The Imider protest camp: resistance by repossession and lived citizenship at the global margins of Moroccan society

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article delves into the eight-year protest camp of Imider (2011–2019), analyzing important shifts both in forms of resistance as well as in political subjectivity within Morocco’s protest landscape. The camp was the place/space where a historical struggle against one of the largest silver mines in Africa converged and new lived practices, relationships and subjectivities materialized. We explore the intricate connections between lived citizenship and what we term ‘resistance by repossession’. We aim to understand how meanings of citizenship are (re)made from below as a response to accumulation by dispossession and driven by the intimate ties between marginalized communities and land. In this process, activists deliberately crossed the boundaries and affinities of the nation-state in search of meanings and alliances elsewhere, highlighting the more complex spatialities of lived citizenship and resistance from the margins.