Extractivism in the Maghreb: Class, State and Geopolitics

Centered on Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, this book interrogates the complex entanglements between extractivism, state power, class formation, and geopolitical reorientation in North Africa. While the global energy transition promises economic diversification and sustainable development, the international contributors to this volume show how “green extractivism” often reproduces older structures of dependency and inequality, and therefore authoritarianism consolidates. Rather than fostering transformation, rent economies adapt, stabilize, and reconfigure themselves through new sources of rent and new modes of social control. The book makes three core contributions. First, it offers a historically grounded and theoretically informed understanding of rent economies in the Maghreb, tracing how colonial legacies of resource extraction evolved into postcolonial patterns of rentier governance. Second, it introduces a class-analytical perspective to debates on extractivism, arguing that rent not only finances authoritarian regimes, but also shapes dynamic social coalitions, “state classes,” and cycles of contention and co-optation. Third, the book develops a comparative approach to the political economy of green transformation, focusing on the interplay between domestic rent regimes and external pressures from global markets, international donors, and climate politics. By anchoring each case study in concrete struggles, everyday experiences, and contested claims to resources, the book reveals how global transformations are mediated, resisted, and reappropriated from below. The book will be vital reading for those interested in political economy, development studies, and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) studies. It will particularly appeal to scholars working on extractivism, rentier states, authoritarianism, postcolonial development, and the political sociology of class and class struggle.