Al Akhawayn - ISA Joint International Conference

Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb: Society, the State, and Solidarities

Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb continue to attract significant attention from international studies scholarship given the nature of wide-reaching change witnessed since the past decade. The fall of the Apartheid regime, the various domestic conflicts of the 1990 which structured politics in the following decades, the Arab Uprisings and the African Awakening, and the continued societal mobilization all forced structural changes unto ruling systems. Governments held elections, instituted representative reforms yet also closed some political spaces, and securitized a wide range of behaviors and ideas that directly impacted peoples’ everyday lives.

Moreover, societies experienced rapid socioeconomic changes; while directions and magnitude of change varied, similarities in patterns could be observed. One of the similarities is the structural developmental weaknesses among African, Middle Eastern and Maghrebi societies despite them witnessing major socio-economic and political transformations since the decolonization period. Weaknesses include volatile growth, forced migration, high rates of poverty, poorly managed urbanism, social exclusion and inequality, gender inequalities, and youth unemployment. Factors that suppressed local potential and accentuated inherent contradictions include the persistence of authoritarian rule, the introduction of neo-liberal economic development models, and pressures from external actors, especially former colonial powers. Domestic dislocations increased incentives for people to move within and across state boundaries; while the most significant movement in terms of population occurs within Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb, movement also occurs outwards, especially towards Europe.

Simultaneously, inter and intra state conflicts aggravated regional insecurities. In particular, regional rivalries that had long been a feature of the regional order in Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb, expanded in numbers and intensities. Rivalries added to overall instability, compromised local state-building processes, contributed to the proliferation of militant non-state actors, and incentivized the internationalization of domestic conflicts and civil wars. These regions witnessed elevated rates of mobility in militant actors and ideologies, proliferation of arms, and a sense of desperation among civilians leading them to move in search of better living conditions (aggravating thus population movements and forced migration). Such effects of regional insecurities mobilized international and regional attention and interventions particularly in the form of peacekeeping operations, intelligence sharing to curb perceived sources of threat, and developmental efforts to increase peoples’ stakes in local community building (such as with the Great Green Wall).

Interestingly, in the past decade, African, Middle Eastern and Maghrebi societies and states have increasingly been active in remolding their ties with the global industrial core and with former colonial powers in ways that exhibit more independence and distance seeking from old hegemonic relationships. In the midst of rethinking international relationships, China’s increased global presence has generated intense debates around its strategic novelty and contributions to local needs.

What is worth emphasis is that amid domestic, regional and global transformations, African, Middle Eastern and Maghrebi societies have been self-mobilizing by narratives of hope. At the core of such narratives is the idea of self-determination, realized by communicating across languages on social media platforms, by developing novel activism tactics to circumvent oppressive structures, and, most importantly, by the grassroots building of community.

Therefore, while states in Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb made substantial economic headways with significant positive impacts on their populations, regional dynamics and domestic factors restricted gains. Indeed, wealth in some states in Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb increased markedly primarily from the sale of hydrocarbons, where progress could be measured by their Human Development Index as well as by the growth of their GDPs. Yet, many other states have been impoverished with populations suffering from greater ontological insecurity. On this backdrop, governments’ capacities were stress-tested with the COVID-19 pandemic, the global interruption in supply chains, and the war in Europe which aggravated economic precarity for large swathes of the populations and to which solutions remain lukewarm. Confluence and divergence in the above patterns offer pertinent, and timely, materials to help advance scholarship on these areas, on the Global South more broadly, and expand on interdisciplinary research perspectives.

Our conference aims to interrogate the ways in which Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb have been studied in the interdisciplinary field of International Studies. Change in Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb seems to outpace scholarship’s ability to comprehend its scope and impact. The complexity and variations within Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb, as geographic areas, complicate how they are – and could be – studied. We are particularly interested in addressing disciplinary debates with fresh analysis of local empirics as well as local-international connections. Most importantly, what is local scholarship interested in? In what languages are local debates held and what means of communication are scholars using to exchange ideas? What are facilitating factors or limitations to generalization from locally-produced knowledge?

Moreover, how do locally-developed theoretical frameworks locate themselves within broader global debates, especially in debates and frames from across the Global South? What can the field of International Relations (IR), in particular, learn from local conversations and ideas? How have recent theoretical debates in international politics affected scholarship produced in Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb? What does scholarship from (and on) Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb share with contributions originating in the Global South? For example, how best to analyze transformations in regional orders as zones of peace, zones of stability, or zones of war? What can the categories of weak or fragile states tell us about societal influence, Westphalian (ideal) models of states, and the legacies and colonial control? Importantly, how can an IR analysis of Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb explain the proliferation and role of various forms of non-state actors?

Finally, how does change in world politics affect regional and national politics in Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb? How does politics in Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb affect international political and economic agendas? How can we understand the agency of local states and societies at times of major global power rivalries? Perhaps more importantly, how can we best capture the changing solidarities within the Global South, a glimpse of which we see in Africa, the Middle East and the Maghreb?

The deadline for submissions is 31 January 2023.