Global and Local in Algeria and Morocco

Book excerpt: This book brings together contributors 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 its impact on local societies, whether developmental or detrimental, of the ‘global in the local’, or of ‘glocalisation’. 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, human rights activists at the edge of the Sahara and 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 published as a special issue of the Journal of North African Studies.