Looks at James Simpson’s early career. Discusses the situation of Gibraltar and Tangier, the importance of Simpson’s diplomatic network and how it became Americanized over time as a result of the extensive diplomacy needed in the region.

The threat of Nasserism shaped the shah’s regional strategy in the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter explores the development of the shah’s policy of building relations with moderate allies in the Arab world who could help to contain and balance the radicalism of Nasser. The shah found two allies in North Africa: Tunisia under President Habib Bourguiba and Morocco under King Hassan II. Bourguiba and King Hassan were, like the shah, moderate rulers, with strong ties to the West, who shared the same concerns over Egyptian ambitions and the threat that Nasserism posed to regional stability. One of the strategies the shah developed, for which he sought the support of King Hassan in particular, was to challenge Nasser’s claims to leadership in the Islamic world, by attempting to form a separate grouping of Islamic countries. The ultimate manifestation of this was the Islamic Summit Conference, held in Rabat in 1969, in which King Hassan and the shah played leading roles.

Digital surveillance technologies using artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as computer vision and facial recognition are becoming cheaper and easier to integrate into governance practices worldwide. Morocco serves as an example of how such technologies are becoming key tools of governance in authoritarian contexts. Based on qualitative fieldwork including semi-structured interviews, observation, and extensive desk reviews, this chapter focusses on the role played by AI-enhanced technology in urban surveillance and the control of migration between the Moroccan–Spanish borders. Two cross-cutting issues emerge: first, while international donors provide funding for urban and border surveillance projects, their role in enforcing transparency mechanisms in their implementation remains limited; second, Morocco’s existing legal framework hinders any kind of public oversight. Video surveillance is treated as the sole prerogative of the security apparatus, and so far public actors have avoided to engage directly with the topic. The lack of institutional oversight and public debate on the matter raise serious concerns on the extent to which the deployment of such technologies affects citizens’ rights. AI-enhanced surveillance is thus an intrinsically transnational challenge in which private interests of economic gain and public interests of national security collide with citizens’ human rights across the Global North/Global South divide.

Matthew Paris was a monk at St. Albans who was a chronicler and artist and cartographer who illustrated his own works. The Chronica Majora is his longest work, from which an excerpt is taken recounting the otherwise unattested meeting between king John’s envoys to Morocco and the Muslim Caliph to whom John wishes to hand over Britain. The Caliph is shocked, and unimpressed by the envoys’ description of Britain and of the king, and he refuses the offer.

This chapter analyses the role of domestic factors in the ability of the EU to promote non-trade policy objectives through formal trade policies and market integration as two distinct governance approaches. Focusing on labour standards, the chapter examines how economic and political factors in developing economies influence the ability of key stakeholders – governments, businesses and labour organizations – to undermine or reinforce EU governance efforts. It uses a combination of regression and comparative case analysis to assess associations and understand processes on the ground. The quantitative analysis shows that improvements in labour standards are closely associated with (1) labour standards in key export markets, (2) the technological sophistication of exports, (3) state capacity and (4) the freedom of civil society organizations. Comparative analysis of how differences in state strategies and capacity, key export destinations and the strength of labour organizations across Moldova and Morocco set in place divergent pathways of improvements in labour standards allows us to shed more light on the potentials and limitations of EU governance efforts.

Christian missionaries in Morocco – who were present from the 1890s to the 1970s – were complete failures at making converts. But their influence was still significant. Much admired to this day, the American missionaries in particular submitted insightful comments on the country, brought medical aid and technology to many areas of the country, and professed a form of Christianity that sought to set an example rather than denigrate local culture. In what is admittedly a small element in the encounter with the West, it remains striking that so many Moroccans continue to speak well of their contacts with the missionaries and thereby give voice to their own culture of inclusiveness.

This chapter expands on the previous chapter by presenting survey evidence from Morocco, Jordan, Venezuela, and the Ukraine using the same conjoint experiment of business political engagement. The chapter documents that Egypt's military has a higher level of penetration than even other Arab countries. In general, Arab countries seem to have more economically involved militaries than non-Arab countries. An additional pattern is that companies that have had to pay higher bribe costs in the past five years are more likely to engage in political action, suggesting that they are trying to protect their companies and their relationships with the government.

The question as to whether a genocide took place in nineteenth-century Algeria has always been deeply contentious in western academic scholarship. By contrast, it has tended to be accepted as a given in many Algerian accounts of the past, both as expressed in conversation and in published works. This divergence has arguably been grounded in the manner in which the prevailing means of framing and defining genocide varied wildly between these two literatures. Curiously, Algerian texts, even when they are 'popular' rather than 'academic' accounts lie closer to the spirit and terms of reference of the scholarly field of Genocide Studies. Looked at comparatively, the violence of imperial Algeria shares remarkable affinities with both the exterminatory impulses and outcomes of other settler colonies, as well as other instances of European incursions into the Arabo-Islamic world, especially in Algeria's north African neighbours Morocco and Tunisia, Mauritania and Libya. Lemkin's diagnostics of genocide certainly seem to map onto the organised system of massacres perpetrated in Algeria, the general desire to cause harm to 'recalcitrant' groups en masse, the belief in the merits of a Maghrebi tabula rasa, and the 'slow violence' of the destruction of groups, communities and identities.

The conclusion synthesizes and reflects upon the case studies and comparative and theoretical contributions in the book. The cases are organized around three categories: first, relatively conventional decentralization initiatives in which reforms were adopted to improve governance; second, contexts in which decentralization has been contemplated as a framework for self-determination for the region’s stateless communities; and finally, decentralization initiatives undertaken in the shadow of conflict and state fragmentation. This concluding chapter develops theoretical insights drawn from the rich terrain for qualitative comparison across these three contexts. It offers reflections on key characteristics of the shared regional context and a typology of factors driving decentralization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that an important contribution of the volume lies in identifying a broader array of motivations for, and actors driving, decentralization than currently reflected in the scholarly literature and in parsing the implications for the institutional design of decentralized government. The chapter concludes by distilling patterns from the cases to identify distinct trajectories of decentralization that are evidenced in the MENA region and their entailments.