruct of land through their male relatives, their access to this depends greatly on the goodwill of the latter. These practices refer to local customs that are said to have been common at the time when the French colonial power decided to regulate collectively owned land. As in other African contexts, while previously flexible, the practices were rigidified when colonial officials started codifying them, creating a distinction between customary and positive law (Mamdani 1996) and often reinforcing gender inequalities (Chanock 1985). They were further reproduced by the 1919 decree specifying that the main beneficiaries of collective land should be ‘heads of family’, who in the dominant representations are men.
While gender inequalities and related local conflicts were an inherent feature of the regime regulating collective land (Bendella 2009), it was the intensified commodification of the latter since the late 1990s that contributed to exacerbating these inequalities in a way that led to the emergence of a larger mobilisation. According to most recent estimations, collective land properties represent 15 million hectares, of which, as stated by the Ministry of the Interior, 11,000 hectares were transferred to new owners or tenants between 2009 and 2011.5 The land is either sold or rented out for long periods via the Directorate of Rural Affairs, which acts as an intermediary between local communities and the new owners or tenants, which are mainly public or private companies using the land for large-scale projects (the extraction of phosphate, development of renewable energy, construction of social housing or tourism infrastructure etc.). In some cases, the state invests the income resulting from such transactions in projects that should benefit the whole community. In other cases, compensation in the form of money or plots of land is distributed to the individuals who constitute the community to which the land belonged before.
Community delegates (generally male elders and notables) are in charge of deciding who should benefit from such compensation by establishing lists of beneficiaries. In most communities the delegates quasi-systematically excluded women from these lists, justifying their decision with regard to the custom that limits the right of use to men. Until recently, the Ministry of the Interior did not oppose this exclusion, referring to the 1919 decree which specifies that collective land should be used and managed according to local customs. Consequently, not only was the community giving away all or parts of its right to use the land, but in exchange for this only men were receiving compensation.6 In some cases this had dramatic consequences: whereas their male relatives benefited from substantial amounts of money or from equipped plots, women who were still living on collective land or were making a living from it lost both their housing and their main source of income. This happened for instance in the surroundings of the expanding city of Kenitra, in the Haddâda community. Out of this community the first connection between ADFM and the future Soulaliyate group was made.
The beginnings of the alliance between the two parties date back to April 2007, when Rkia Bellot, a retired civil servant from the Haddâda community, showed up for the first time at the Rabat-based ADFM counselling centre, which specialised in helping women suffering from violence and gender discrimination. The ADFM counsellor who received her that day felt rather puzzled by Rkia Bellot’s story. It was the first time she had heard of such a case: while all of Rkia Bellot’s brothers had received compensation in exchange for collective land sold to real estate companies, she, like the other women of the Haddâda, had not received anything. A second meeting was rapidly scheduled, this time with some of the main representatives of ADFM, who swiftly decided to take up the case, and by mid May the press had already started reporting the issue of the Haddâda women, mentioning ADFM’s support for the women of ‘all the tribes of Morocco’ (Mseffer 2007).
From 2007 on, ADFM carried out an active campaign aimed at contacting women from other communities and bringing them together within a common movement in collaboration with the first local women who joined the movement. The Soulaliyate movement is therefore a mobilisation that was gradually built out of this partnership, bringing together very diverse actors and organisations. Creating the movement meant bringing together actors who were very different in terms not only of social and geographical background but also of the goals pursued through the movement. The following two sections show how the different tasks aiming to reach this goal were distributed amongst the various actors forming the movement, contributing to transforming this inherent diversity into a powerful resource in which intermediary leaders play a pivotal role.
Providing a strategy, knowledge and financial means
Building upon resources, knowledge and competences acquired during several decades of militancy, ADFM played a dominant role in shaping both the form and the discourse of the mobilisation. It designed the movement’s strategy, and provided appropriate terminology and repertoires of action as well as legal advice and financial means. More importantly, it contributed to identifying a common goal and language that could encompass – at least at the level of the movement’s official discourse – the plurality of meanings, stakes and targets represented within the movement.
Created in 1985 out of the women’s section of the leftist Party of Progress and Socialism (PPS), heir to the former Communist Party, ADFM has become one of the leading feminist organisations in Morocco, with privileged connections to public authorities and international donor organisations, yet without ‘a huge presence on the ground’ (Sater 2007, 58). While the association is officially independent of the PPS, its relations with the latter remain close and guarantee ADFM access to political representatives and public ministries. The organisation has also several cooperative partnerships with international donors and United Nations organisations which provide ADFM with funding and access to ‘world conferences … where NGOs meet, exchange experiences and develop new strategies’ (Chen 1995, 477). Today ADFM is mainly led by highly educated women in their late fifties or early sixties, often middle- or upper-middle-class school or university teachers whose political experience dates back to the 1970s and 1980s when they were actively involved in the student movement that led protest actions against the state. They are assisted by a team of younger full-time employees who receive a salary for their activities within the organisation.
Several interconnected reasons might explain ADFM’s swift reaction to Rkia Bellot’s request in 2007. The case put forward by this former civil servant represented first a blatant form of gender discrimination and addressed the global issue of women’s economic rights, which coincided with the organisation’s and its partners’ fields of action. ADFM has in fact had a long experience of women’s rights advocacy since its creation. Its missions are principally directed towards establishing gender equality in all sectors of society, focusing mainly on legislation reform. The organisation’s main field of action has therefore been, for a long time, the reform of the family law. Incidentally, when Rkia Bellot contacted the organisation, only a few years had passed since the reformation of the law in 2004, with King Mohammed VI receiving praise for being the main actor who made this reform possible. Thus, Rkia Bellot contacted ADFM at a time when the organisation was facing a void and needed to renew its agenda and legitimacy. Finally, supporting the Soulaliyate cause has also enabled ADFM to broaden its grassroots base within popular classes, contributing to the move away from its often criticised image as an elite-based organisation.
The committee in charge of the Soulaliyate case within ADFM consists of two to three elected board members and two full-time employees. This committee played the leading role in constructing the movement, is the main rallying-point for all the women who join the mobilisation and provides training workshops and legal advice. It helps the women to write letters of complaint, organises so-called sit-ins (or rather stand-ins),7 negotiates with public authorities and contributes to publicising the movement via the media, both at national and international level. The necessary financial means are provided by different national and international partners of ADFM such as UN Women, the Spanish organisation Asociación para la Cooperación en el Sur (Association for Cooperation with the South, better known as ACSUR) and the Belgian Embassy.
Of the tasks taken over by ADFM, it was the development of a strategy aimed at transforming a multiplicity of local claims into a common movement using national and international norms and standards that had the most important impact on the making of the mobilisation. At the first meeting with Rkia Bellot, ADFM decided to move from the case she was presenting to create a social movement representing the interests of the whole Soulaliyate of Morocco. As an employee of ADFM interviewed in June 2011 later explained, this strategy aimed at both creating a critical mass and at giving a national dimension to the women's claims. The shift from many localised conflicts over land rights to a movement representing all the women affected by a similar problem seemed all the more important, as the representatives of the Ministry of the Interior initially stated that they had no legal capacity to act in favour of the female complainants as the problems raised were community-based and therefore only subject to local customs (Berriane 2015).
Moving from many local claims to a movement meant first moving from the ‘self’ to the ‘us’, in the words of the main coordinator of ADFM committee in charge of the Soulaliyate case. When joining the movement the motivations put forward by women from different communities are mainly directed towards achieving individual and very diverse economic objectives linked to their limited access to collective land. This can be illustrated, for instance, through the letters of complaint written by women in different regions of Morocco to their local authorities before they joined the movement. Their letters refer mainly to intra-familial disputes over collective land and to the complainant’s individual claims. Moving from the concrete problems of each constituent to a problem faced by all of the women representing a same community of origin was therefore the first step in the process of building the movement; a process that, according to ADFM coordinator, is still ongoing:
We were conscious of the importance of having a unified group that is able to have a real impact. But how to transform an issue that concerns individuals into an issue that concerns a group and later an issue that concerns all of Morocco – all the Soulaliyate women of Morocco? What we managed to do was to move from the ‘self’ to the ‘us’, to make them speak in the name of their community. Now we are teaching them how to speak in the name of the Soulaliyate movement. We are trying to make them include that in their discourse. (Interview, July 2014, Rabat)
As highlighted by the literature on social movement coalitions, ‘for coordinated action to occur, groups must have a certain degree of overlapping interests, goals, and core beliefs’ (Cornfield and McCammon 2010, 80). However, depending on the region of origin, the concrete problems faced by the Soulaliyate vary. These differences are mainly linked to the multiplicity of norms applied to collective land, which depend on the customs of each community, and on differences in the value of land depending on its locality. While intensified urbanisation has led to the selling-off of land surrounding the city of Kenitra for instance, land owned by communities in Errachidia is not yet attracting many investors. The group of women represented by Naïma Ammar is therefore claiming not its right to receive compensation payments, as in Kenitra, but its right to use parts of the land owned by the community to develop small economic enterprises.
In light of these differences, ADFM undertook what Benford and Snow would call active ‘signifying work’ (2000, 614), constructing common goals, meanings and references for the movement. According to ADFM’s understanding, the common cause and interest that links all the women forming the movement is gender discrimination and the necessary fight against it. References to gender discrimination come hand-in-hand with those to ‘women and human rights’, ‘social justice and equality’ and ‘citizenship’. These references are at the core of the arguments developed before the media, during demonstrations and in official correspondence sent to public authorities. This terminology refers first to international standards included in conventions signed by Morocco, and second to norms inscribed in the Moroccan Constitution. Putting forward such keywords has a particular significance in today’s Morocco. It refers to the many policies and reforms implemented by the state in favour of women’s rights in the country since the beginning of the 2000s. Since its recent reform in 2011, the Constitution specifies in its preamble that ‘Morocco reaffirms and commits to … banning and combating all forms of discrimination against anyone, on any grounds such as sex or other,’ before adding in Article 19 that women and men enjoy the same rights.
ADFM’s involvement contributed therefore to framing the movement according to national and international standards that understand ‘women’s rights as human rights’ (Hodgson 2011), linking the issue of land-use rights to that of gender equality. By inscribing the claims of the Soulaliyate within globally and nationally hegemonic norms and standards, ADFM first legitimises them vis-à-vis international partners and representatives of the state and, second, contributes to further dissemination of these global gender norms and terminologies at the level of the women claiming land-use rights. The transfer of these norms and terminologies to the women forming the movement mainly takes place during training workshops organised by ADFM in collaboration with their international partners. The workshops bring together 15 to 30 women chosen by ADFM, are usually based around global keywords privileged by their international partners such as ‘leadership’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘citizenship’, and enable ADFM to inform the participants about their rights both as members of their respective communities and as citizens. ADFM therefore plays a pivotal role in the process of norms transfer at the transnational and national levels (Moghadam 2005).
However, this transfer of terminologies and norms is not a unilateral process. It entails a process of hybridisation and adaptation of these global references to local specificities. The argumentation developed by the Soulaliyate movement under the supervision of ADFM combines two different registers: first, the notion of ‘gender equality’ that refers to a universal understanding of human rights, and second, the exclusionary notion of ‘particular rights’ that is predominant at the level of the communities to which the constituents of the movement belong (Ait Mous and Berriane 2016). This second understanding can best be illustrated by the use of the term ‘Soulaliyate’ to name the movement. As mentioned, this term refers to the patrilineal tie that links each member to her community of origin. By using this term, the movement refers to a norm that limits the transmission of land to members of the community who are linked to it through their fathers. This genealogical link is central in the argumentation put forward by the women that make up the movement: they use their own patrilineal filiation to legitimise their right over land, and by extension they exclude from this right all those who cannot prove such a genealogy.8 While this combination of universal and particularistic rights might seem contradictory, it is at the core of the argumentation developed by ADFM in collaboration with the women claiming access to their collective land properties, which indicates a process of hybridisation that merges global and local understandings of the rights at stake.
Amongst the factors that made this combination possible at the discursive level, we should highlight the multiple meanings of the word haqq in Arabic. While this word can refer to a universal and abstract understanding of ‘rights’, in the sense promoted by international conventions and by organisations such as ADFM, it can also mean ‘the share that belongs rightfully to a person’. Thus, through the word haqq two different understandings of the objectives of the movement could be brought together: gender equality in its universal and abstract sense, and the concrete and material share of land or of revenues generated by that land and distributed according to institutionalised local customs. When using the word haqq during the interviews, my respondents from Mehdia, Meknes and Kenitra were often superposing both meanings. The differences inherent to both meanings have concrete implications that I will mention in the last section of this article but, during the process of movement-making, they were blurred and made invisible at the discursive level through the use of the common word haqq, contributing to framing consensus beyond internal contradictions.
These observations nuance the monopoly of power that ADFM representatives seem to have within the partnership and their capacity to unilaterally impose the references they usually privilege. A closer look at the roles played by the women representing the Soulaliyate shows how central they are to the making of the mobilisation.
Giving substance to the movement: the role of ‘bridge leaders’
While ADFM has played a leading role in identifying the ‘movement’ as the main strategy for attracting the state’s attention, the implementation of this strategy depends greatly on the women belonging to communities that own collective land. On the one hand, all the strategic decisions that led to the making of the Soulaliyate movement were taken by the ADFM representatives, using power legitimised by the symbolic capital of their position as ‘educated’, ‘experienced’ and ‘well-connected’ partners and by the material and cultural means generated by their social position. On the other hand, the implementation of this strategy would not have been possible without the active participation of the Soulaliyate members themselves. Their role in the partnership on which the movement rests includes the gathering of information on the ground that ADFM can later use in negotiations with public authorities. They are also the ones participating in the demonstrations, providing the concrete examples through which the general claims of the movement are illustrated. The narratives of their lives are highlighted as concrete examples of ‘ordinary’ women who are living gender discrimination first-hand and expressing their demands in a simple and often passionate way, using colloquial Arabic or Amazigh dialects. While the testimonies of grassroots women have long been used by Moroccan feminist organisations to strengthen their claims (Vairel 2014, 268–272), this strategy has taken on a much broader dimension through the Soulaliyate movement, which has brought together mainly working- and lower-middle-class women originating from rural or peri-urban areas.9
The bridge between ADFM and the women claiming land-use rights was created through the active involvement of the intermediary leaders, who can be referred to as ‘bridge leaders’ (Robnett 1996). They mobilise women on the ground, coordinate their actions, transfer knowledge from ADFM to the women at the grassroots (and vice versa), and represent their community before local authorities and the media. Privileging a gender perspective, Robnett was able to reconceptualise leadership, showing how, in the male-dominated American civil rights movement, African-American women represented an ‘intermediate layer of leadership critical to the micromobilization’ (Ibid., 1661). In the case of the Soulaliyate movement, this intermediate layer is represented by female actors who take their legitimacy and resources from both structural and social characteristics: their first-hand experience of discrimination, which provides them with important symbolic capital; their socio-economic profile, which is perceived as being close to that of the majority of the population; particular competences such as their ability to read and write; and their insertion within networks based on kinship and neighbourhood relations that enable them to mobilise other women.
Mennana Shiseh, an illiterate widow in her fifties and president of the Association of Soulaliyate Women of Qasbat Mehdia, is such a bridge leader. She was among the very first to join the movement in 2007. She has since participated in several of the workshops prepared by ADFM and has become one of the main spokeswomen for the movement, contributing much to making the cause of the Soulaliyate known at the national level. She has appeared in several TV shows, documentaries and press articles illustrating the demands of the movement with examples from her own life story, passionately narrated:
I was born here in the Qasbah [of Mehdia]. I lived here and then got married. When my husband died I went to work in the [fish] factory. My husband’s pension was stopped for a year. That was a time when my children were still going to school. I was not able to pay for their education and they dropped out of school. I kept on working. I was their mother and their father, the only breadwinner in the family. … When they started transferring the land … we went to our delegates and asked them to give us our share. … They told us that they don’t give anything to women. (Quote from Mennana Shiseh’s testimony in the documentary Moroccan Women in Collective Land, produced by ADFM, 2010)
Mennana Shiseh has also played a central role in recruiting women in Qasbat Mehdia, where she lives. To make the coalition possible, old kinship and neighbourhood ties had to be reactivated and new ones created, such as that between ADFM and local women. By contacting ADFM and informing its representatives about the problem encountered by women in her community, Rkia Bellot can be described as the movement’s first bridge builder. Relying on her family networks she later took an active part in identifying and contacting other women in the Gharb region, forming the first group of grassroots women that grew into a movement. In her own words:
ADFM told me: ‘Next time you should come with more people.’ I called one girl whose mother is my mother’s cousin and another one who is my cousin’s daughter, another woman who comes originally from Sâkniya10 but who lives in Kenitra now, in the old town, and finally a cousin who lives in Mehdia. I told this one: ‘You go to Mehdia.’ She is the one who contacted Mennana. She knew people there and asked them: ‘I am looking for a woman who would be ready to speak out against what is happening.’ They told her that the best choice would be Mennana Shiseh. This is how she ended up knocking on her door. Another did the same thing in Sâkniya. I had told her to visit a woman who used to work in the army. … Then we all came here and met at the association [i.e. ADFM]. This is how the first group of Soulaliyates women was assembled. (Rkia Bellot, interview, November 2011)
The reactivation of pre-existing social ties played a central role in this process. In some of the encountered cases in Kenitra, Mehdia and Meknes, kinship relations linking community members were still active, although this seems to have been mainly the case during major events such as funerals or weddings. In addition, links were based on a common living space in cases where members of a community were living in the same neighbourhood or village. Relationships based on spatial proximity also pre-existed at the intercommunity level, such as between women of the Haddâda and the Mehdawa communities who live on the outskirts of the city of Kenitra and were the first to join the alliance. The role played by these relationships in the making of the movement remind us of the importance of informal networks in the making of social movements in North Africa and the Middle East. As shown by authors such as Singerman (1996), the social location of women within the family and the neighbourhood provides them with a privileged access to such networks. As a matter of fact, Mennana Shiseh and Rkia Bellot rallied the first groups of women during informal social gatherings such as weddings or while visiting their female neighbours or relatives at home.
In spite of their very different trajectories, both Rkia Bellot and Mennana Shiseh have some similarities in terms of social resources and competences that can also be found in the profiles of other women who have since taken over as intermediate leaders. Most have at least a minimal level of education and those who do not, like Mennana Shiseh, have close family members who help them to read and write. Both Mennana Shiseh and Rkia Bellot’s fathers were influential members of the community, which provides them with additional social capital as well as far-reaching networks within the community that they can mobilise to gather women. Both kept close links with their community of origin: Mennana Shiseh because she lived most of her life in Qasbat Mehdia, Rkia Bellot because she kept close ties with family members who are still living in the outskirts of Kenitra. Neither of them is particularly restricted as regards movement. Rkia Bellot has her own car and is used to travelling. As a widow and the head of her household, Mennana Shiseh is less restricted in her movements than her married female neighbours. Finally, Rkia Bellot’s and Mennana Shiseh’s trajectories provide them with additional symbolic resources. Rkia Bellot, who grew up in the countryside and then moved to the city where she studied and worked in a ministry, has the advantage of being educated and almost ‘fluent’ in both worlds (Rose 2000, 184): that of ADFM and that of the grassroots women. Mennana Shiseh’s tragic life story has provided her with incomparable symbolic strength, legitimising her role as a speaker for all the women of Qasbat Mehdia and beyond who are discriminated against.
Conflictual partnerships and shifting power relations
The mobilisation that started in 2007 is still ongoing today, and has achieved its first major results. Between 2009 and 2012 three administrative circulars were issued by the Ministry of the Interior instructing its local representatives to ensure that women are included amongst the beneficiaries of collective land (Berriane 2015). While the movement sees these resolutions as a first success, they also consider them insufficient measures. An administrative circular is not a law, and can thus be revoked at any point. In addition, the concrete implementation of the new decision faces many obstacles such as the opposition of local delegates or family members and a proliferation of strategies used by local communities to circumvent the new resolution. The alliance that contributed to the making of the Soulaliyate movement is therefore still active today, calling for a reform of the legislation and the effective implementation of the ministry’s new resolutions.
However, the movement is increasingly facing internal conflicts. Tensions are observable both between ADFM and local women and within local communities. These tensions result, first, from the gradual inversion of power hierarchy that become visible when observing the transformation of the relation that links ADFM and the constituents of the Soulaliyate movement. Throughout the process of leadership formation, some bridge leaders grew increasingly aware of the centrality of their role to the making of the movement, which contributed to fuelling tensions between them and ADFM. An indicator of this inversion is the development of a growing awareness among the women representing the Soulaliyate of their right to be listened to. As their main interlocutor in ADFM, one of the full-time employees of the organisation finds it increasingly difficult to deal with this situation.
Today, they consider that our listening to their problems and finding solutions to them is their right. When they have the impression that they are not listened to, they get angry. … They call you at every moment of the day and you have to listen to them, to find a solution. … Sometimes I can’t cope with it anymore, but I can’t say that; I can’t tell them that I’m tired, that I can’t listen to all their problems. She might not understand that the right way. I have to be very careful. Things you say can be distorted. … If I tell her: ‘I’m very tired today’ or ‘I’m busy right now, please come tomorrow’ she might understand it as: ‘They don’t want to help us, no one wants to help us, this association doesn’t do anything.’ I feel that I have a big responsibility here. (June 2014)
In this quote it is particularly interesting to note how the employee is aware of the need to comply with the demands of the Soulaliyate, which is an indicator of the new balance of power resulting from the complementarity of roles and interests on which the alliance is based. In order to better understand the employees’ fear and caution, one should know that the number of alternative partners who are ready to support the Soulaliyate in their quest has increased with the movement’s visibility. Other (often competing) feminist or women’s associations, human rights organisations, political parties and, most notably, local politicians are increasingly showing their interest for the Soulaliyate cause, offering their support, intermediation and know-how. Thus some members of the movement have started to diversify their partners, joining other alliances and sometimes even leaving the movement to continue their quest via different means (through electoral politics for example): a trend that threatens to undermine ADFM’s leading position as the main supporter of women’s land rights in the country. Following the trajectory of several intermediate leaders since 2011, I could perceive a clear shift in the discourse of certain actors. During the first interviews I conducted in 2011, all my female interlocutors highlighted the key role of ADFM in teaching them how to stand for their rights, raising public awareness about women’s exclusion from land-use rights and making negotiations with public authorities possible. Two years later, the interviewed ‘bridge leaders’ seem much more aware of their own importance within the movement, even suggesting, in some rare cases, that they were the ones who played the most decisive role in the successes reached by the movement.
The shift in discourse, the diversification of partnerships and the disengagement of some of the members from the movement have been nourished by the gap that separates the priorities of the Soulaliyates and those of ADFM. While ADFM’s framing of the movement had managed to produce a common formulation of the goals of the movement, it did not erase the temporal contradictions that oppose the objectives of the two partners. With time, these contradictions seem to have grown stronger. As ADFM aims mainly to change the legislation, it privileges in fact a long-term perspective that fits with the temporalities of (slow) institutional reform and increasingly directs its attention towards lobbying activities at the level of the government. Facing an intensified privatisation process and the sense of an approaching deadline after which all the land that once belonged to the community will have been transferred, the women constituting the movement have more pressing concerns that need to be dealt with in the short term. They insist therefore on the urgency of the matter, seeking rapid solutions and territorial interventions, rather than the long-term and slow perspective favoured by ADFM. As a result, some intermediate leaders are facing growing dissatisfaction from the women they have managed to mobilise for the movement, a situation that they describe as being particularly difficult to deal with. In some contexts in which women have not yet received any share of the land or any compensation, the impatience of the Soulaliyates is growing and with it also their willingness to accept compromises such as a smaller share than that given to men, for example;11 a trend that goes against ADFM’s aim to reach gender equality and highlights the different understandings of the word haqq mentioned earlier.
Conclusion
I have shown that the Soulaliyate movement, which is generally portrayed as a grassroots movement of rural and illiterate women, is the result of an alliance of actors representing different social groups. It has emerged out of the interrelation of different goals and the combination of different resources, skills and interpretative frames which contributed to shaping the movement. This diversity has greatly contributed to the making of the movement and to its increasing visibility in the public sphere. The central role played by ADFM in setting the agenda and the organisation of the movement and transferring specific knowledge to the Soulaliyate via workshops reflects its monopoly of power; a monopoly that is intimately linked to the unequal distribution of social and political capital within the alliance, and more generally within society.
While this observation plays a central role in the production of the movement, it should not lead us to overlook the central role of the women who represent their local communities. Their contribution to the making of the movement is as essential as that of ADFM: they give a voice, a face and substance to the mobilisation. The complementarity of interests and resources that characterises the alliance brings a relative balance of power that has had an impact on the making of the movement by contributing, for example, to framing it as a merger of different interpretative frames. However, one should not overlook the many obstacles and conflicts that result from this form of partnership and more particularly the fluidity of the domination relationship within the movement. As shown in this article, the empowerment of grassroots women via the movement is leading to tensions within the movement; tensions that have been further exacerbated by the increase in the number of potential partners who are ready to support the Soulaliyate in their quest. These dynamics should encourage researchers to look closer at the making of social movement coalitions that bridge social divides.