Global and Local in Algeria and Morocco ─ The World, the State and the Villiage

This book brings together contributors from across the disciplines to examine the local, national, regional, and global processes that have shaped Maghribi societies, economies, and politics since the colonial period. Focusing equally on the local shape of global processes and on the broader significance of particular ‘ways of doing things’, these studies move beyond generalisations about globalisation and discuss the impact of the ‘global in the local’, or of ‘glocalisation’, on local societies, and whether this impact can be seen as developmental or detrimental.

Cases range from the onset of the ‘first wave’ of globalisation in the colonial era, to the most recent developments in identity politics, consumerism, and telecommunications. Contributors show how nationalising and globalising influences are seized, remade, and put to work in very different ways by High Atlas farmers, or urban real estate speculators, by human rights activists at the edge of the Sahara, or amateur theatre actors in Mediterranean towns. Always located somewhere, these social actors nonetheless act in different ways, with different effects, at different levels of engagement, whether with each other, their own governments, or the wider world.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of North African Studies.

James McDougall is a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Oxford, where he teaches modern European and world history, with a focus on the Middle East, Northwest Africa, and the global history of Islam.

Robert P. Parks is the Founding Director of the Centre d’Etudes Maghrebines en Algerie, at the American Institute for Maghrib Studies’ Overseas Research Center in Algeria.