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Commonsense discussions about illegal immigration in the Maghreb point the finger in the direction of authorities on both sides of the Mediterranean. The EU is reproached for closing its borders and North African governments for exploiting the problem by diverting attention elsewhere and downplaying its gravity. The Moroccan writer, Laila Lalami, through her collection of short stories Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), prefers to focus more on the harraga populations themselves; it is their unthinking proclivities that exacerbate the problem and allow the ruling machinery to become biopolitical entities, working less for the interest of the impoverished populations and more for staying in power, no matter how. Through characters and narrative situations, Lalami shows that illegal immigration is a trap. For, even when the harrag makes it to the host country and starts sending remittances, as Aziz does, to family back at home, he remains a loser. The middle-class ideal of a steady income and improved living standards lifts the Maghrebi's spontaneity and turns him or her into a superfluous commodity, seeking always to behave, not to think. Unlike Aziz or Larbi then, Murad failed to make it to Spain. His prolonged joblessness becomes an extension of his romantic character. Shaking that romanticism off allows him eventually to reverse the biopolitical reality by embracing the art of 'story telling'. Readers find him expertly selling artworks in souvenir shops in Tangier. Success in this context is not capitalistically driven; it involves organically connecting self-important American tourists with the artwork. The tourism industry becomes less of a recognition of already ordered reality, and more of an encounter with a new one: money matters but does not determine or control the encounter. The self-reflexive Murad assumes now a constructive engagement with the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the evolving foreign policy influence of three violent non-state actors – insurgent groups, terrorist organisations and foreign fighters – in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia during the Arab Spring and beyond. It draws on a unique dataset (1970–2015) compiled by the authors to explore whether countries or geographical regions experiencing various forms of political unrest, such as North Africa during the Arab Spring, exhibit greater levels of violence by violent non-state actors. North African leaders have responded to this violence by making the pursuit of national security their primary foreign policy goal. This response has led to the marginalisation of other expected benefits of the Arab Spring, including socio-economic development, human rights reforms and democratisation. North African leaders – old and new alike – have instead coordinated with regional and international partners in the pursuit of common national security-oriented foreign policy objectives, most notably counterterrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islamist political parties rose to lead governments in three North African countries after the 2010–11 Arab Spring: Ennahda in Tunisia, the Justice and Development Party (PJD) in Morocco, and the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in Egypt. While sharing many similarities with non-Islamist parties, these parties brought unique ideological and identity preferences to both domestic and foreign policy. With respect to foreign policy, these included a preference for strengthening foreign relationships within the Islamic world, a preference for indigenous solutions over 'colonial' ones, and a willingness to fight for 'just causes' at the expense of strategic relationships or traditional alliances. These preferences were significantly constrained in practice, however, leading Islamist parties to pursue much more traditional foreign policies than some had initially projected. The foreign policy pursued by governing Islamist parties resulted from a mixture of ideological preferences and institutional constraints. These constraints emerged from the domestic institutional context faced by ruling parties (such as governing coalitions and hybrid regimes), from international pressures, and also from a path to election that created internal party norms that favoured the status quo. As illustrated by three North African cases, Islamist parties in government must inevitably walk the line between ideology and pragmatism as they try to translate the ideals that served them well in political opposition to the realities of the global stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Arab Barometer data, this article provides the backdrop for understanding continuity and change since the Arab Spring in national-level public opinion attitudes toward economic and political foreign policy issues in North Africa, inclusive of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. The article leverages the concepts of differentiation and diffusion to understand how international affairs shape public opinion in North Africa since the Arab Spring. Three findings emerge. First, public opinion about domestic and international issues are linked in the minds of North African citizens and foreign policy issues are more important factors underlying pre- and post-Arab Spring politics than are often recognised. Especially in the post-Arab Spring era, Arab citizens widely see external interference as a problem and this perception increased in every North African country between 2013 and 2016. Moreover, there is considerable variation across and within North African states in attitudes toward economic and political foreign policy issues, including the Arab-Israeli conflict and attitudes about economic and security relationships with Israel. Anti-Israeli sentiment increased substantially in the years leading up to and following the Arab Spring. Finally, since the Arab Spring, anti-Americanism, as measured by negative perceptions of U.S. culture, has declined in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, but risen slightly in Egypt, even as North Africans demonstrate increased support for a U.S. role in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict during this same time period. These trends suggest that anti-Americanism is highly dependent on specific domestic and international developments and is highly complex in the Arab world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evolving foreign policy roles of four sets of civil society actors – youth, women's, labour and human rights groups – in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia during the Arab Spring and beyond. Our findings demonstrate that civil society groups initially flourished in the Arab Spring, with the region's average 'civil society rights score' registering positive increases in 2011 and 2012. The period of 2013 to 2018 witnessed a deterioration in this average score, as civil society faced an authoritarian backlash from illiberal (authoritarian) and liberal (democratic) North African regimes. An examination of individual civil society organisations further demonstrates a range of influence on foreign policy. Youth groups exert the least impact on North African foreign policies, despite high expectations associated with their central role in revolutionary protests and change associated with the Arab Spring. In contrast, women's, labour and especially human rights organisations have played more influential if still limited foreign policy roles. Finally, the impact of civil society on foreign policy is strongly mediated by a country's level of democracy. Only in Tunisia, which made a successful transition to democracy, have civil society organisations in the post-Arab Spring continuously enjoyed the freedoms to organise, protest and provide input into policy, including foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the evolving foreign policy roles played by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, by drawing on a unique data set of diplomatic data, interviews and field research, and a small, largely case study-oriented literature. The results demonstrate that North Africa is unique as a region due to the fact that all five North African countries maintain 'high' levels of diplomatic representation (i.e. more than forty-five embassies maintained abroad), and that these embassy networks have grown and diversified throughout the contemporary independence era, including during the Arab Spring. This is principally due to economic power and cultural history; neither a country's size, regime type, nor transition to democracy appear to matter. Second, the foreign policy role played by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs throughout North Africa has ebbed and flowed during the last sixty-seven years (1951–2018), including during the Arab Spring. The evolution of foreign policy influence is the result of a number of factors, including regime type, the stability (i.e. turn-over rate) of the office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the rise and decline of other government institutions and especially other bureaucracies. Of particular importance is the relationship of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the economic affairs bureaucracies, the Ministry of Defense and the military establishment more broadly, and the assumption of power by moderate Islamist parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strong political position armed forces enjoy in authoritarian states and the high priority military elites assign to foreign affairs would lead one to believe that in North Africa – a region made up of authoritarian states with the sole, recent, and partial exception of Tunisia – generals had the political standing to exert a major influence on foreign policy decisions. This would not be a correct assumption because in this region the armed forces' political influence is actually highly variable. Of the five states analysed in this article (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia) the military is the dominant political institution only in Algeria and Egypt. In the other three countries, the army plays a marginal political role and, by extension, possesses modest foreign policy influence. Moreover, the political clout of these armies is not constant. Since the Arab Spring the political influence of Egyptian generals has considerably increased, that of their Tunisian colleagues has marginally risen, while the status of Libya's military leaders has diminished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unprecedented wave of constitutional reforms in North Africa in the wake of the Arab Spring provides a unique opportunity to study the evolution of the foreign policy content of constitutions in different political contexts. Using a cross-national statistical analysis of 195 national constitutions promulgated from 1974 to 2015, as well as an in-depth analysis of North African constitutional reforms from 2011 to 2016, this study finds that compared to dictatorships, democracies allocate less power to the executive in the realm of foreign policy. A comparison of the revised North African constitutions with their pre-Arab Spring predecessors also shows that while the foreign policy content of the Algerian and Moroccan constitutions did not change significantly, constitutional provisions in Tunisia and Egypt successfully limited executive power regarding foreign affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the concept of 'revolutionary diplomats' that is central to this guest-edited issue of The Journal of North African Studies. Specifically, we explore whether the political openings associated with the Arab Spring beginning in January 2011 have permitted the emergence and/or re-emergence of state and non-state actors that are capable of challenging the foreign policy supremacy of authoritarian presidents, and therefore playing more important roles in the formulation and implementation of their countries' foreign policies. We do so by focusing on the North African countries of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. The first part of this article explores North Africa's status within the Arab Spring and broader Foreign Policy Analysis literatures, most notably the foreign policy shortcomings associated with an inherently case study approach that dominates these literatures. A second section examines three theoretical approaches ('big man', great power, and dependency theories) that typically have been adopted to explain North African foreign policies. The primary dilemma with these theories is that they limit our understanding of North African foreign policies to either North African rulers or external powers. A third section sets out a domestic actor approach to North African foreign policy, which underscores that a host of state actors (such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and non-state actors (such as civil society groups) play varied foreign policy roles. The foreign policy influence of these actors has ebbed and flowed during democratic and authoritarian periods alike, including during the Arab Spring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to better understand the dynamics of international cooperation on democracy promotion with authoritarian regimes, this article looks into the processes and results of negotiations on democracy (promotion) between the European Union (EU) and two of its North African neighbours (Morocco, Tunisia) in the decade leading up to the Arab uprisings. Asking if, how, and to what effect the EU and its Mediterranean partners have negotiated issues related to democracy promotion, it analyses official documents issued on the occasion of their respective association council meetings in 2000-2010. It shows that partners have indeed addressed these issues since the early 2000s, however, without engaging in substantive exchanges. Most of the time, conflicts have been neither directly addressed nor resolved. Where there are traces of actual negotiations leading to an agreement, these are clearly based on a logic of bargaining rather than arguing. These findings challenge the picture of harmony and cooperation between the EU and Morocco. Furthermore, they point to the low quality of these exchanges which reinforces the dilemma of international democracy promotion in cooperation with authoritarian regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few decades, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have become very active in Northeast Africa. In addition to developing bilateral relations with countries in the region, they regard the area as the gateway to connections with the rest of the continent, although they are guided by different motivations. Turkey's expansion of its interests in Africa is both a reaction to the European Union's rejection of its membership and an opportunity to expand its trade, which has been hindered by instability in the Middle East in recent years. Like Saudi Arabia, it views Northeast Africa as a place to extend its cultural influence with that region's indigenous Sunni population. Saudi Arabia has used its wealth to curtail Iran's attempts to expand its influence in the region, while Turkey has provided on-the-ground technical assistance to enhance its political and economic connections in the region. In recent years the two countries have been drawn together by Iran's involvement in Yemen, although Turkey has sought to avoid becoming involved in local political disputes. Rather, it has served in multinational peacekeeping efforts and actions to prevent piracy in the sea lanes off the coast of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. However, since the dispute between Saudi Arabia and Qatar over the latter country's relations [End Page 1] with Iran that began in June 2017, some tension has arisen between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. While Iran also wants those sea lanes to be freely open to traffic—as they were during the time of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi—it also wants to counteract Israeli involvement in Northeast Africa. Turkey has made great inroads politically and economically in Northeast Africa in recent years, while Saudi Arabia has gained the upper hand in its rivalry with Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the Arab Spring, each regime that confronted mass protests selected from a range of repressive and concessionary tactics in the effort to remain in power. In five cases—Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen—regimes eventually resorted to using violent repression with participation from national military forces. However, these regimes experienced a variety of outcomes related to their ability to preserve their authority. These outcomes were greatly impacted by the interventionist strategies they faced from foreign powers. We argue that the nature of the international interventions best explains the outcomes for the regimes in question. Foreign powers intervened both to support and to confront existing regimes, providing explanations of why certain regimes survived, collapsed, or came to share territorial sovereignty with oppositional groups during civil wars. Thus, regime survival in the Middle East and North Africa following popular uprisings may depend on the effective management of international support as much as on regime control over national military forces or the repression of social opposition. [End Page 23] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyse whether better governance rewards economic performance and facilitates the integration of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region into the world economy. In comparison with other regions in the world economy, MENA countries suffer from important institutional deficiencies, which generate insecurity and difficult international transactions. Despite this fact, the relationship between trade and institutional quality in MENA countries remains unexplored. A gravity model of trade augmented with governance indicators is estimated for the exports of 19 MENA countries, their 189 trading partners and for all exporters in the period from 1996 to 2013. The main results indicate that improvements in five of the six governance indicators increase exports from MENA countries, whereas better governance in destination countries does not affect MENA exports. Instead, each of the six governance indicators used has a positive effect on bilateral trade for the entire sample of exporters (189). Moreover, the effect of country‐pair similarity in governance indicators suggests that a similar level of regulatory quality and rule of law in exporting and importing countries increases exports from MENA countries. Similarities in voice and accountability also foster exports for the average exporter, but not for MENA exporters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We analyse the nature of robust determinants of differences in democracy levels across countries taking explicitly into account uncertainty in the choice of covariates and spatial spillovers. We make use of recent developments in Bayesian model averaging to assess the effect of a large number of potential factors affecting democratisation processes and account for several specifications of spatial linkages. Our results indicate that spatial spillovers are present in the data even after controlling for a large number of geographical covariates. Addressing the determinants of democracy without modelling such spillovers may lead to flawed inference about the nature of the determinants of democratisation processes. In particular, our results emphasise the role played by Muslim religion, population size, trade volumes, English language, natural resource rents, GDP per capita, being a MENA country and the incidence of armed conflicts as factors affecting democracy robustly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past three decades have been highly climactic for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The advent of satellite television and the Web, coupled with emerging democratic orientations, marked the region’s first political engagement with digital communications at a global scale. The failure of the digital public sphere, however, to deliver on democratisation promises during the so-called Arab Spring suggested a broader failure of the region’s traditional elites to properly address emerging challenges. In this article, the writer argues that the MENA’s youth, with their progressive civic outlook and extensive digital social engagement, hold a good promise for better governance in the region. Research has shown Arab youth to be developing a hybrid identity that lends itself to both local and global features such as diversity, co-existence, women empowerment, innovation, freedom, national pride and tolerance. A review of an online sample of young Arab bloggers and influencers suggests a huge potential to leverage virtual space to promote civic culture in the region. The article concludes that a convergence of young demographics, cyber engagements and progressive orientations is likely to give rise to a sound civic culture with significant implications for good governance. As future leaders in media, education, culture, business and politics, Arab youth will most likely bring their progressive civic views to positively bear on the realities of their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

North Africa is marked with an unmatched phenomena of increase in IT (Adeiza, 2013), though IT users are not homogenous groups, but rather heterogeneous communities with diverse interests and motivations. As explained by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) that technology itself cannot solely make a difference in the practice of the sociopolitical and economic progress, but rather the other way around where indicators of development behind the technology drives the change. IT is thus an instrument, not a goal (Sarrazin, 2011). The synergy between politics and IT is exemplified through many hybrid formations and phases since its initial preparation phase, where activists used digital media over several years to build social networks and identified collective identities. The second launching phase is marked with unprecedented ignition moments, where movement leaders activated these digital networks toward offline protests. And thirdly, profound channeling and programming of information warfare are in place to compete for control, as well as enhance international pressure, economic sanctions, and lobbying efforts (MacKinnon, 2012). But there are a number of concerns and limitations to what we know, expect and do with IT and digital democratization which coincides with the words of Schraeder (2003), when he described Africa's diversities and complexities as "mosaic in transformation." Such complex and inconclusive crossing roads are further interoperated to serve commercial and political interests in what is called the "Rashmon Effects" (Davenport, 2010). This makes it rational to mention that the level of legitimacy in using power and establishing identity is the main prevailing trend in Africa, which exploits the social function of media as a driving force for national ideology (Movius, 2010). Social power in many African societies construct meanings in the human mind through communication that utilizes internet and other horizontal digital communication networks (Castelle, 2011). This research puts forward a key question: "Will the new technologies that have sustained globalization reinforce or undermine democracy?" The aim is to offer a more nuanced approach of deductive forms of investigation about the potential role and impact of digital politics. This difficult path though must be considered by cross examining how politics, digital infrastructure adoption function and affect could contribute to democratization within the African context (Hussain, 2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The core of the argument of this article is that the integration of Islamic notions of justice into transitional justice mechanisms in the MENA makes for a more viable and sustainable transitional justice process in the region. This would mean a critical cultural value in the MENA is given a place in dealing with the past and mapping out a sustainable future in the region. The argument here is premised on the logic that a social transformation-focused enterprise like transitional justice ought to engage with Islam for sustainable outcomes in societies in the MENA where Islam is very influential. Given the significant role and influence of Islam on cultural, socio-political and legal institutions in the MENA, a process of transitional justice that takes account of Islamic values and practices is important for negotiating justice and institutionalising reforms in societies in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protests that swept the Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are expected to have influenced two key civic attitudes fundamental to well-functioning democracies: trust and tolerance. However, systematic comparative assessments of the general patterns and particularities in this region are rare. This contribution theorizes the uprisings' impact and presents new society-level measurements of trust and tolerance for the MENA, synchronizing over 40 Arab Barometer and World Values Survey surveys on Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, and Yemen, from before and after the uprisings. The analyses firstly show political-institutional trust falling in the uprisings' aftermath in countries that went through democratic reform or regime change. It appears that politicians misbehaving and reforms not resolving social problems hurt people's trust in politics. Secondly, in democratic transition countries Egypt and Tunisia, a decrease in social trust reflected the pattern of political-institutional trust indicating a spill-over effect. Thirdly, ethnoreligious tolerance dropped region-wide after the uprisings, indicating that the aftermath of religious conflict impacted the entire Arab region. These results support rational-choice institutionalist theories, while at the same time refining them for the MENA context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of the development of parties and party systems in the MENA region from early oligarchic pluralism to the mass single-party systems of the populist era and the limited multi-party experiments of the 1990s era of political liberalization. The survey shows how parties develop in parallel with the deepening of politicization and become nearly indispensable adjuncts in the construction of political order. The article then examines parties in the post-2010 period, with case studies of Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia demonstrating how very different configurations of party development dramatically impact on regime trajectories, ranging from democratization to hybrid regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new political geography has emerged in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) after the Arab Spring. The transformative impact of the popular upheavals appeared to put an end to long-term authoritarian regimes. Today, the region is far from stable since authoritarian resilience violently pushed back popular demands for good governance and is pushing to restore former state structures. However, the collective consciousness of the popular revolts endures, and a transformative prospect may emerge on the horizon. The chaotic situation is the result of an ongoing struggle between those who seek change and transformation and others in favour of the status quo ante. A critical evaluation of the Arab Spring after five years indicates a continuous process of recalculation and recalibration of policies and strategies. There are alternative routes for an eventual settlement in the MENA region, which are in competition against both regional and transregional quests for a favourable order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

State failure, sovereignty disputes, non-state territorial structures, and revolutionary and counter-revolutionary currents, among others, are intertwined within the Arab Spring process, compelling old and emerging regional actors to operate in the absence of a regional order. The emergent geopolitical picture introduces the poisonous mix of loss of state authority spiralling toward instability, defined by sectarianism, extremism, global rivalries, and ultimately irredentism within interdependent subregional formations. This assertion is substantiated by detailed and specific evidence from the shifting and multi-layered alliance formation practices of intra- and inter-state relations, and non-state and state actors. Analysis of the relations and alliances through a dichotomous flow from domestic to regional and regional to global also sheds light on prospective future order. A possible future order may take shape around a new imagination of the MENA, with porous delimitations in the form of emerging subregions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Arab uprisings of 2011 put into question previously held understandings about the stability of authoritarian regimes in North Africa as well as the European Union’s (EU’s) relations with countries in its southern neighbourhood. Despite early calls on behalf of the EU to change its policies, the Union’s responses in the early stages seemed mostly characterised by continuity. This article claims that certain dispositions and background knowledge developed over several decades vis-à-vis EU’s Mediterranean policies served as a baseline from which EU officials and diplomats acted. Drawing on insights from practice approaches, the article argues that the practical understandings on what the EU can (and cannot) do vis-à-vis partner countries in North Africa create a kind of power politics of practical dispositions. The article focuses on the European Neighbourhood Policy - the EU’s flagship initiative - and builds on a unique set of data that combine policy documents and interviews with about 30 EU officials and national diplomats from before and after the Arab uprisings. In this way, it illustrates how practice relates to change in that even though the EU’s responses drew on an established repertoire of practice, enacting it in a new context opened up new possibilities for action. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 Sanusi experience in Libya. It also considers more informal practices – theRipublikin the Rif or the political system of the Ait ‘Atta, based on egalitarian access to water. It concludes with some observations on the roles these experiences have played in establishing political cultures which informed the outcomes of recent political change in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars have recently begun to examine how authoritarian rulers cooperate with each other in order to fend off popular challenges to their power. During the Arab Spring the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council ( GCC) supported fellow authoritarian regimes in some cases while backing opposition movements in others. Existing theoretical approaches fail to explain this variation. Advancing the study on authoritarian cooperation, this article develops a theoretical approach that sets out to explain how authoritarian regimes reach their decisions. Drawing on poliheuristic foreign policy analysis, it argues that perceptions of similarity serve as a filter for estimating threats to regime survival at home. If regimes perceive the situation in other countries as similar to their own, supporting other authoritarian regimes becomes the only acceptable strategy. In contrast, if perceptions of similarity are low, regimes also consider other options and evaluate their implications beyond the domestic political arena. Applying this framework to the example of the GCC states during the Arab Spring, the analysis reveals covariation between perceptions of similarity and threat among GCC regimes, on the one hand, and their strategies, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the place of the Amazigh movement and communities in the evolving political fortunes of North African states. It evaluates the prospects for attaining a genuine recognition of Amazigh ethnocultural demands as part of a broader democratic transformation of society and state, and the Amazigh movement's likely contribution to that transformation. The Amazigh movement has the potential to make alliance with governments and other sectors of societies, in part to try and balance the strength of Islamist groups. However, the process is only at the beginning stages, and there is also a possibility that Amazigh self-assertion may lead to greater polarization of North African societies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The EU has loudly voiced its intention to facilitate poverty reduction and democratisation in North Africa. In particular, it seeks to conclude Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements (DCFTAs) with Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. These are seen as a vital response to the Arab Spring – integrating North African countries into the globalised economy. Applying a moral economy perspective, this article argues, however, that, while ‘Normative Power Europe’ seeks to build more tranquil societies in the region, its trade policies nevertheless threaten to exacerbate poverty and social unrest. The prospect of de-industrialisation in the wake of FTAs will do much to entrench economic asymmetries between the European metropole and its neighbours. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]