The Renewal of Local Elites in Times of "Participation" in Morocco

Résumé En

This chapter contributes to the literature on the making of elites in Africa by analyzing recent transformations that have led, in Morocco, to the emergence of a new kind of local elite whose legitimacy rests upon its participation in the associational sphere. In this analysis, I focus on the way new local elites come to legitimize and account for their role as key intermediaries within an expanding associational sphere by drawing upon diverse registers and norms that refer to the two main forms of government that constitute Morocco’s hybrid political system. Through their participation in the associational sphere, actors with limited social capital, often unemployed and belonging to the working class or the lower middle class, have been able not only to climb the social ladder but also to become part of the local decision-making apparatus as political actors. I concentrate on the role that these new norms played in the life trajectories of local association leaders by emphasizing how they reappropriate these new values to establish themselves locally and account for their role by simultaneously differentiating themselves from the local population and highlighting their social and territorial belonging to this same population. More particularly, I show that these newly established norms have contributed to providing local associative actors (both men and women) with new “lines of argumentation” (based upon the ideas of “autochthony,” “professionalism,” and “nonpartisanship”) that they combine with older sources of elite legitimacy (notably their symbolic “closeness to the king”).