1 On September 8, 2023, a magnitude seven earthquake rocked much of the High Atlas. In a spirit of survival and solidarity, initiatives were promptly organized throughout Morocco and beyond. The earthquake soon made the question of sovereignty, including economic sovereignty, come up in public debate, and in ways that were sometimes very conventional, but often unexpected. This extraordinary event presents us with an opportunity to directly tackle the various facets that our special issue aims to shed light on.

2 The earthquake initially brought to the fore a classic expression of sovereignty, namely the state’s relationship with its external environment, in the form of its concrete relationship with emergency relief efforts. Amid the earthquake’s aftermath, a debate began: should the country turn to foreign aid?  [1] In the first hours following the earthquake, Morocco declined the French president’s hasty offer to provide logistic and operational support. Courteous though this refusal was, forty-eight hours after the earthquake, help from Spain, the United Kingdom, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates was accepted. Geopolitical factors played a role in this decision:  [2] the Moroccan authorities were clearly asserting the country’s sovereignty over its choice of donor countries, making plain which countries it was allied with and which it was distancing itself from. Historically, for at least four centuries, Morocco has leveraged circumstances and tactical alliances to gain a foothold on the international stage, aligning with the Europeans against the Ottomans, with the French against the English, with the Spanish against the French, and so on. These alliances’ forms and modalities may have changed since then, but the underlying logic remains much the same. Indeed, as is the case with other countries that have been the focus of foreigners’ ambitions (such as Ethiopia and Turkey), Morocco’s trust is only circumstantial, and its choice of allies is a function of the situation. This reveals an insular mentality vis-à-vis the threats the country has faced since the sixteenth century.  [3] National sovereignty is interpreted in this context as asserting the capacity to decide one’s alliances alone, in this case through an opportunity with a significant economic dimension: emergency humanitarian aid. The earthquake was also an opportunity to assert the kingdom’s independence, in particular because it let Morocco demonstrate its capacity to act independently and the extent and effectiveness of the national resources it had to handle this ordeal. This explains the “drip-feed” approach that was taken to manage the arrival of foreign aid, which had to wait forty-eight hours to arrive on Moroccan soil, and the primacy given to immediately deploying the army, enabling different national bodies to mobilize.

3 On a more implicit level, the earthquake highlighted the specific forms that the matter of sovereignty takes in a context marked by the dual-headed nature of power, which is characterized by a twofold legitimacy: the historical legitimacy of the king and the monarchy as an institution, and the much more recent electoral legitimacy of the government and its leader. The earthquake coincided with a notable period of government inaction. No minister—not even the prime minister—made a public statement. And none visited the affected area for the first four days. Only after this period did King Mohammed VI travel to Marrakech to visit victims. Without being the product of an explicit decision—because it was taken for granted—the expectation was that the king would be the first on the scene. Only one high-ranking official, Abdellatif Hammouchi, director general of the Interior Ministry’s Direction Générale de la Sureté Nationale (DGST) (General Directorate for National Security), made an immediate visit. He did so, however, as a representative of a sovereign ministry whose head is appointed by the palace. Monarchical sovereignty’s primacy over popular sovereignty had very clearly been asserted. This echoed the tensions that arose following the February 2004 earthquake in Al Hoceima, when Driss Jettou, the prime minister at the time—though a “technocrat”—had been prevented from going to the area in the earthquake’s immediate aftermath so the king could take precedence. In a similar vein, aid from various civil society organizations was blocked by the all-powerful Mohammed V Foundation. The memory of these latent conflicts proved to be very powerful, despite the fact that, twenty years on, and with a new constitution in place, the ballot box’s legitimacy is finally making itself felt. The only ministers who visited the scene did so in an individual capacity, either because they were local elected officials from the affected region—for instance, the minister of justice (who is mayor of Taroudant) and the minister of national planning (who is mayor of Marrakech)—or because they are known to have direct ties to the king, one example here being the health minister. However, the head of the government, Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch, did not hold his first interministerial meeting until after the king’s authority had been asserted and deployed on the ground.  [4]

4 The earthquake also opens up a deeper understanding of economic sovereignty and, more specifically, the different ways in which sovereignty and the economy connect. First, the earthquake highlights the kind of sovereignty through the economy that we describe above, because the Moroccan state (and its sovereign more specifically) showed off its ability to mobilize economic resources quickly and effectively in an emergency. Exceptional circumstances call for exceptional measures. This is the “royal route,”  [5] which in this case relied on the army, an institution that falls under the sovereign’s authority, meaning that mobilizing it ahead of elected officials and the people’s representatives symbolically restated the king’s mobilization. This taking of the royal route made it possible, first of all, to mobilize operational resources from major economic operators without anything in return and to make up for the absence of relief assistance from the public authorities. For instance, the delivery of excavators and the clearing of the affected areas within forty-eight hours were the work of the Société Générale des Travaux du Maroc  [6] and Al Mada,  [7] notably via the latter’s firms Sonasid and Lafarge, while the Richbond and Dolidol groups arranged for tents and mattresses to be supplied.  [8] And then, just three days after the disaster, the royal route fast-tracked the creation of Fund 126, a special fund dedicated to managing the impacts of the earthquake.  [9] Here too, monarchical sovereignty was asserted through the economy—or, to be specific, through the sovereign’s ability to mobilize economic resources by turning to exceptional measures that give the state a free hand to act.

5 At the same time, management of the response to the earthquake reveals those in power wished to be sovereign over the economy, and particularly over its flows, goods, and economic actors. Not only did Fund 126 allow funds to be marshaled in record time, but it also enabled financing to flow (in the form of donations and aid) from businesses and civil society—and fairly efficiently, since by November 2, 2023, nearly 1.6 billion euros had been collected. The earthquake was without a doubt an exceptional moment of solidarity and mobilization, something reflected in the scale of the donations and aid. Potential competition between the monarchical institution on the one hand and between associative actors and private operators on the other had to be defused. Similarly, the creation of the Grand Atlas Development Agency  [10] at the end of September—this another sovereign act by the king—brought control to the allocation of resources for the reconstruction and maintained the initiative in terms of decision-making.

6 More unexpectedly, though, the earthquake also revealed forms of sovereignty of the economy: once the three-day national mourning period was over, the authorities’ priority was to return this region, which relies almost exclusively on tourism, to normality. However, economic actors did not share their perspective. The organizers of the Moga festival, which was scheduled to take place on October 5 in Essaouira, decided to cancel the event in the name of decency and on the basis that it would be impossible for the sponsoring companies to be associated with a festive event taking place in the earthquake’s aftermath. This cancellation, which contradicted the official government position,  [11] is indicative of the sovereignty of economic actors—that is, of their independence and growing power,  [12] which has increasingly been asserted in Morocco over the past twenty years.

Current debates on economic sovereignty

7 This ambition to act with sovereignty during the earthquake arose within a very specific context: at present, references to economic sovereignty abound in Morocco. The situation is not specific to Morocco. It is global, as evidenced by the recent trend in academia, which has seen a surge in research on the subject, at the sectoral  [13] and general  [14] levels alike. And it has come about despite the neoliberal hegemony and its efforts to “desovereignize” the state in the economic domain  [15]—in other words, to depoliticize and denationalize economies through both developing international law and constitutionally enshrining certain economic norms.  [16] In Morocco, where there is a historical tendency to resolve conflicts through legal and political compromise rather than through open confrontation, this is an ongoing process, one that was accentuated when a new constitution was proclaimed in 2011, providing for various agencies, bodies, councils, and commissions with an economic dimension  [17] and thereby “defusing”  [18] the political sphere.

8 The main objective of this issue of Politique africaine is to deconstruct a concept whose dimensions vary massively according to the actors, contexts, and situations. Above all, the aim is to use the case of Morocco—a case that is both specific and representative of broader trends—to highlight the diversity, tangibility, and subtlety of the political and economic stakes at play in sovereignty claims, whose number is continually growing. Ever since mercantilism emerged,  [19] a country’s economy has been understood as something that serves the country’s power. Economic sovereignty, then, translates to international reach, as can be seen in most of the public debates—and even in the academic ones—surrounding the expansion of Moroccan economic and financial actors across the continent, whether these are public actors such as the OCP (Office chérifien des phosphates; the state-owned phosphates producer),  [20] private actors and banks,  [21] or the pharmaceutical industry.  [22] As moments of crisis—for instance, that of the pandemic, which was then reactivated by the war in Ukraine—illustrate, economic sovereignty is sometimes a matter of “survival.” In royal discourse, sovereignty is therefore understood as the need to set up strategic reserves—whether these are of active ingredients in medicines, grain, or hydrocarbons  [23]—and reemphasizes the state’s historical legitimacy: feeding the population, managing famines.  [24] Economic sovereignty can also refer to economic independence—that is, the capacity to make choices and define economic policies along the lines of the decision taken in the late 1990s to establish large banking entities.  [25] Finally, sovereignty can also mean ultimate decision-making authority, just as it may refer to the idea of command and control.  [26] In Morocco, just as elsewhere, these competing understandings combine in different ways, depending on the situation, the time, and the actors involved.

9 The debate on industrial sovereignty predates COVID-19, though it did give it fresh impetus, prompting post-pandemic growth schemes such as the Industrial Recovery Plan (2021–2023). In recent years, this debate was primarily led by the Ministry of Industry when it was run by Moulay Hafid Elalamy between 2011 and 2021. Elalamy, former “bosses’ boss,” was head of the Confédération Générale des Entreprises du Maroc (CGEM) (General Confederation of Moroccan Enterprises), the main employers’ association in Morocco (2006–2009), and president of Saham, Morocco’s largest insurance group. In this context, economic sovereignty is associated with the concept of economic independence and the nation’s capacity to meet its needs as well as possible. At the beginning of the new millennium, the internationalization of production networks had expanded industrial subcontracting to new “global endeavors” (that is, sectors related to international subcontracting, such as aerospace, automotive, and offshoring) alongside the traditional textile and agrifood sectors. Industry once again became an important lever for Morocco’s economic growth,  [27] ushering in the return of industrial strategies—for instance, Industrial Emergence Plans I and II (2001–2012) and the Industrial Acceleration Plan (2014–2020)—and sector-based “visions.” The old debate on the industrialization process was therefore revived. In the period after Morocco regained its independence, this debate revolved around the dilemma between building capital-intensive industry to strengthen Morocco’s economic independence while allowing the country to accrue domestic savings on the one hand, and building labor-intensive industry to respond to the pressing issue of employment on the other.  [28] Fifty years later, the tenor of the debate has changed, now revolving around issues such as the “quality” of national production, the low value of the jobs the latter creates, and the need to diversify as a consequence, though the debate is still driven by the same impossible tradeoff between employment and value creation.

10 The ambition of sovereignty asserted in the 2021 Industrial Recovery Plan is rooted in this tradition, and it has materialized as measures that prioritize manufacturing industrial products locally, marking a return to logics of import substitution strategies, albeit with the focus now not on finished manufactured goods but on their components. The aim is therefore to factor in globalization and seize a share of international production chains, which are being reconfigured following the disruption of the pandemic, by positioning Morocco as a producer of components and semi-finished products. Supported by economic operators grouped within a sovereignty task force, the Ministry of Industry and Trade outlined “a bank of industrial projects” that are eligible for a series of support measures and span sixteen sectors. Economic sovereignty is therefore understood in terms of not only the power of the national economy, the aim being to create jobs and increase the amount of added value Morocco produces,  [29] but also the defense of national economic interests.  [30] This vision is shared by some of the economic operators themselves, as we have mentioned, and also by economic think tanks, forums, and bodies that shape the contours of public debate.

11 These debates have not been confined to the realms of public action, however. They can be found in seminars and scholarly output in the form of the concept of “made in Morocco”  [31]; they take place in the press  [32] and gray literature with discussions about “upscaling”; and they arise in public discussion  [33] and deliberative forums focused on “Morocco’s international expansion,” something the Commission spéciale sur le modèle de développement (CSMD) (Special Commission on the Development Model) examines.  [34] These debates are economic, of course, but they are not limited to financial matters; they fundamentally pertain to the relationship between power, wealth creation, and sovereignty. They explore ways of thinking about accumulation, distribution, and innovation, for example. And they reveal a growing desire to create a strong economic nation, voicing and amplifying a nationalist discourse that has a high profile on the international scene. The strong prosovereignty discourse surrounding free-trade agreements (particularly the amendment of the agreement between Morocco and Turkey in 2020, the attempts to amend the agreements between Morocco and Egypt and between Morocco and Tunisia, and the mounting tensions with the European Union) and the rhetoric on the kingdom’s economic diplomacy in Africa suggest that, in contemporary Morocco, the economy is playing an integral role in this hour of heightened nationalism. This rise in nationalism is also protectionist in nature, and it has been the target of guarded criticism from entities such as the IMF, which has taken a dim view of the recovery plan and measures supporting local production. “Made in Morocco,” then, comes across variously as another way of designating “sovereignty’s industrial ambition,”  [35] a “state of mind” among economic operators,  [36] and “a nation’s ambition.”  [37] Even if “made in Morocco” never calls into question Morocco’s position in international subcontracting, the tagline reveals a tension between the priority of creating jobs and upscaling industry on the one hand,  [38] and defending a national-preference strategy on the other.  [39] In this context, sovereignty is still understood as national power, but the conceptions of what makes for an economy’s power are different.

12 Another area of debate that current analysis of economic sovereignty revolves around is that of the “Moroccanization” of development and economic policy choices. The need to reorient the country’s development model has been at the center of economic news in recent years. The discourse surrounding the appointment of the CSMD involved emphasizing the need for a “Moroccan model” to be developed “by” Moroccans.  [40] This preoccupation echoes criticisms of the role international expertise has played in the development of economic programs and plans as large foreign consulting firms such as McKinsey, Roland Berger, and the Boston Consulting Group have become more powerful.  [41] The issue of the relationship between technocracy and politics, raised by the debate on the role of expertise,  [42] is about the “bearers”  [43] of sovereignty and, more specifically, about the transfer of sovereignty to an “elected” group that, unlike the “people,” of course, but also unlike “politicians,” apparently possesses the skills needed to make decisions and govern. Sovereignty is therefore being claimed in the name of national preference, as the first criticisms directed at international companies  [44] and the emergence of Moroccan consulting firms over the past decade illustrate.  [45] However, it is sometimes also claimed in the name of public policies that are independent of private firms,  [46] and in the name of electoral legitimacy’s primacy over historical legitimacy.

Addressing economic sovereignty via its modalities

13 This special issue is the outcome of a joint effort that prompted us to share our readings and fields, not to mention an approach and an intellectual journey. In fact, our reflection on sovereignty fits within previous reflection on transformations of the state and modes of governance. In the 1990s, globalization and economic liberalization were seen as factors contributing to a weakening or retreating state and thereby calling state sovereignty into question—particularly in Africa, both north and south of the Sahara. Works on strategies for reimposing control over international trade  [47] and works problematized in terms of “privatization of the state”  [48] have attempted to go beyond these interpretations, criticizing perspectives taking the view that globalization and neoliberalism were going to ultimately degrade or even eradicate sovereignty. In particular, they have shown that, once an institutionalist vision of the state is done away with and the increasingly fragmented, and often informal, modalities of control and domination are taken into account, the economy is in fact the site par excellence for reimposing the exercise of power and government over events, places, and social actors.  [49] As such, any analysis of sovereignty must acknowledge this shift toward new ways of exercising power that involve a multitude of actors, and this is the primary reason why we have chosen to tackle economic sovereignty via its modalities. The second reason stems directly from the first, in the sense that moving beyond an essentialist and substantialist view of the state to understand how government of goods and people  [50] is imposed requires the approach taken to encompass the concept of sovereignty. Of course, in this issue, we all ultimately adopt a minimalist definition of sovereignty: the pursuit of power, control, and independence. Nevertheless, we do not consider economic sovereignty to be a known and a given, a stable and easily characterized concept, or an object that can easily be apprehended in acts, sites, or very precise time frames. Rather, in our view, it is more fruitful to identify its variations according to situations, to thereby consider it as a relational concept, and so, within a perspective that is both Weberian and Foucauldian, to base our reflections on government practices, leaving aside this ultimately elusive concept.  [51] This has prompted us to approach sovereignty via its modalities and to study more specifically the modalities through which economic sovereignty might be established, consolidated, affirmed or, simply, claimed. This perspective sheds light on the richness of the subject matter, on the diversity of the sites in which power is exercised, of the ways in which political economy and power’s economic foundations are established and understood, because sovereignty (economic or otherwise) is such an obvious objective for most actors that it is barely—if at all—discussed and is not the focus of debate as such. Accordingly, as an objective it does not allow social and political relations to be deeply penetrated.

14 Some of our contributors have conceptualized this relational understanding of economic sovereignty as a discharged sovereignty, others as a delegated sovereignty. In all cases, we have strived to understand the diversity and complexity of what economic sovereignty has allowed (in terms of, for example, the exercise of power, conflicts and struggles, and definitions of public interest or responsibility), the modalities through which sovereignty has been established, and what these modalities might have triggered (in terms of governance forms, political maneuvering, power relations between actors, and so forth). Accordingly, we have drawn on very specific case studies to bring out the very concrete ways in which, whether it is claimed or not, economic sovereignty takes shape in arenas, with actors, and around specific events. But this we have done while going off the beaten track. Doing so involved exploring thematic backroads: not sovereignty’s traditional objects (such as currency or debt) but actors (governors/walis in Nadia Hachimi-Alaoui’s case, and a national-level entrepreneur captured by Irene Bono using his private archives), intangible sites (such as public order and its connections to the economy, analyzed by Nadia Hachimi-Alaoui, and the sociopolitical order and its economic translations, highlighted by Béatrice Hibou), and moments in time (changes to cannabis regulations, analyzed by Federico Reginato, and the workings of the CSMD, which we discussed with Mohamed Tozy in an interview) that have seldom been problematized in terms of sovereignty. And we have taken methodological backroads as well: when we have chosen classic entry points (for the contemporary period, the so-called national champions—the large enterprises capable of bolstering local economic growth—or grain supply, analyzed respectively by Béatrice Hibou and Beatrice Ferlaino, and for the postindependence period, the subject of international economic integration, raised by Irene Bono), we have taken a detour to understand the ways in which it is possible to be sovereign beyond the goal explicitly stated by a given policy, beyond the expected practices and known formulas, and beyond explicitly engaged actors. This chosen path also manifests our desire to vary the scales of analysis and observation, which range from the most micro, even biographical, to the macro and the most holistic economic data, from the sectoral to the national, from ideas to practices, from individuals to institutions, and from the contemporary to the historical. For it also goes without saying that the concept of sovereignty is historically constructed and is not immutable. Our approach has therefore made us take an interest not in economic sovereignty in itself but in the maneuvers that it allows, in terms not only of the choice of devices and actors but also of the opportunities they create, whether these are political, territorial, or social—or, of course, economic.

15 Many studies of economic sovereignty, whether they focus on Morocco or elsewhere, tend to reify this concept.  [52] This reification obscures the diversity of significations that economic sovereignty can take on, the diversity of issues that are bound up with sovereignty claims, and, perhaps even more so, the economic processes through which another type of sovereignty is established. And so we have tried to avoid falling into the same trap by placing the question of the “meaning” and significations given to actions at the heart of our respective analyses.  [53] Our starting point was the idea that only consideration of the “habits of thinking and feeling” and the “norms of our thought,” only “threads of meaning” in their historical and social thickness,  [54] make it possible to understand the modalities through which economic sovereignty is claimed, achieved (or not), or exercised. Some of the contributors to this issue use the notion of “representation” while others have opted for the concept of “imagination,” but through their choices they all highlight the categories, frameworks, and ordering principles of the sensible world  [55] that relate to different times but alone make society and give meaning to social relations. Nadia Hachimi-Alaoui and Beatrice Ferlaino take this as a starting point when they show how the way in which the economy or grain supply are represented influences how the form of sovereignty being supported is conceptualized and the mechanisms envisioned. Taking a comparable approach, Federico Reginato builds on the initial idea that cannabis has been subject to different representations down the years to understand the effects of these shifts, particularly on the way the type of sovereignty sought through legal activities pertaining to cannabis has been perceived. Conversely, Irene Bono, Beatrice Ferlaino, and Béatrice Hibou take mechanisms that are unequivocally intended to establish economic sovereignty as their starting point, but they show that the transformations in meaning that come with their integration into power relations trigger conflicts or undermine the stated objective.

An economicization of power relations and political issues

16 The growing interest in economic sovereignty is directly linked to a recent development: since the mid-1990s, economic issues have had a rising importance in the exercise of power. The primacy of economics can be attributed to neoliberal globalization, but it also stems from deep transformations within the Moroccan political economy that are directly related to the issue of economic sovereignty. Owing to the transformations bound up with privatizations and economic liberalization, the Ministry of the Interior’s loss of control over the regulated economy, and the rise of new technocratic elites, the state ceased to be the country’s primary financier and primary employer. The late 1990s also witnessed the emergence of new economic interests, and more specifically the formation of large private groups (as a result of privatizations and changes in the rules for public intervention) and stronger foreign investment.

17 From the start of the twenty-first century, and in response to these transformations, the priority given to economics and the overhaul of mechanisms of authority and methods of intervention in the economy began redefining the content and contours of economic sovereignty. It goes without saying that these transformations did not stop public authorities’ efforts to reconfigure market relations and to leverage them so they could assert themselves as sovereign powers. This is the suggestion innovatively made in Beatrice Ferlaino’s article on the grain sector and in Federico Reginato’s article on cannabis. Ferlaino demonstrates how economic sovereignty hinges on the capacity to get into the market (through the actions of public regulatory agencies, for example) and the capacity to get out of it (through laissez-faire stances vis-à-vis traditional markets or the free rein given to large mills), while Reginato shows that economic sovereignty has revolved around state control over networks and processes for accessing the market, which define the legitimate actors and those ultimately responsible for the market’s operation.

18 Transformations in sovereignty also suggest a transformation in politics itself, which has played a part in shaping the site of power relations and the exercise of domination, hence why in Morocco today the matter of sovereignty is essentially approached via its economic dimension. This is doubtless because the economy is thought of as a social space in which legitimate intervention can and must happen—even though simultaneously, especially amid liberalization and globalization, it is seen as a space that is difficult to control. Doubtless also because the obviousness of the need to establish economic sovereignty pushes aside questions surrounding its legitimacy, its main bearer (ultimately, who is the sovereign?), or its feasibility. Doubtless, finally, because politics is too sensitive and economics is the best way to “defuse” it. In any case, today the economy appears to be the supreme site for the expression of a desire, for a claim to sovereignty, or even for sovereign action.

19 Morocco’s disputed borders, starting with the Sahara, are an example that helps us to understand this. This matter is as political as they come, a dispute which, since the late 1970s, has pitted the Moroccan state and the vast majority of its citizens, who have considered it to be Moroccan territory for centuries, against the Polisario Front and a segment of Sahrawis who are campaigning for the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination to be recognized. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century and following Morocco’s proposal for its “Southern Provinces” to have political autonomy, the Polisario Front’s proindependence activists have increasingly set out their sovereignty claims over the Sahara using economic arguments. And proindependence groups have mounted legal challenges in the European and international courts against various economic cooperation agreements between Morocco and Europe, such as the 2009 fishing agreements and, more recently, the association agreement between Morocco and the European Union.  [56] They have also initiated lawsuits in Great Britain against agreements between the UK and Morocco.  [57] Their activities also target major Moroccan companies operating in the Sahara via lawsuits filed in countries with which these firms have economic ties—in Australia and South Africa, for instance—to contest the legality of the firms’ exploitation of the Sahara’s resources.  [58] These claims to sovereignty through economics echo the very methods Morocco has been using for decades to assert its sovereignty over the Sahara. According to Morocco’s Conseil économique, social, et environnemental (CESE) (Economic, Social, and Environmental Council), the state provides more than 50 percent of the Southern Provinces’ GDP in the form of public investment and subsidies for basic necessities such as oil and special soft wheat flour.  [59] Furthermore, the state’s presence is asserted above all through direct economic intervention, whereas incentives and indirect intervention are favored in other regions. In 2013, CESE devised a development plan aimed at moving the region away from a rentier economy (one based on natural resources: fishing, octopus, and phosphates) through public investments. Diversification is being achieved through major port infrastructure projects such as the Dakhla Atlantic port and Nareva’s development of large wind farms via joint ventures with foreign interests.

20 The Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla are a much less sensitive issue, but a political one nonetheless. Their existence, which is not perceived as a challenge to Morocco’s territorial sovereignty, is problematized in terms of economic sovereignty: How can smuggling be controlled? What can be done to make sure it does not compromise control over the national economy? In October 2019, for example, the authorities’ decision to close the land crossing to Ceuta, which “feeds” the local and national economy, redefined the political stakes involved in this territory. At a time when claims over the Sahara were being voiced, this was the Sharifian kingdom’s way of reminding its Iberian neighbor that it was in control, that the enclaves existed only because it had decided to accept them. However, the decision to close the land crossing between Ceuta and its surroundings was absolutely not a challenge to the idea of the enclaves; the goal was to put an end to the illegal economy and to “moralize” the crossing. The move was combined with creating an economic activity zone in the commune of Fnideq to place the entrepreneurial fabric within a structured and orderly framework and to bring all those operating in and between the cracks of the informal and irregular economy into the official labor market. In short, it was an attempt to assert economic sovereignty without raising the question of territorial sovereignty.

The importance of contingency and context

21 Our approach and perspective have led us to emphasize the role of things that have not been foreseen or thought of. More often than not, the ways in which economic sovereignty is achieved, established, or claimed arise not so much from deliberate actions and carefully considered strategies but rather from the ability to capitalize on constraints and opportunities that, although not always directed toward a stated goal vis-à-vis sovereignty, can contribute to establishing it.

22 Adopting a relational understanding of economic sovereignty has naturally led us to be sensitive to the context—or the historical moment. Context shapes the actors’ conception of economic sovereignty. It shapes the devices that are devised and implemented to exercise it. It shapes the categories used to govern. Above all, it shapes the conditions allowing actors to claim a share of sovereignty, to act (consciously or otherwise) to bring about a form of sovereignty, or to carry out actions driven by objectives but which nevertheless contribute to defining the contours of sovereignty. Federico Reginato, for instance, sets out the different ways in which cannabis has been conceptualized as an issue down the years (first it was a crime, then a social issue, and, finally, an economic issue) and their influence on how sovereignty has been envisaged and how governments have thought about achieving it. The argument Nadia Hachimi-Alaoui makes in her text revolves around the influence, at a given moment, of how the notion of the economy is conceptualized on the type of sovereignty given consideration, revealing that it was only recently, once the economy had been objectified as such, that economic sovereignty was considered in its own right.

23 The context is therefore understood first of all in terms of its economic dimension. Neoliberalism, for example, shapes economic sovereignty by conceiving of it within globalization and as partnerships between public and private sectors, turning entrepreneurs/investors into a central protagonist alongside the state. But the context is also political. After the 2011 “Arab Spring,” for example, a certain level of openness and the adoption of a new constitution paved the way for the rise of popular sovereignty by making the ballot box legitimate. Such assertions of sovereignty are not limited to political issues. They also extend to economics, for example, when examining—as Mohamed Tozy does in his analysis of the CSMD’s experience—who has the legitimacy needed to define the contours of the new development model, or who has the legitimacy and capability needed to bring in new options and new economic policies. This is also something that Béatrice Hibou highlights when she shows how actors find opportunities to seize a context (in this case, the context of Morocco’s economic conquest of sub-Saharan Africa) so they can assert themselves under the banner of a prosovereignty slogan (planting the Moroccan flag), even when their own goal is purely to pursue their own interests.

24 Contingency also plays a fundamental role in the exercise of economic sovereignty. Ad hoc opportunities and specific circumstances allow mechanisms that establish economic sovereignty to be put in place—ones that were previously discussed but could not take shape, and even ones that were previously unimaginable. Irene Bono and Nadia Hachimi-Alaoui raise this in the context of the establishment of the dirham two years after independence. Although appearances would have it otherwise, leaving the French franc zone in 1958 and creating a national currency was not contemplated beforehand as the way to assert economic sovereignty. This contingent decision was connected especially to the bad year suffered by farming and, more generally, to the economic situation, which made the Moroccan authorities refuse to be penalized by the devaluation of the French franc and the loss of foreign currency resources. Something that has retrospectively been perceived and analyzed as the expression of a strategic and deliberate economic sovereignty actually reflects the circumstantial priority given to financing the national economy. This shows that economic sovereignty has been shaped, de facto, by decisions made outside of an explicit concern for sovereignty. However, contingency can also lead to claims for economic sovereignty becoming legitimate in a way they weren't before. The most obvious recent examples come from the energy and food industries. Actors in these domains have managed to take advantage of the war in Ukraine to propose or put in place mechanisms that favor them, presenting these—whether effectively, potentially, or purely cosmetically—as acts of economic sovereignty. The case analyzed by Beatrice Ferlaino is a case in point: she shows how calls for emergency stocks to be set up, something certain actors in the grain sector had been demanding from the public authorities for years, suddenly became audible and conceivable. The same can be said of thinking on renewable energies and combining these with traditional energy sources, which is discussed by Mohamed Tozy in his interview. In all these cases, the ability to seize contexts and situations is about the art of “governing by moments”; analyzed elsewhere by Nadia Hachimi-Alaoui, this is the art of governing by seizing opportunities and taking ad hoc measures rather than defining long-term strategic orientations.  [60]

“Of,” “through,” “over”: Connecting different types and sources of sovereignty

25 Analyzing the ways in which economic sovereignty is claimed or effectively established reveals systematic connections between economic sovereignty and other types of sovereignty. Throughout this issue, discussing economic sovereignty without addressing food, territorial, security, political, legal, and other forms of sovereignty has therefore proved to be impossible. But the nature of these connections varies. In some cases, focusing on particular moments in which economic sovereignty was asserted (as Irene Bono does in studying the implementation of compensation agreements and the nationalization of agricultural exports in the early postindependence years; and as Béatrice Hibou does in considering the era of “national champions” in the early twenty-first century) opens up the possibility of observing how other types of sovereignty (such as political, administrative, and territorial sovereignty) are asserted through the economy and according to various political logics (this may take the form of developing a government department or a public service, but it could also involve political conflicts and asserting specific interests or defending a public order). In other cases, sovereignty is asserted through governing economic matters but doing so according to logics that are not themselves economic. The case analyzed by Beatrice Ferlaino is a prime example of this. In her analysis, Ferlaino shows how food security is achieved, at least partially, by governing actors, places, and economic events, but doing so in a way that corresponds to security or political logics. In still other cases, as Nadia Hachimi-Alaoui highlights through her analysis of agrarian reform and the management of agricultural land resources during the first postindependence decades, economic sovereignty is simply not given consideration, and the economic mechanisms put in place tend to establish a territorial or political sovereignty. Finally, in the configuration of areas such as cannabis, analyzed by Federico Reginato, legal, regulatory, and territorial mechanisms aim to establish sovereignty over economic actors indirectly and according to hybrid criteria that distinguish between actors that can cultivate cannabis that is deemed tolerated or legal and ones that cannot. Mohamed Tozy, meanwhile, leads us to see the CSMD not as some supreme vehicle for economic sovereignty (which was not thought about as such) but rather as an site where monarchical sovereignty is asserted, as a device for denying territories any sovereignty, and even as a mechanism for screening conflicts surrounding food sovereignty.

26 These different connections suggest different ways of understanding economic sovereignty. Sometimes it is a matter of a sovereignty over the economy, sometimes a sovereignty through the economy, and sometimes a sovereignty of the economy. One of the contributions made by all the articles presented here is highlighting these different dimensions of a concept whose complexity and ambivalence are too often concealed. The example of the “clean-up campaign” of 1995 and 1996, officially conducted as a fight against smuggling, corruption, and drugs but interpreted as an operation to clean up the business world,  [61] enables these different dimensions, which coexist within it, to be understood. The campaign exhibited a desire to obtain command and control over entrepreneurs and traders, to make them subject to rules, and, in so doing, to claim sovereignty over the economy—in this case, over economic actors—for the sake of public order and security. But it was also an arbitrary decision taken by the sovereign to define what is exceptional. The sovereign, all powerful, defined what was legitimate and what was not; he defined the rules to be followed and the deviations that were forbidden. The idea was to restore the sovereignty of the state and the sovereign himself through economic intervention. It was therefore also about claiming sovereignty through the economy. Last of all, the campaign was triggered by the sense that the state had lost control as economic actors (major entrepreneurs and traders), events, and sites (economic practices in the north of the country as well as in the large ports and smuggling networks) had become more independent. The campaign was a symbol and symptom of the preeminence of certain ways of governing, and it was proof of the preeminence of economic logics and of attempts to call them into question. It therefore revealed the limits of this order, which needs to constantly “revitalize” itself by engaging in violent sovereign acts in response to the sovereignty of the economy.

27 Our collective work does not exclusively focus on unpicking the entanglement of different sovereignty domains and modalities; the different articles in this issue also highlight the diversity of sources of sovereignty, as well as their interdependence. Analyzing the modalities through which economic sovereignty is claimed or actually established reveals the diversity of the sources of power and sovereignty legitimization. In a political context in which monarchical, national, and popular levels coexist, analyzing economic sovereignty allows the connection between these three levels to be better understood. This analysis involves observing the complex and ambiguous power relations between different power circles and different modes of governance—the royal route, the governmental route, and so on. If the source of monarchical sovereignty is taken to be the king and the palace, the source of national sovereignty to be membership in the community, and the source of popular sovereignty to be not only political representation resulting from elections and embodied by the government elected by the people but also civil society and the citizens’ groups recognized in the constitution as counterbalancing powers, the centrality of the interplay between these different sources to power relations becomes clear.

28 This is what this issue probes within both recent history and the contemporary period, and within both expected and unexpected topics. And always with an eye to detail, to bring out all the possible and concomitant variations in conceptions of economic sovereignty. But also and above all, the idea is to bring out the full range of power maneuvering that referring to sovereignty allows, behind words and discourses—in other words, in a similar vein to what Paul Veyne invites us to look at,  [62] the things we see when we lift the veil of “economic sovereignty,” as well as, conversely, what the problem of economic sovereignty allows us to see with fresh eyes.

Sovereignty conflicts

29 Adopting a relational understanding of economic sovereignty has also led us to grasp that economic sovereignty can be only the bearer of a simultaneity of expressions, understandings, interpretations, and representations that are necessarily different, and sometimes contradictory owing to the diversity of actors, their place in society, their interests, and their ethos. Analyzing economic sovereignty on this basis has led us to be sensitive to struggles and tensions, to rivalries and manifestations of competition, to asymmetries in power relations, and to effects of domination, rather than to convergences and harmony in social relations around the expression of an economic sovereignty. This is what we among ourselves have called “sovereignty conflicts,” it being understood that these are not problematized as such in public debates and discussions between actors but instead arise from our approach and the specific perspective we have taken on economic sovereignty. The “sovereignty conflicts” analyzed in this issue’s various contributions are of different kinds.

30 Sovereignty conflicts are primarily disputes between visions, conceptions, and interests. One of the strengths of Beatrice Ferlaino’s article is its demonstration of how the polysemy of the term “food security” is based on very different representations of the rural world, but also on government practices and the role of actors within government, and how this diversity, a source of conflicts over representation, paradoxically does not end with deadlock but rather succeeds in regulating bread prices through a combination of contradictory but compatible mechanisms and practices. Federico Reginato ultimately arrives at a similar conclusion regarding cannabis, highlighting how various compromises have allowed conflict between different visions concerning cannabis to be overcome. In the 1990s, the compromise involved accepting that some regions could get by on “criminalized” cannabis; at the start of the twenty-first century, it involved agreeing to make data on this “social issue” public; and today it involves “making economies” with cannabis.

31 Other conflicts have their origins in how economic sovereignty is understood and the need to connect political sovereignty and economic sovereignty. Mohamed Tozy, for instance, shows that the neoliberal hegemony shared by the actors making up the CSMD did not prevent differences of opinion, or even explicit conflicts, over the path to economic sovereignty, with some seeing the way forward in the connection between monarchical sovereignty and popular sovereignty through a constitutional state, while others went to great lengths to bypass this issue by making it technocratic and depoliticized. In her analysis of the prosovereignty “national champion” tagline, Béatrice Hibou highlights the fact that it has been understood in a wide variety of ways: among other things, as legitimizing market concentration and the advantages obtained, as an opportunity to consolidate businesses, as a granting of greater independence, as an expression of the nation-state’s power, as a way of conquering Africa, as renewal of the country’s bourgeoisie, as a continuation of Moroccanization, and as a way to make the public and private sectors work together. She shows that tensions have arisen from these different meanings, even leading to certain forms of violence—for example, when the authorities are being led to intervene in the competitive field of contenders for the champion label.

32 Conflicts may also arise over the mechanisms best suited to establishing economic sovereignty. In the early postindependence years, analyzed by Nadia Hachimi-Alaoui, partisan struggles led to violent conflicts over agrarian reform, allowing monarchical sovereignty to assert itself. Irene Bono brings to light the conflicts that broke out between 1955 and 1960 over the mechanism the new independent authorities hit upon to establish their sovereignty over foreign trade when they had no monetary independence. Compensation agreements provoked conflicts between, on the one hand, the leading lights in commerce, who did not want to give up their import licenses, and, on the other hand, politicians, who wanted to renegotiate these agreements and set them up on a state-by-state basis.

33 Conflicts can be sparked by the mechanisms set up to establish economic sovereignty. Federico Reginato shows, for example, that the ongoing process of legalizing cannabis differentiates actors and, moreover, produces asymmetries between the ones that are able to invest—not just money, but also effort and resources to expedite bureaucratic procedures—in the pharmaceuticals sector (and therefore become sovereign actors) and the ones that are not.

34 Conflicts between actors are clearly very common. Beatrice Ferlaino points out various tensions—between importers and local producers, between traditional and industrial markets, between large and small mills, between Casablanca and Fez—that can only be resolved through discharging practices and result in a discharged or stratified sovereignty. One of the innovative aspects of Irene Bono’s article is that it shows the conflicts that arise over how to be economically sovereign, and in particular over the ways by which wealth and power are accumulated. Nadia Hachimi-Alaoui sets out the conflicts arising from the process that turns actors into leading lights. These conflicts pit elected officials seeking to establish their sovereignty over control of economic actors against the actors themselves, who wish to become independent through the financial gains that these arrangements allow.

35 Finally, conflicts can crystallize around the meaning given to actions. In analyzing the strategies used by major Moroccan groups to conquer sub-Saharan Africa, Béatrice Hibou highlights the conflicts over meaning that are emerging among actors in this battle to become champions through Africa, one example being the conflict between actors that see their mission as the expression of a delegated royal sovereignty and actors that contribute to national sovereignty in a less conspicuous way as they pursue their own sovereignty. Using the idea of “dissenting capitalism,” Irene Bono brings to light another way of understanding a process that has usually been interpreted as cooptation, or even as being bought, and therefore as a loss of sovereignty (that of these leading lights/dignitaries): it is a way to establish economic sovereignty by integrating dissident practices.

36 When the focus is not the outcomes or effectiveness of economic sovereignty but instead claims to be sovereign or to defend economic sovereignty, the latter comes across as a “battlefield”  [63] in which power relations play out: asymmetry and hierarchy, inclusion and marginalization, connivance and dissent—in short, domination.

Violence and danger in forming the nation: The benefits of looking through the prism of economic sovereignty

37 Understanding politics via economic sovereignty also allows the diversity of forms of violence and the trivialization of violence to be highlighted in a way that goes beyond its physical and brutal expressions. This is not unique to Morocco. Historians have shown, for example, that Turkification of the economy was a process that happened gradually, via moments of extreme violence, the Armenian genocide, the Turkish-Greek population exchange, and the seizure of Jewish and Greek assets.  [64] In Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya, one dimension of economic decolonization was hunting down Indians and Lebanese in the name of claiming sovereignty, including in the economic sphere, or even starting with it.  [65] And that the ambition of regaining economic sovereignty in interwar Germany was achieved by plundering Jewish assets and capital alongside those of the countries that Germany occupied is well known. Even if it is also known that the specific effects of this plundering did not have the anticipated economic effects, this seizing of assets, capital, and property was based on the rhetoric of sovereignty and a claim to redress.  [66]

38 The Moroccanization process did not feature the intensity of “pure violence.”  [67] But it was not devoid of violence either, though this aspect is rarely retold. While practices such as land seizures took place in the name of economic sovereignty, they were also and above all carried out in the name of modernization or because of how essential a given public enterprise was—and therefore in the name of the general interest. From the protectorate period until the 1980s, operations carried out to take control of common lands and monopolize land in areas where the OCP dominated were very violent; their intensity can be gauged by the forced migrations that ensued. The region surrounding Khouribga, for example, has one of the country’s highest emigration rates, including in recent years, and this “performance” is linked to this land seizure process.  [68] In the sense that such violence delimits exceptional rules for actors that embody the nation, it is a violence of transgression, expressing both economic and political sovereignty.  [69] With the emergence of corporate social responsibility and better cooperation with public institutions on the ground, this violence is less visible and more insidious. It happens above all in the background, implicitly, through the management—and therefore the recognition—of the effects of the phosphates industry on populations’ health.  [70]

39 Likewise, in this special issue, several authors proceed implicitly in their contributions, taking a roundabout route to tackle this fundamental question. In respectively analyzing dissenting capitalism in the 1970s and national champions at the start of the twenty-first century, Irene Bono and Béatrice Hibou bring out the violence of hegemony against economic actors that claim full decision-making powers and therefore sovereignty. It is a hegemony that sometimes prevents and snuffs out any desire for independence and always imposes legitimate paths of accumulation.  [71] In neither case is the violence physical, and this is why it is often minimized, kept quiet, or not understood as violence, further increasing its coercive effects. It is carried out by intimidating economic actors and exploiting their legal vulnerability through “campaigns” against corruption or illegal practices and, above all, through processes that make them internalize rules. Violence can also consist of processes legitimizing exclusion and inequality in the name of economic sovereignty, understood here as the sovereignty of the economy, or in the name of political or territorial sovereignty achieved through the economy. Nadia Hachimi-Alaoui, for instance, recounts how in the 1960s, when agrarian capitalism was being created using colonial land reclaimed by the state, military governors allowed a large portion of land transactions to go unregulated, allowing economic interests to prevail and inequalities to worsen. The quest for territorial sovereignty through the economy proved particularly violent, the violence taking the form of legitimizing inequality and exclusion.

40 These surreptitious or trivialized forms of violence can be explained in part by the fact that the danger is considered to come from society itself, or rather from certain social forces or actors within it. In Morocco, questioning of the nation and threats to sovereignty seem to come more from internal forces than from external ones. In other words, and as has been emphasized several times, they come more from independent Moroccan economic powers than from globalization and foreign economic powers. Irene Bono’s, Nadia Hachimi-Alaoui’s, and Béatrice Hibou’s articles highlight this by pointing out the authorities’ misgivings about the growing independence enjoyed by national economic actors’ and the different strategies put in place to remedy the situation: co-optation of dissenting voices, confinement of economic actors in delimited spaces, pressures or threats of retaliation, or even exclusion. This very specific conception of danger explains one highly astonishing, paradoxical, and even bewildering situation that in any case goes against the conventional and “main” way in which sovereignty is understood: the existence of the Ceuta and Melilla enclaves in the north of Morocco. The danger does not arise from their existence (which could arguably pose a threat to the Moroccan nation and its national sovereignty). It is the opposite: they are seen as opportunities that allow what is fundamental to be negotiated. For many years, priority was given to governing the north of the country: these enclaves gave a living to an economically impoverished region that was poorly integrated into the rest of the country, a region that considered itself marginalized. These enclaves even allowed the national economy as a whole to be supplied with inexpensive products. Today, however, the enclaves’ economic usefulness is being called into question by the Tanger Med port complex and its industrial and commercial zones. This is why the Sahara is now fundamental: on the basis of the 1975 consensus over the monarchy and the Sahara’s positioning within the political imagination as the place where the monarchy regenerates itself, the enclaves allow the application of pressure and manipulation of the power relations surrounding sovereignty claims. The events of June 2022 illustrated this in a way that was both stark and severe: thousands of Moroccan and sub-Saharan African migrants went over Melilla’s and Ceuta’s walls and barbed wire as Moroccan customs officials and police officers passively looked on, before the migrants were violently subdued. A game centered on claiming sovereignty, in which migrants were used as a weapon, was clearly being played. The Moroccan authorities are well aware that they can neither open Europe’s borders nor close their borders with sub-Saharan Africa, but they also know that, within the power relations between them and their European partners, especially Spain, migration is the most effective lever, and they have been using it to advance a demand they consider a priority for their sovereignty claims: recognition that the Sahara is Moroccan, a real diplomatic obsession. Economic sovereignty is thus being called into question in the name of political sovereignty.

41 Analyzing the modalities by which economic sovereignty is exercised and the maneuvering it enables provides us with the opportunity to understand economic matters as one of the primary site of politics and to precisely grasp the economic foundations of power. Economic sovereignty emerges primarily as the fulcrum of power relations, both external—in the context of power struggles to affirm the existence of room for maneuver, political independence, and territorial boundaries—and, above all, internal, in the latent or open conflicts over defining spaces of mastery or control, at the level of individuals, groups, institutions, and so on. In the Moroccan context, competition between monarchical sovereignty, national sovereignty, and popular sovereignty lays bare the question of accountability: Who is responsible for exercising economic sovereignty? Which actors hold sovereignty, and how do they connect with one another? It also raises the question of the general interest: Who can or should define the general interest? How are the boundaries of the general interest defined amid conflicts and power dynamics involving actors holding different conceptions of sovereignty? And it brings up the question of modes of government, and particularly the authoritarian exercise of power. The various contributions to this special issue reveal these fundamental political matters by examining the historical trajectory of state interventionism and the underpinnings of public policies, by analyzing localized mechanisms, or by reflecting on categories.