Traditions of governance in North Africa

Abstract

The recent political convulsions in North Africa have usually been analysed as a binary confrontation between universalist political Islam and secularist democracy, with violent chaos as the price of failure. To a very large extent, this has been a reflection of analytical templates derived, respectively, from the arguments of the Salafiyyist movement of the late nineteenth century or from the European experience of the Enlightenment, as mediated through the colonial moment in the region. Both approaches have denied ideological agency to North Africa and North Africans themselves; yet, there is a long tradition of indigenous principles of governance there, both formal and informal. This paper examines some of these mechanisms, from the Khaldunian argument of the circulation of tribal elites, Moroccan concepts of communal consent and contract alongside mediation and arbitration, to Tunisia's constitutional experiment, Malek Bennabi's vision of democratic governance in Algeria or the...