Home Institution

Whitman College

Publication Date

Fall 2012

Program Name

Morocco: Migration and Transnational Identity

Abstract

My research concerns how individual protestors of the February 20th Movement relate to the rest of the Arab Spring and their own society. I conducted several interviews during November 2012 with participants of the movement currently living in Rabat, each one lasting between 30 minutes to two hours. I initially intended this study to focus on the movement’s relations to the rest of the Arab Spring, but found in my interviews that this question is much more tangential than the question of how participants of the movement relate to their own society. What I discovered was that while the events of the Arab Spring were instrumental in initiating the movement, the intranational perception of the movement, propagated by the movement and the media, was much more salient in the outcomes and the state of the movement today. The February 20th Movement, described by some analysts as a branch of a global phenomenon, an unremarkable footnote to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi and the protests of Tahrir Square, is therefore more effectively analyzed in light of these national forces, in addition to the international Arab Spring phenomenon. This is important to keep in mind when discussing the future of activism in Morocco. While the February 20th Movement is no longer as active as it once was (at least, as of writing this paper), political dialogue between the state of Morocco and its people is far from over.

Disciplines

Civic and Community Engagement | Community-Based Research | Inequality and Stratification | Peace and Conflict Studies | Politics and Social Change | Regional Sociology

Download

Share

Article Location

 
COinS