Morocco is in turmoil. We do not hear very much about it, but political turbulence, resistance and protest are a persistent feature of the country’s political economy. Brought to the fore during the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings in 2011, accelerated by the crushing to death of a street fish seller in the northern city of Al Hoceima in October 2016, the popular movement of Al Hirak al Chaabi has driven street protests throughout Morocco. Demonstrations against corruption, poor housing, unemployment and the failure to transition from an executive monarchy into a parliamentary democracy have unified protest across the country.
Koenraad Bogaert’s important and analytically rigorous book provides a context within which to understand contemporary political and economic crises. He says little about actual protest, the connectivity between town and country and the patterns of mobilisation. However, he provides essential insight into how shifts in the character of the Moroccan city inform a broader transformation of politics and the state, the economy and the framework of globalisation and neoliberal reform. He begins from the International Monetary Fund riots of 1981 in Casablanca which give rise to new forms of government, control, domination and popular revolt (7). The real changes, however, take place after the accession to the throne of Mohammed VI in 1999 and the May 2003 Casablanca suicide bombings. Economic growth during the early years of the new king’s rule accompanied state-driven social development initiatives. The earlier plans to control the riotous cities were now the subject of new ‘inclusive’ modalities of government to try and deal with the deleterious consequences of structural adjustment.
Bogaert’s book ‘explores political change through the lens of the city’ (3): he informs us about what happens when capital takes over the city and he does this by looking at an urban megaproject in the Bouregreg River Valley between Rabat and Salé and a programme of slum upgrading, ‘Villes sans bidonvilles’ – cities without slums. These projects for many commentators were examples of the king’s liberalisation and inclusive government. For Bogaert, the visual spectacle of the modern city highlights how authoritarian government converges with increasing globalisation and affirms the rationale for economic liberalisation. The book excels at critique of the two urban schemes, or what he calls the ‘urban revolution’ (4), by focusing on the political dimensions of them seen as a class project and a governmental problem. While visitors to Casablanca may witness the superficiality of landscapes that appear modern and welcoming, offering a shared commonality that comforts the tourist, underneath lies a class project of authoritarian transformation.
The authoritarian transformation is a class project exemplified in the high-end urban Bouregreg River development of luxury housing, marinas, shops and hotels delivered through a new model of state power that creates an agency for the valley’s development. Bogaert then documents how a declared slum upgrading programme replaces historical notions of controlling local populations with new patterns of governability, of integrating slum dwellers into a new neoliberal social order of compliance, engagement and needs satisfied by encouraging the claiming of new rights, incentives and authorisations circumscribed by free-market ideology.
Bogaert offers a significant contribution to understanding what urban development means in the context of globalisation. He does so, moreover, by not reducing the local to the international or vice versa. Instead, he argues against shorthand definitions of the neoliberal city or neoliberal urbanisms. He insists on the diversity of urban development and in so doing critiques broad swathes of literature on North Africa and the Middle East that remain rooted in modernisation theory and transition political science – the notion that modernity is unilineal and democratic politics flow ipso facto from improvements (whatever they may be) in development. The book is at its best when it urges analysis of politics in Morocco that is not simplistic, where understanding the Makhzen (the Moroccan regime) requires not just an account of the power of the monarch and his entourage, but how the Makhzen interacts with and generates new patterns of domination and subordination. His account of urbanisation and the two detailed projects, for instance, highlights not just the durability of authoritarian government ‘but also its transformation from neopatrimonial, clientelistic, and kinship-based forms of political practices toward a more globalized modality of authoritarian government’ (92).
Bogaert’s analysis draws on the work of Foucault, contributing to the idea of biopolitics, or technologies and mechanisms through which the urban population becomes the object of political strategy of power. In documenting this, in the context of the two projects, the author also seeks to contribute to the understanding of class. As he notes, there is a real, and important, concern to resurrect class as an analytical concept and tool in the study of North Africa and the Middle East. In doing so there is sometimes a reluctance to demonstrate empirically just how class as a relational concept – something the author affirms – drives a particular pattern of capital accumulation, drives class conflict and can still be grounded in issues of ownership and non-ownership and control of the means of production and social reproduction. There is reference to the domination of trades unions and opposition, but there could also have been more on what constitutes the labouring classes, highlighting perhaps how patterns of work and urban development are directed and controlled by capitalists to ensure the capacity of labour is realised. The use of terms like ‘power’, ‘projects’ and ‘space’ could have more frequently been seen through the prism of accumulation of capital as well as control of people.
This is a significant book that deserves to be widely read. It is a pity that Bogaert seems to ground his work only in the Middle East and North Africa region. Morocco is in Africa and there is much that can perhaps be generalised to the continent more broadly in seeking to understand patterns and varied dimensions to urban (under)development.