A rich investigation into Morocco’s urban politics

Over the past thirty years, Morocco’s cities have transformed dramatically. To take just one example, Casablanca’s medina is now obscured behind skyscrapers that are funded by global capital and encouraged by Morocco’s monarchy, which hopes to transform this city into a regional leader of finance and commerce. Such changes have occurred throughout Morocco. Megaprojects are redesigning the cityscapes of Rabat, Tangiers, and Casablanca, turning the nation’s urban centers into laboratories of capital accumulation, political dominance, and social control.

In Globalized Authoritarianism, Koenraad Bogaert links more abstract questions of government, globalization, and neoliberalism with concrete changes in the city. Bogaert goes deep beneath the surface of Morocco’s urban prosperity to reveal how neoliberal government and the increased connectivity engendered by global capitalism transformed Morocco’s leading urban spaces, opening up new sites for capital accumulation, creating enormous class divisions, and enabling new innovations in state authoritarianism. Analyzing these transformations, he argues that economic globalization does not necessarily lead to increased democratization but to authoritarianism with a different face, to a form of authoritarian government that becomes more and more a globalized affair.

Showing how Morocco’s experiences have helped produce new forms of globalization, Bogaert offers a bridge between in-depth issues of Middle Eastern studies and broader questions of power, class, and capital as they continue to evolve in the twenty-first century.

Koenraad Bogaert is assistant professor in the Department of Conflict and Development Studies and member of the Middle East and North Africa Research Group (MENARG) at Ghent University.

"Globalized Authoritarianism is a must-read for scholars and political organizers interested in urban neoliberal politics in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. Exploring political change through the frame of the city, Koenraad Bogaert traces how the geopolitical concept of the urban comes to take a central place in class and biopolitics in contemporary Morocco, a major shift since the 1970s and an elite response to heightened social struggle from below. Bogaert brilliantly synthesizes Marxist literatures and their critics to show how the urban becomes a central arena of social struggle in a neoliberal period that continues to haunt and afflict the living long past its heyday."—Ahmed Kanna, author of Dubai: The City as Corporation

"Bogaert’s Globalized Authoritarianism is an important step in reframing the links between global economy, local politics, and urban projects in North Africa—and thus in the world at large."—Technology and Culture

"This is a welcome addition to a growing collection of remarkable books published over the past decade that use the entry point of urbanization and its planning in specific cities of the global South in order to provide powerful insights about broader political change across the globe. Decentring urban analysis from the handful of European and American metropolises that constitute the model for the majority of urban studies, these books combine an engagement with contemporary theory with richly documented and analysed case studies that force critical reconsiderations of the existing theoretical frames through which we understand cities, their residents and planning."—International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

"Bogaert brilliantly illustrates how deeply neoliberal globalization and authoritarian rule are entangled in Morocco."—Jadaliyya

"The book is well written, the argument is finely articulated throughout the three parts of the book, and the empirical evidence is extensive, thus making this a book that all those interested in urban Africa and in the wider debates on globalization and neo-liberalism ought to read."—Planning Perspectives

"Globalized Authoritarianism is welcome and timely."—Urban Studies