History of the Maghreb since independence

Over the last sixty years, the Maghreb has witnessed major events that have profoundly altered its structures, institutional frameworks and societies. More than half a century of history is presented here, from independence to the period following the Arab Spring, offering a political, cultural, economic and societal panorama to highlight the permanent changes, developments and revolutions that have marked the Maghreb in recent decades. The authors have opted for an unprecedented, global, cross-cutting approach to the three countries of the central Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia), in order to gain a better understanding of their recent history and current situation. They present complex and dynamic societies, with their heritages and constantly renewed challenges: the rise of civil society, religious extremism, the capture of economic resources, reflection on the principle of democracy, the place of women, the migratory crisis, etc. All these issues are presented, analysed and discussed thanks to the contribution of recent work by social science specialists, in order to offer relevant keys to understanding a geographical area and its recent history. This first comprehensive work on the history of the Maghreb since independence helps us to understand the driving forces and dynamics of the states and societies common to these three countries.

Karima Dirèche is a qualified history teacher and Director of Research at CNRS/TELEMMe. Her work focuses on the history of contemporary Maghrebian societies in their cultural, religious and migratory dimensions. Her research explores the question of religious minorities in the Maghreb (Catholics, Jews and neo-evangelicals today) and their political and religious controversies; the Berber dimension in its relationship with politics since independence; and national historical narratives in the light of Islamist and Berberist movements.

Nessim Znaien is a Junior-Professor at the University of Marburg (Germany) and holds a PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2017. A former long-term fellow at the Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain (IRMC) and former temporary teaching and research associate at the University of Aix-Marseille from 2017 to 2020, he is the author of “Raisins de la domination. Une histoire sociale de l’alcool en Tunisie sous le Protectorat” (2021) and a “histoire du Maghreb depuis les indépendances” (2023).

Moderator: Isabelle Werenfels is a Senior Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, where she also headed the Africa and Middle East Group for five years. She has published numerous works in German, English and French on the development of the Maghreb and Euro-Maghreb relations. She is currently President of MECAM’s International Scientific Council

Mobility and borders: What issues for artists from the South?

This meeting aims to create a platform for exchange between the scientific community and the actors of the cultural, political and civil society.

Questioning the issues of circulation of Tunisian artists and more broadly artists from Arabic-speaking countries is at the heart of this discussion proposed by MECAM, in collaboration with the El Hamra Theatre. The mobility of artists is at the heart of artistic practice, training and creation processes. However, the persistent inequalities in access to these circulations impact the Tunisian cultural environment. These inequalities, reinforced in the post-COVID 19 context, materialize in particular in the difficulties of access to visas, in the increase in travel costs to the detriment of artists from the South. But these issues of disparity are also noticeable in artistic and aesthetic expectations. Funding and programming opportunities on international stages are often limited to perceptions centered on identities and socio-political contexts as they are perceived externally. How do artists and arts and cultural institutions develop their practice in cooperation and resistance to these issues? This question and these issues will be discussed by three speakers: Cyrinne Douss, Cyrine Gannoun and Ophélie Mercier and moderated by Vanessa Barisch. An exchange with the public will then be organized to expand the debate.

The Tunisian-French choreographer and dancer Cyrinne Douss will participate in the debate by talking about her career, her personal position and her artistic approach. As a bi-national, she will share her views and experiences on identity issues on both sides of the Mediterranean and will allow us to discuss the notion of “out-group”.

At the end of the discussion, Cyrinne Douss will present her performance “I am not white – بيضاء مانيش” as a possible extension of the debate.

In this Ibn Khaldoun Meeting, we aim to discuss the different points of view on the theme on two levels: First, the influence of the themes of (de-)colonization, mobility, borders and identity attributions on artistic work in particular performative art; second, the impact of macrostructures such as border regimes, funding, stereotypes towards a difference in the quality of artistic training in the North and the Global South in an environment affected by colonial structures.

“JE NE SUIS PAS BLANCHE | بيضاء مانيش” is a multidisciplinary creation that circulates between song, dance, text and performance.  How do we identify our impasses? How to face our intimate and collective shadow zones? To answer this question, Cyrinne Douss, alone on stage, engages in a process of metamorphosis and resistance.  Between power and vulnerability, she invites us to move, to better embrace our shared realities.

La violence à l’épreuve de la littérature : Rencontre avec Mustapha Benfodil (Algérie) et Samir Sassi (Tunisie)

Legacies of violence leave visible and invisible traces on societies, prompting questions about their political trajectories, their effects, the sense of justice and peace, and associated creative expressions. Literature is one of the privileged domains that explores these questions. Whether fiction or non-fiction, literature addressing violence is a powerful means of expression which can reflect and link individual and shared experiences, influence and be influenced by public debates, as well as contribute to an evolving understanding of the role of public and cultural memory in dealing with the legacy of violence.

Both Algeria and Tunisia deal with legacies of violence. The literary work in Algeria and Tunisia forms part of a continued negotiation, elaboration, identification and recognition in dealing with past violence that flows over into the present in the two countries.

During this Rencontre Ibn Khaldoun, Professor Ratiba Hadj-Moussa will discuss with Algerian writer Mustapha Benfodil and Tunisian writer Samir Sassi their works and their treatment of the civil war (Algeria) and authoritarian violence (Tunisia), the impacts of the those on their personal and artistic experiences, as well as the relationships of their works with public debates in their respective countries or more broadly.

Anne-Marie McManus, Amir Moosavi « Approaching the Literary 1980s in the Maghreb and Middle East: Connections, Comparisons, Periodizations »

»Transregionalism and Arabic Novels: On Literary Uses of History in the 1980s« (Anne-Marie McManus)
This talk approaches the 1980s through a comparative frame for the Arabic novel, which it treats as transregional in two senses: on one hand, a literary work that imagines, or maps, transregional (“Arab”) space between the Maghreb and Iraq, and on the other hand, a literary work that can successfully circulate and be received across this space. Through readings of novels by Haydar Haydar and Rachid Boudjedra, the talk will show that transregional space was intimately entangled with the dream of a progressive, revolutionary, and transregional history as it was articulated first in the anti-colonial era and subsequently claimed by Arab socialist states in Algeria, Iraq, and Syria. By drawing a comparison across techniques of repetition in works by Haydar and Boudjedra, the talk asks what work remained for the novel as form when it critically reflected, in the 1980s, on the demise of this vision of history.

Anne-Marie McManus is a comparative literary scholar of Arabic, English, and French literatures in the 20th and 21st century. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She has published essays on poetics, comparative and theoretical methods, and contemporary Arabic literatures and cultures in venues such as Critical Inquiry (2021), The Cambridge History of World Literature, Books & Ideas, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of World Literature, and Expressions Maghrébines. Her first book – Of Other Languages, under contract at Northwestern UP – tracks theories and practices of linguistic clarity, ambiguity, and emotion that circled the Algerian War of Independence during the decades of decolonization between the Maghreb and Mashreq. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, NYU Abu Dhabi, and the European Research Council (ERC). She currently oversees the ERC-funded project SYRASP at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.

»War and Relation: Reading the 1980s across the War Literatures of Iran and Lebanon» (Amir Moosavi)
This talk proposes a comparative framework for reading Arabic and Persian literatures of the 1980s in the context of war. Using examples from Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, and informed by theories of world literature and Shu-mei Shih’s notion of relational comparison, it asks how war fiction from Southwest Asia in the 1980s can be used to periodize a regional literature. In doing so, it offers a comparative reading of Arabic and Persian literatures against the backdrop of the final years of the Cold War, regional wars, the rise of political Islam and the decline of leftist political movements across the region.

Amir Moosavi’s research and teaching interests cover modern Arabic and Persian literatures and the cultural history of Southwest Asia, with an emphasis on Iran, Iraq, and the Levant. With ACLS and NEH support, he is currently completing a book titled Dust That Never Settled: Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War in Arabic and Persian Literatures. The book argues for the expansion of comparative literary studies across the Arabic and Persian linguistic spheres based on the common experience of the Iran-Iraq war and the various responses of writers to it since 1980.

This event is a cooperation between the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) and Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME). It is part of the workshop “The Literary 1980s in the Middle East and North Africa: Towards a Transregional History of the Present”, June 29 to July 1, 2022, Berlin.

Discussion about the book: Entanglements of the Maghreb

As part of the presentation of the anthology “Entanglements of the Maghreb” Dr. Christoph Schwarz will present ” Le ḥirāk du Rif et la diaspora en Europe: espaces mentaux enchevêtrés,” where he focuses on the activists of the Moroccan ḥirāk movement based in Europe around 2017. The author discusses the entangled positions of European activists between Europe and their home country, Morocco (specifically the Rif region). He argues that the politicization and mobilization of a Rif diaspora has produced an identification not only with the Rif but also with Europe. These are transnational practices, an example of entangled mobilities in the Maghreb.

=> link Online conference

Author Meets Critics: Youth and Institutional Violence

Factors such as income inequality or unemployment, rather, other forms of institutional – and thus state-induced – violence account for the lived realities of marginalization of young inhabitants of such neighbourhoods. The edited volume “Youth and Institutional Violence” (in French: Jeunes et violences institutionnelles), published by International Alert Tunisia in spring 2021 under the lead of Ola Lamloum and Myriam Catusse, brings together cutting-edge research on different forms of institutional violence experienced and lived in the urban quarters Ettdhamen and Douer Hicher. The Rencontre Ibn Khaldoun that was organised by IFG II “inequality and mobility” on November 27^th 2021 in the Gallery Le Central in Tunis brought together the book authors and MECAM fellows who took on the role of ‘critics’ to discuss the book. From exploitation in invisible female subcontracting (Chiraz Gafsia), to experiences of immobility amongst youth (Stéphanie Pouessel) and targeted police violence against ultras/football fan clubs (Chaima Ben Rejeb), new dimensions of urban marginalisation and inequality were examined.

Launch of the research group “border studies”

Migration and mobility in the Mediterranean are often researched from a Eurocentric perspective, reducing countries like Tunisia to a threatening ‘origin country’ of migrants or turning it into a ‘border line’ to be secured and consolidated. By launching a new research group on “border studies”, based at the Centre for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Sousse, MECAM Fellow Wael Garnaoui aims to decenter this perspective, providing more nuanced insight into the reconfigurations of borders that determine (im)mobilities in contemporary North Africa. The Rencontre Ibn Khaldoun that was organised by the IFG II “inequality and mobility” on November 18^th 2021 at the University of Sousse brought together early career researchers from diverse disciplines adopting critical approaches to studying ‘borders’ in order to launch this new research group. Presentations by researchers working on borders in contexts as diverse as Tunisia, Mexico and Syria set the multi-layered research agenda: from the externalisation of borders to racialized border regimes and material cross-border circulations, frontiers are studied as sites of violence, but also as vital sites for exchange and the articulation of difference.

Describing and deconstructing the social: what is at stake for Ibn Khaldun?

Born in 1332 and dying in 14O6, Ibn Khaldun was an eyewitness-actor during a long and crucial transitional phase. He was a conscious and sensitive observer of human relationships and the forces that govern them. His experience was enriched by bookish knowledge but, above all, by his direct observation of all Maghrebian, Andalusian and Oriental social environments. Thus he produced a synthesis based on the history of civilisations, enriched, supported or contradicted by direct observation and observations throughout his life. The result was a state of affairs. In his approach, he started from the past, then analysed his present, trying to establish the laws governing the functioning of human societies. What did he hope to achieve through this approach of the committed historian who is fully integrated into the course of history, in theory and in practice?

Covid19. Teaching and research in times of pandemic: state of play in Tunisia and Germany

To inaugurate the “Rencontres Ibn Khaldûn”, MECAM is organising an event in which actors directly concerned by the impact of the Covid19 pandemic on the academic world will participate. They will be invited to discuss the issues of distance learning, mobility and the challenges of research in times of health crisis. The debate will focus on specific questions such as What significance has research had in times of crisis? And what are the consequences for the research community? What measures should universities take in the short and medium term in this respect?

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