Based on the ideal types of empire and nation-state, the authors highlight the plurality of modes of government and domination at work in Morocco, emphasising their ongoing osmosis.

"Morocco inspires commonplaces. It is said to be a prototype of political immobility, in the authoritarian and conservative hands of the "Commander of the Faithful", in need of democracy, but in the shadow of a moderate Islam. Thirty years of fieldwork, interviews, extensive primary documentation and participant observation have enabled Béatrice Hibou and Mohamed Tozy to show how demographic and environmental changes, as well as the naturalisation of neo-liberalism, have transformed the ways in which the kingdom's people and territories are governed.
Based on the ideal types of empire and nation-state, the authors highlight the plurality of modes of government and domination at work in Morocco, emphasising their ongoing osmosis. There is no question of a transition from the Cherifian Empire (17th-19th centuries) to the nation-state, for which the French protectorate laid the foundations, or of the perpetuation of a residual imperial tradition at the heart of the modern state. What we have here is a combination of these two logics, which coexisted in previous centuries, and whose simultaneous interplay underlies contemporary neoliberal government. Empire and the nation-state are not alternatives or contradictions. They are two springs of the same domination, which cannot be reduced to the figure of the king alone. They are in continual tension, a tension that is the source of the historicity of the Moroccan political imaginary and weaves its singular time. A fundamental demonstration of the comparative historical sociology of the State".

Béatrice Hibou is director of research at the CNRS (Sciences Po-CERI). Her publications include, The political anatomy of domination (La Découverte, 2011). 
Mohamed Tozy is a professor at Sciences Po Aix. He is the author of Monarchy and political Islam in Morocco (Presses de Sciences Po, 1999).

(Table of contents and other information on the Karthala website).