The pitfalls of transnational consciousness: Amazigh activism as a scalar dilemma

This essay explores the scalar dimensions of North African politics through an ethnographic investigation of the continuities and discontinuities between local, national, and transnational dimensions of Amazigh activism in the southeastern Moroccan oases. Since the 1960s, activists in Algeria, Morocco, and overseas have agitated for state recognition of Berber culture and language. Through their mobilisation of an international discourse on ‘human rights’ and their support for national ‘wars on terror’, Amazigh activists have elicited state promises to introduce Tamazight into the media and school systems of Algeria and Morocco. However, in peripheral areas such as pre-Saharan Morocco, this national entente has proved fragile, as Amazigh activists have mobilised protests for regional autonomy, including the control of collective lands, often at the expense of other local claimants. Thus, a social movement which internationally focuses on issues of human rights, engages questions of national integration and the ‘war on terror’ at the state level, while locally prioritising issues of resource development and domination. The essay investigates how these different dimensions are negotiated by activists from southeastern Morocco who simultaneously collaborate with militants from Kabylia and Europe. I argue that the ethical and pragmatic discontinuities between activist engagement at different scales – rather than their ideological divergences – constitutes the principal source of the Amazigh movement's internal fragmentation and occasional violence. In highlighting these scalar discontinuities, I challenge segmentary or composite models of North African politics that presume either a singular logic of political action or a unified structure of commensurable, nested organisational forms.