Bachelor's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

The French colonizer from 1912–1956 brought not only the French language to Morocco but also a colonial administration that reinforced divisions between various indigenous social groups. European, Jewish, Muslim, and Berber communities were segregated into separate schools providing different levels of French-language education. As a result, French linguistic dominance and economic opportunity were assured among some groups more thoroughly than others. Acquisition of the French language for European and Jewish communities through advanced educational opportunities at the European lycées and Jewish Alliance Israélite Universelle granted certain higher educational, economic, and administrative privileges within the colonial administration and workforce. Meanwhile, those attending schools created for Muslim and Berber Moroccans where curricula insisted on rudimentary French skills were unable to seek advanced educational or economic opportunity. This research describes the different types of access to the French language that were intended for the diverse European, Jewish, Berber, and Arab speech communities through the various educational institutions created by the French government during the French protectorate in Morocco. Through the application of Bourdieu’s language market theory, this dissertation examines the ways that access became linked to the job market and the attainment of symbolic, economic, and cultural capital. This research offers explanations of how language shift occurred among European and Jews in Morocco and how French continued to confer socioeconomic value long after independence, despite efforts to oust the “colonizer’s language” for all Moroccans. Furthermore, in contradiction to Bourdieu’s language market theory, this research exposes how multiple language markets in Morocco emerged for Muslim and Berber communities as a result of access to different kinds of instruction and how both French and Arabic became legitimate languages with very different social functions. / text

The aim of the present study is to cast new light on the nature of definiteness marking in Moroccan Arabic (MA). Previous work on the dialect group has described its definiteness system as similar to that of other Arabic varieties, where indefinite entities are unmarked and a "definite article" /l-/ modifies nouns to convey a definite meaning. Such descriptions, however, do not fully account for the behavior of MA nouns in spontaneous natural speech, as found in the small self-collected corpus that informs the study: on one hand, /l-/ can and regularly does co-occur with indefinite meanings; on the other, a number of nouns can exhibit definiteness even in the absence of /l-/. In response to these challenges, the study puts forth an alternate synchronic description the system, arguing that the historical definite article */l-/ has in fact lost its association with definiteness and has instead become lexicalized into an unmarked form of the noun that can appear in any number of semantic contexts. Relatedly, the study argues that the historically indefinite form *Ø has come under heavy syntactic constraints and can best be described as derived from the new unmarked form via a process of phonologically conditioned disfixation, represented {- /l/}. At the same time, MA has also apparently retained an older particle ši and developed an article waħəd, both of which can be used to express different types of indefinite meanings. To support the plausibility of this new description, the study turns to the linguistic history of definiteness in MA, describing how a combination of internal and external impetuses for change likely pushed the dialect toward article loss, a development upon which semantic reanalysis and syntactic restructuring of other forms then followed. If the claim that MA no longer overtly marks definiteness is indeed correct, the study could have a significant impact on work that used previous MA descriptions to make grammaticality judgments, as well as be of value to future work on processes of grammaticalization and language contact. / text

The purpose of this research is to examine the socio-economic legacies of the French Protectorate in Morocco and the attitude of modern-day Moroccans to that legacy, through a series of in-depth interviews with a wide range of people who lived through colonialism and came after it. I use these interviews alongside documents of the time and the findings of contemporary commentators to chart the establishment of the Protectorate's social and economic policies in Morocco and how they destroyed the traditional infrastructure and cultural heritage of the country to replace them by a more 'modern and civilised' westernised system. I argue that, although some good did come from French colonialism in Morocco, these policies were not viable and so, when decolonisation came about, the country was unable to sustain itself and, therefore, had no choice but to continue to look to France both financially and educationally. Through highlighting how France transformed every aspect of Moroccan life to match that of la Métropole, this research shows why Moroccans find it so hard to shake off their colonial past, why they continue to use the French language in business, politics and education and why, unless Morocco steps out of the shadow of its former occupier, and make its own way in the world, they feel it will never be truly independent.

Today, most Muslim-majority countries must contend with two realities: Islamists’ increasing access to political participation on the one hand and domestic and international pressures for women’s rights on the other. This dissertation seeks to identify the conditions necessary for resolving tensions between Islamist demands for political inclusion and secular feminists’ demands for the institutionalization of women’s rights in Muslim-majority countries. Attempts at gender reform have not only been rare, but have also usually excluded either secular feminists or Islamists due to state actors’ inability or unwillingness to resolve conflict between them. In some contexts, however, power holders have initiated inclusive consultative arrangements, mechanisms (commissions, committees, and mediation) that enable both secular feminists and Islamists to participate in gender policy-making processes, in spite of divergent ideological preferences, and thereby generated more broadly supported reforms. This dissertation argues that attempts at conflict resolution between secular feminists and Islamists are more likely to arise in the context of an autonomous state where the power holder needs the support of both groups. Such a state has both the flexibility and willingness to include both Islamists and secular feminists in the policy-making process. In states that do not enjoy autonomy from non-state actors, the state is less likely to have the flexibility to adopt policy-making processes that do not serve the politicized interests of dominant actors. I build this argument by conducting a comparative historical analysis of state development and relations among power holders, secular feminists, and Islamists, as well as drawing on interviews with politicians, bureaucrats, scholars, and activists in Morocco and Bangladesh. In both of these countries, secular feminists and Islamists have had antagonistic relations and ideological differences, but both groups participated in gender policy reform in Morocco, whereas in Bangladesh, multiple attempts at gender policy-making have excluded one group or the other. I then assess the extent to which an argument based on state autonomy and political alliances explains variation in the inclusiveness of gender policy-making processes in four other Muslim-majority countries (Jordan, Malaysia, Turkey, and Pakistan). / Government

No description available.

The thesis examines how the European Commission incorporated and implemented migration policy as part of the European Union’s external relations, also known as the external dimension of migration. The focus of the thesis is on the period between the coming into force of the Amsterdam Treaty in 1999, when migration largely came to fall under the Commission’s remit, and the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. The study compares how the Commission’s Directorates-General (DGs) involved in the external dimension of migration during this period—Justice, Liberty and Security, External Relations and Development—made sense of the changes introduced to their responsibilities. The thesis proposes that the concept of organisational culture, drawn from organisational sociology, can explain how actors interact with and collectively make sense of their organisational environment. The main argument of the thesis is that each of the DGs possesses an organisational culture based on its members’ shared readings of priorities and the function of their unit. The thesis examines these divergent organisational cultures to gauge how policies are internalised and translated into output. The analysis contributes to the external governance literature, which has theorised the external dimension of migration as a continuation of European integration processes without accounting for internal organisational dynamics. It also leads to reflections on organisational sociology theorising, and the implications of the findings on studies of organisational change and implementation. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first provides a background for how the Commission came to be involved in migration policy. The second provides a theoretical framework for the study, building on organisational sociology. The remaining chapters empirically analyse the three elements of organisational culture: DG members’ sources of organisational identity, their perceptions and prioritisations of the external dimension of migration, and their reading of the Commission’s implementation practices, focusing on relations with Morocco as a tool for illustrating the latter.

<p>How do political leaders strategically manage fiscal policy formation to enhance their political survival? What are the implications of the fiscal mechanics of survival for theories of redistribution and democratic transition? This dissertation examines the complex relationship between political regime types and fiscal information asymmetries. I focus on budgetary policies (taxation and public spending) as major strategic tools available to the executive for co-optation and punishment of opponents. I argue that allowing some degree of contestation and transparency on the fiscal contract in electoral authoritarian regimes helps the executive identify distributive claims and co-opt the opposition. Paradoxically, in new democracies, political survival depends more on lower levels of budget transparency than existent theories would have us expect. Chapters 1 and 2 present a general formal model from which I derive the major hypotheses of the study. Second, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 use new cross-national measures of fiscal transparency and test empirically the theoretical implications. The statistical models confirm the main theoretical intuitions. Finally, Chapter 6 compares in greater detail the evolution of fiscal transparency in Morocco, Turkey and Romania between 1950 and 2000. I argue that fiscal taboos closely followed the shifting political alliance and their distributional consequences for leader's survival.</p> / Dissertation

During the Protectorate period (1912-1956), the vast majority of Moroccan mines were privately owned. The investors were mainly French. This general picture is in agreement with the fact that Morocco was under the domination of France and consequently a privileged field for French investors. However two major events do not fit into the above description. The first occurred in 1921 : the creation of the Office Chérifien des Phosphates, a public company which had the monopoly of the exploration and the exploitation of Moroccan phosphate. The second occurred in 1928 : the creation of the Bureau de Recherches et de Participations Minières, a public body which acquired one third of the only Moroccan coal mine, and obtained afterwards shares of several mines and directed oil exploration in Morocco. In order to integrate these two events into the global development of the Moroccan mining industry it will be shown that these authoritarian measures on the part of the State were taken because it was necessary to find a way of bypassing the international constraints bearing on Morocco at the beginning of the Protectorate period. European countries did not object to French domination over Morocco as long as French investments would not be favoured against those of other countries. Therefore the open-door regime was established in Morocco. In the twenties, the French Government and the Protectorate administration were increasingly worried by the growing influence of foreign investors and by the very slow rate of development of the Moroccan mining industry. Therefore, as French interests could not be favoured directly, because of the open-door regime, the only solution was to reinforce the power of the State. From the thirties onwards, French investors were in a dominant position and no longer needed State intervention in order to protect them. Consequently, the role of the Bureau de Recherches et de Participations Minières was reduced to that of a public fund which only invested in those sectors which were not considered as profitable by private investors.

Zugl.: Münster, Univ., Diss., 2003