Idriss Jebari

The alliance between the leftist movement Perspectives Tunisiennes and university students delivered sustained opposition and repeated protests against Bourguiba's regime in the 1960s and 1970s. This article argues that these groups were driven by the “student question,” a counterproject for Tunisian national development that opposed the vision of liberal bourgeois modernity espoused by Bourguiba's reforms of elitism through education and depoliticization. Instead, the student question was fleshed out in the group's periodical, envisaging the emancipation of Tunisian subjects and their entitlement to citizenship and political participation, and how the struggle of students would sweep the whole country. Drawing on the movement's journal and memoirs of four former Tunisian leftists, I trace how Perspectives navigated the regime's repression in 1968 and 1972–75, and how two successive generations of leftists emerged with different ideological reference points. In so doing, this article takes seriously the political imagination of this group during the global 1960s and 1970s, while conceiving ways to reintegrate silenced memories and histories into the mainstream of Tunisian historiography after the 2011 revolution.

The recent revival of interest in Moroccan thinker Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–2009) around the English release of his seminal 1983 essay, Maghreb Pluriel represents an opportunity to place this thinker in the inner circle of post-1967 Arab thought. This article argues that most coverage and commemoration of him has been devoted to a glorified side of his trajectory that fits neatly within the framework of ‘postcolonial francophone intellectuals.’ However, this article argues that we must revise the meaning of his seminal book and his call for a ‘plural Maghreb’ to see it also as the demise of his project for a decolonized sociology in Morocco, which was necessary to set his sights toward semiology and his significant literary oeuvre. His example informs us on Arab intellectual strategies after the end of grand ideological narratives, and how to write Arab intellectual and cultural histories without succumbing to the trap of nostalgia.

This chapter explores the possibility of reconciliation between Morocco and Algeria, inspired by the French and German reconciliation model. Mutual mistrust has set in over the past few decades following several crises. Reconciliation efforts are complicated by each side's sense of grievance, among leaders and an increasingly belligerent public. They both now see the status quo as the safest option. Faced with the limits of traditional approaches, the Franco-German model could break the deadlock by binding their destinies together and creating incentives for collaboration. The model owes its success to the ability to overcome multi-generational conflict and distrust through integrative economic measures and symbolic gestures. It jumpstarted European construction, just as this reconciliation could resuscitate the Arab Maghreb Union as a prosperous block that includes Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, and Tunisia. Hence, their reconciliation should overcome the root of mistrust and address the structural incompatibility between the two economies.

This article examines the experience of transitional justice and its relation to collective memory of authoritarian repression in Morocco (1965-1992) and the Civil War in Algeria (1991-2002). It confronts and compares to the two states’ therapeutic historical discourse produced to heal the national community after these periods of violence and its impact on the countries’ historians, journalists,  film makers, and novelists from 2004 to 2017. The article argues that Algeria and Morocco’s rigorous definition of the “victim” during these two episodes (the imprisoned and disappeared) excluded the way communities suffered during this period and, as a result, has delayed healing, forgiveness, and national reconciliation. This article highlights the limits of two overpoliticized processes of transitional justice in the Maghreb and their limited conception of what it meant to “come to terms with the past.” However, it finds optimism in the ongoing efforts by new historiography and cultural actors to confront the lasting traumatic aftermaths outside of official denitions and on their own terms.

In 1977, a group of North African intellectuals produced a special volume for the prestigious French journal Les temps modernes. Led by Abdelkebir Khatibi, they sought to ‘rethink the Maghreb’ as a way to counter the poisoned, divided and belligerent climate of the region, and to offer an alternative to the authoritarian models of the nation-state that took hold after political independence. When
read through the lens of Rancière’s concept of the ‘dissensus’ concerning the interplay between culture and politics, this collective volume of Les Temps Modernes reveals the plight of a generation of post-independence Maghrebi intellectuals who questioned their own purpose in light of their countries’ national projects. This article claims that this group intervened in the public sphere as a way to reconfigure the intellectual’s purpose in their respective societies and political systems. Their case highlights an important chapter in the region’s social and intellectual history and demonstrates how intellectual
actors seek re-integration in the national community after a painful period of exclusion.

In 1974, Abdallah Laroui and Hichem Djaït, two emerging Maghrebi historians and intellectuals wrote political essays affirming the necessity of re-historicizing the national projects of Tunisia and Morocco. These two countries faced what was framed then as a “crisis of modernity”, at a time when these countries were consolidating national authority. These intellectuals’ participation in the public space was seen as innovative and daring. In this article, we look at their ideas and practices in relation to each other. The article allows us to establish the specific mechanisms of consultation that were put into place between intellectuals, authorities and the public with lasting implications. On the one hand, these essays took on special meaning for these intellectuals whose lives would be marked by disillusionment and alienation resulting from the confrontation of their idealist convictions upon completing their studies in France and the stark realities of the Maghreb of the early sixties. On the other hand, these authors placed history and the historical principle of change at the center of their analysis, thus avoiding any claim that the “crisis” was the product of the intellectual limitations of national political elites. These two axes of study will allow us to frame the issue of the social demand for history in a wider perspective, while arguing that the constituent elements of the historicity regimes in the Maghreb were put in place as early as the seventies.

In the first report on the state of the social sciences
in the Arab world, Sociology Professor Mohammed
Bamyeh tackles the conundrum of Arab social sciences
today: a seemingly-historically weak field of knowledge that exists alongside richly tumultuous and complex social realities. Five years on from the Arab Spring,
there is enough critical distance to ask how the fi eld of
knowledge has digested these transformations. How does the report depict the challenges faced by Arab social sciences? What lessons regarding public engagement should young Arab social scientists take away from it?

By calling on their peers to " think the Maghrib " in the seventies, Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938-2009) and Abdallah Laroui (1933) each made seminal contributions to the radical Moroccan effort to decolonize the social sciences from their colonial and orientalist legacies. Despite this shared goal, these two figures disagreed firmly on their conception of socio-historical change and on Moroccan modernity, in large part to their interlocutors and audiences. During this fascinating period of intellectual renewal taking place in Paris and Beirut, Laroui and Khatibi engaged profoundly with deconstructionists, poststructuralists, reformed orientalists, disillusioned pan-Arabists, Marxists and new supporters of cultural heritage, producing an important and often neglected episode of Arab intellectual history. By addressing these two cases, this talk aims to highlight the importance of adopting a material perspective for the study of Arab knowledge production, which includes studying the influence of movement, reception and critical appropriation. Bio: Idriss Jebari is a Postdoctoral research fellow at the Arab Council for Social Sciences and a visiting researcher at the Centre for Arab and Middle East Studies, where he is carrying out a research project titled " Exploring the centre-periphery relation between the Maghrib and the Mashriq ". After completing his doctorate in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford in 2016, he has researched and published on the contemporary social, cultural and intellectual history of North Africa, and on the social memory of the recent past and its impact on present-day youth social mobilization.