Despite Court Protection Orders, Trump Admin Deports Refugees to War-Torn Central African Republic, Putting ‘Lives at Risk’

“It’s hard to fathom how deeply evil this is,” said Sen. Chris Murphy.

Central African Republic soldiers and Tanzanian peacekeepers of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) patrol during a joint operation near Carnot on May 25, 2026.
(Photo by Pacome PABANDJI / AFP via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Jun 12, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The US government advises Americans not to travel to the Central African Republic “for any reason.” But it just deported nearly two dozen people to the war-torn country, including several refugees who fled persecution in other nations.

On Friday morning, Human Rights First’s deportation flight tracker reported that a plane used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had landed in Accra, Ghana, after departing from Louisiana the previous day and was believed to be en route to the CAR’s capital, Bangui.

Per The New York Times on Thursday, the administration was preparing to deport “at least two Iranian women who had sought refuge in the United States” as well as “migrants from Afghanistan and Syria.”

According to their lawyers, several of the migrants had received court orders from judges prohibiting their deportation to their home countries, citing the risk of persecution there.

A lawyer for one of the Iranian women told the Times that neither of them has a criminal record and that they both have been granted court protection due to fear of threats to their freedom or lives if they returned to Iran. One is a Christian convert, and the other is a pro-democracy activist.

According to Reuters, just the activist ended up on the flight from Louisiana. But the Christian woman is still at risk, along with another Iranian national.

The burden of proof to receive what is known as a “withholding of removal” status from an immigration judge is even higher than that needed for migrants to qualify for asylum.

Those seeking their deportations to be halted must demonstrate that it’s more likely than not that their life or freedom would be threatened if they returned to a specific country due to their race, religion, nationality, or political or social affiliation.

In order to get around orders protecting these migrants from deportation to their home countries, the administration is instead dumping them in what have been described as “third countries.”

The flight departed on Thursday is the first US deportation flight to the CAR, which is one of the poorest countries in the world and is reeling from a civil war that’s displaced more than a million people both inside and outside the country.

The country is under the State Department’s highest travel advisory, warning US citizens not to go there “due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, health, and terrorism.”



“People on this flight proved to a judge that they were likely to be persecuted in their home countries,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “This is profoundly unjust.”

Human rights law experts Anjli Parrin and Savi Arvey wrote on Wednesday for Just Security that the administration was putting “lives at risk” by sending these migrants to a dangerous country where they know nobody and where basic healthcare infrastructure hardly exists.

They said the administration’s deportation of these migrants “is the latest example of its dangerous and potentially life-threatening strategy: using secretive deals with countries to expel asylum seekers and migrants with no legal or personal connection to the places where they are being sent.”

“Since early last year, the US government has signed a growing number of third-country forced transfer agreements with over 30 countries worldwide to expel and deport people to places where they have no legal or personal ties,” they said.

“These deportations are often carried out in secrecy and without any semblance of due process,” they added. “Individuals are often not given any advance warning or the opportunity to challenge their deportation to a third country—with many only discovering they are being sent to a country they may have never heard of while airborne.”

Emily Trostle, a lawyer for the Iranian activist, told Reuters that the migrants facing deportation to the CAR “have absolutely no connection to this place.”

“These individuals are being removed from the United States and abandoned in a country where they have no status, no connection, and no support network,” she said. “We fear they will ultimately be forced to return to the countries they originally fled.”

According to Human Rights First’s Third Country Deportation Watch, governments around the world have been given $44 million from US taxpayers to receive these migrants. More than 19,000 people, it found, have been deported across 24 countries.

Most of them have been sent to Mexico, but the US has also shipped migrants to some of the poorest, most unstable nations in sub-Saharan Africa, including Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, and Sierra Leone. Many have faced arbitrary detention and torture or been returned to the country where they fled persecution.

In order to avoid having to allow over 1,000 Afghans who fought alongside US soldiers to settle as refugees in the US as planned, the Trump administration is reportedly trying to ink a deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo to take them instead, but the plan was stalled amid public backlash, and the administration is seeking other options.

The Iranian American Legal Defense Fund said on Thursday that the deportation of Iranian nationals was a “potentially fatal action,” as they could face danger in the CAR or be sent back to Iran.

Another person scheduled to be deported to the CAR was an elderly man from Syria, whose immigration attorney, Margaret Stock, told the Times that he had scars all over his body due to torture in his home country.

He is a Sufi Muslim and feared persecution if he returned there, and is in danger of lacking access to care for his diabetes if sent to the CAR. According to Stock, he received an emergency temporary order halting his deportation.

Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.), the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee in charge of funding for the Department of Homeland Security and its immigration agencies, responded to the Times report on the deportations with outrage.

“It’s hard to fathom how deeply evil this is, and that we have people running our country who get sick pleasure from sending women fleeing violence in Iran to an African country in the middle of a brutal civil war,” he said.

Reichlin-Melnick agreed: “Evil is the right word for... taking people who are safe in the United States, who have proven to a judge they would be persecuted in their home country, and dumping them in a random country in the middle of a civil war.”

“No previous administration would have done this, despite it likely being legal,” he added.

US flight carrying deported migrants lands in Central African Republic

The first plane carrying Iranian, Afghan, Turkish and Georgian migrants deported from the United States arrived in Bangui in the Central African Republic on Friday evening as part of a controversial US programme to send undocumented foreigners – some of whom have legal protections – to third countries. The Central African Republic is the latest country to join the list of African nations that have agreed to accept people deported from the US.


Issued on: 13/06/2026 
By: FRANCE 24

A general view shows part of the capital Bangui, Central African Republic on February 16, 2016. © Siegfried Modola, Reuters

A US deportation flight landed in the Central African Republic on Friday, lawyers and activists said, carrying nationals from Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and Georgia as part of the latest "third-country" deportation under US President Donald Trump.

Deportations of people – including those with legal protections – to countries where they have no links have become a staple Trump's expanded crackdown on immigration.

The US State Department advisory for the impoverished, violence-wracked Central African Republic reads: "Do not travel to Central African Republic for any reason."

Eye on Africa: Migrants deported from US stuck in DRC

Cover image: © France 24
01:49

Trump has described Iran, with whom Washington is currently at war, as a "terrorist regime" but is nonetheless deporting nationals who have fled the country, including at least two Iranian women slated for the flight, their lawyer said.

The Iranians had been granted "withholding of removal" – a status that carries weaker rights than asylum but has been considered a "win" in immigration court under previous administrations.

"We fear they will ultimately be forced to return to the countries they originally fled," as has repeatedly happened with other deportees sent across Africa, their attorney, Emily Trostle, told AFP.

The flight took off from Alexandria, Louisiana, on Thursday evening, according to the ICE Flight Monitor, affiliated with non-profit Human Rights First.

It then made a scheduled stopover in Ghana – which is itself a hub for third-country deportations – Friday afternoon and landed in Central African capital Bangui around 2100 GMT.

It was unclear if some people were to be taken off the plane in Ghana or if they were all sent to the Central African Republic, said Alma David, a US immigration lawyer familiar with the case.

Ghanaian immigration authorities did not respond to a request for comment.

She said those headed to the Central African Republic "are mainly withholding grantees from a variety of countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Georgia".

In recent years, a United Nations peacekeeping mission, Rwandan troops and Russian mercenaries have helped to improve the Central African Republic's security situation.

But anti-government fighters and armed groups are still present throughout the unstable, mineral-rich country.

Previous allegations of abuse

As part of its crackdown, the Trump administration has expanded who is targeted for deportation and where they can be sent.

Washington has argued it is only barred from sending people with "withholding of removal" to their country of origin – and thus can send them anywhere else, even if those countries then send them home.

Deportees and lawyers have described unsanitary holding conditions in Ghana and indefinite detention in Eswatini, among other alleged abuses.

Failed American dream: Deportees restart their lives in Guatemala

Cover image: FOCUS © FRANCE 24
05:40

From Ghana and Equatorial Guinea, another African hub, some people have been sent back home to countries in which US judges ruled they faced danger.

It was not clear what would happen to the deportees upon arrival in the Central African Republic.

It appears to be Bangui's first accord with Washington, which has made a slew of opaque deportation deals in Africa and elsewhere.

"We don't know if these migrants who are coming to and will be received on Central African soil are in transit or if they are entitled to apply for asylum," Paul Crescent Beninga, a political scientist and civil society leader, told AFP.

"The government doesn't want to provide any answers, the government isn't communicating."

A State Department spokesman said "we remain unwavering in our commitment to end illegal and mass immigration" but did not answer questions about the terms of the deal.

Central African authorities did not respond to a request for comment.

"These individuals are being removed from the United States and abandoned in a country where they have no status, no connection and no support network," Trostle said.

Last week, a lawsuit was filed with the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights – the continent's top human rights body – to halt US deportations to Equatorial Guinea, a small, authoritarian petro-state that has served as a waystation for African deportees.

The lawsuit also seeks to stop Equatorial Guinea's onward expulsion of the deportees to their home countries.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

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MULTITUDE WAR AND DEMOCRACY IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE MICHAEL HARDT...

Michael Hardt and Anronio Negri.

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Deciphering The History Of Morocco: Continuity, Rupture, And The Making Of A North African Civilization – Analysis

May 30, 2026 

By Dr. Mohamed Chtatou

Abstract

This essay offers a comprehensive historiographical examination of Morocco from prehistoric settlement to the post-independence era. Drawing on archaeological evidence, medieval Arabic chronicles, colonial archives, and contemporary scholarship, the essay traces Morocco’s development as a distinct political and cultural entity at the intersection of Amazigh, Arab, African, Andalusian, and European civilizations. Particular attention is paid to the founding and succession of dynastic states—Idrisid, Almoravid, Almohad, Marinid, Saadian, and Alaoui—as well as to the processes by which Moroccan society negotiated Islamic identity, imperial ambition, and colonial penetration. The analysis situates Morocco within broader global and regional frameworks while foregrounding the agency of indigenous populations. The essay concludes by assessing Morocco’s post-1956 trajectory and the historiographical debates that continue to animate scholarly enquiry.

1. Introduction: The Challenge of Moroccan Historiography

Morocco occupies a singular position in global historical consciousness: it is at once the westernmost extension of the Arab world, the heartland of Amazigh (Berber) civilization, a conduit of trans-Saharan commerce, and a society shaped by successive waves of Andalusian, sub-Saharan African, and European influence without losing a recognizable core identity (Laroui, 1977). Yet precisely because of this complexity, Moroccan history has long resisted easy narration. Colonial-era scholars, most prominently those operating within the intellectual framework of the French Protectorate (1912–1956), produced accounts that systematically undervalued indigenous agency, projected racial and civilizational hierarchies onto the historical record, and privileged rupture over continuity (Burke, 1972). Postcolonial historians, Moroccan nationalists, and Anglophone social scientists have collectively worked to dismantle these distortions, though the field remains marked by productive methodological tensions.

This essay undertakes a synthetic reading of Moroccan history from the earliest documented human settlement through the consolidation of the post-independence state. It does not claim exhaustiveness but aims instead for analytical density: to identify the structural forces, key transitions, and recurring themes that give Moroccan history its distinctive shape. Following the influential framework proposed by Laroui (1977), the essay treats Moroccan history not as a series of discrete episodes but as a long-run dialectic between centripetal forces—Islamic universalism, makhzen authority, and urban scholarly culture—and centrifugal pressures—tribal autonomy, regional particularism, and external conquest. This dialectic, it will be argued, is the master key to deciphering Morocco’s past and anticipating its future.

2. Prehistoric and Protohistoric Morocco: The Amazigh Substratum

Any serious account of Moroccan history must begin not with the Arab conquest of the seventh century CE, as colonial historiography frequently implied, but with the Paleolithic populations whose material culture has been recovered from sites across the Maghreb. Fossil evidence from the Jebel Irhoud site in western Morocco, dramatically reanalyzed by Hublin et al. (2017), places anatomically modern Homo sapiens in this region approximately 300,000 years ago, predating previously accepted chronologies by a substantial margin and positioning Morocco as one of the probable zones of human cognitive emergence. This discovery carries profound implications for the self-understanding of the region’s indigenous inhabitants, the Imazighen (singular: Amazigh), whose ancestors populated North Africa long before the first historical civilizations of the Mediterranean littoral established themselves.


By the first millennium BCE, Berber-speaking populations had established complex agropastoral societies across the Maghreb, engaging in trade with Phoenician colonies on the northern Moroccan coast—most notably Lixus (near present-day Larache) and Tingis (Tangier). These contacts introduced literacy, coinage, and Mediterranean commodity networks but did not fundamentally alter the Berber social structure organized around lineage groups, transhumant pastoralism, and confederal political authority (Camps, 1987). The Mauretanian kingdoms that emerged in the last centuries BCE—particularly that of Juba II (c. 25 BCE–23 CE), a Romanized client king whose court at Caesarea blended Hellenistic, Roman, and Berber cultural elements—demonstrated the capacity of Amazigh elites to selectively appropriate external cultural frameworks while maintaining indigenous political forms (Roller, 2003). Rome’s incorporation of Mauretania Tingitana as a province in 40 CE extended imperial administration into northern Morocco but never achieved effective penetration of the mountainous interior, a pattern of partial external control that would recur throughout Moroccan history.

The Amazigh substratum is not merely an archaeological or prehistoric phenomenon; it is a continuous living presence in Moroccan history. Tamazight languages—Tachelhit in the Anti-Atlas and Souss, Central Atlas Tamazight, and Tarifit in the Rif—remained spoken by substantial majorities of the Moroccan population throughout the Islamic period and into the twenty-first century. The cultural practices, customary law (izerf), and social organization associated with Amazigh communities shaped the texture of Moroccan life in ways that Arabic chronicles systematically obscured (Gellner, 1969; Hammoudi, 1997). Acknowledging this substratum is therefore not an act of romantic primordialism but a historiographical corrective essential to any accurate account of what Morocco is and how it came to be.

3. The Arab Conquest and the Islamization of Morocco (647–788 CE)

The Arab Muslim conquest of North Africa, launched from Egypt in the mid-seventh century, reached the Moroccan interior only after decades of fierce Berber resistance. ʿUqba ibn Nafiʿ’s celebrated raid to the Atlantic shore (c. 682 CE) was less a conquest than an extended razzia; effective Islamic administration in Morocco was not established until the campaigns of Musa ibn Nusayr in the first decade of the eighth century (Brett & Fentress, 1996). The resistance of the Berber warrior leader known in Arabic sources as al-Kahina—whose identification, historicity, and significance remain subjects of scholarly debate—has become a potent symbol of Amazigh agency against Arab imperialism, though contemporary historians caution against reading modern nationalist categories into early medieval social conflicts (Modéran, 2003).

The process of Islamization was gradual, uneven, and deeply conditioned by Berber social structures. Islam spread not primarily through military coercion but through the activities of traveling scholars, Sufi orders (turuq), and the prestige associated with Arabic literacy and Islamic law. Crucially, the Kharijite movement—a puritanical Islamic tendency emphasizing the equality of all Muslims regardless of ethnic origin—found enormous resonance among Berber populations resentful of Arab fiscal exploitation and social condescension (Savage, 1997). The Kharijite revolts of 739–743 CE were among the most serious challenges ever faced by the Umayyad caliphate and effectively ended Arab imperial control over the Maghreb, opening the political space in which the first distinctly Moroccan Islamic dynasty would emerge.


That dynasty was the Idrisid, founded by Idris ibn Abdallah, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad who fled the Abbasid massacre of Alid partisans and found refuge among the Berber Awraba confederation of northern Morocco in 789 CE (Terrasse, 1949–1950). His son Idris II (r. 804–828 CE) founded the city of Fez, which would become the intellectual and spiritual capital of Morocco for twelve subsequent centuries. The Idrisid state was politically fragile—fragmenting rapidly after Idris II’s death among competing princely lines—but its symbolic legacy was immense: it established the template of a Morocco governed by a sharif (descendant of the Prophet) who derived legitimacy simultaneously from Islamic genealogy, Berber tribal alliance, and urban scholarly endorsement. This tripartite legitimation formula would underpin Moroccan political culture down to the present day (Waterbury, 1970).

4. The Berber Imperial Dynasties: Almoravids, Almohads, and Marinids (1040–1465)

The eleventh century inaugurated what many historians regard as Morocco’s most consequential contribution to world history: the rise of the Almoravid and Almohad movements, which projected Moroccan power across the entire western Mediterranean world. The Almoravid (al-Murabitun) movement originated among the Sanhaja Berbers of the western Sahara, inspired by the reformist teaching of Abdallah ibn Yasin, who had studied with the Maliki jurists of Kairouan and returned determined to impose orthodox Islamic practice on the lax religious environment of the Saharan confederation (Messier, 2010). The movement combined military discipline, puritan religious reform, and shrewd political organization: by the 1060s the Almoravids had conquered Morocco and founded Marrakech (1070) as their imperial capital; by 1086 they had crossed into the Iberian Peninsula in response to appeals from Andalusian Muslim rulers threatened by the Christian Reconquista, decisively defeating Alfonso VI of Castile at the Battle of Sagrajas (Bosch Vilá, 1956).


The Almoravid empire at its height encompassed Morocco, western Algeria, much of West Africa, and al-Andalus, making it one of the largest Islamic states of its era. Yet it proved institutionally fragile. The second generation of rulers, acculturated to the luxury of Andalusian court life, lost the austere reforming energy of the founders, and the movement was ultimately overthrown by an even more radical reformation emerging from the High Atlas Mountains: the Almohad (al-Muwahhidun) movement, founded by Ibn Tumart, an Amazigh scholar from the Masmuda confederation who had studied in the Islamic East and returned convinced that the Almoravids had lapsed into anthropomorphism and juridical rigidity (Fierro, 2011). The Almohad caliphate (1121–1269) represents the apogee of medieval Moroccan imperial power, reuniting the Almoravid domains under Abd al-Mumin and his successors and briefly controlling the entire Maghreb.

The cultural achievement of the Almohad courts of Marrakech and Seville was equally remarkable. These courts patronized Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whose Aristotelian commentaries shaped the entire trajectory of European scholasticism; Ibn Tufayl, the philosopher-novelist; and Maimonides, the Jewish theologian born in Cordoba, whose intellectual formation occurred in part within Almohad cultural orbit (Urvoy, 1991). This efflorescence—the product of precisely the multi-civilizational confluence that characterizes Moroccan history—has sometimes been overshadowed by scholarly emphasis on Almohad religious intolerance, but it represents a genuine intellectual achievement of world-historical significance. The Almohad collapse, precipitated by military defeats in Iberia (Las Navas de Tolosa, 1212) and by internal tribal rebellions, eventually produced the Marinid dynasty (1244–1465), another Berber confederation that established its capital at Fez, rebuilt the great madrasas of that city, and struggled perpetually to maintain control of al-Andalus and fend off internal challenges (Shatzmiller, 1976).

5. Sharifi Dynasties and the Consolidation of the Moroccan State (1465–1664)

The decline of the Marinids inaugurated a prolonged political crisis in which religious legitimacy increasingly displaced genealogical Berber identity as the primary currency of political authority. The Wattasid regents who displaced the Marinids lacked effective control over the countryside, and their inability to resist Portuguese expansion along the Atlantic littoral—Ceuta fell in 1415, Arzila and Tangier in 1471—created a legitimacy crisis that sharifi religious movements were well positioned to exploit (Cour, 1920). The Saadian dynasty (1509–1659), originating in the Draa Valley of southern Morocco and claiming Prophetic descent, built its power on a combination of religious prestige, anti-Portuguese jihad, and control of the trans-Saharan gold and salt trade.

The Saadian victory at the Battle of the Three Kings (Wadi al-Makhazin, 1578)—in which the Portuguese king Sebastian I, a Moroccan pretender backed by Portugal, and the reigning Saadian sultan Abd al-Malik all perished—became one of the most celebrated military episodes in Moroccan national memory and definitively ended Portuguese ambitions of territorial conquest in Morocco (Bovill, 1958). The subsequent reign of Ahmad al-Mansur (1578–1603) marked the summit of Saadian power: his conquest of the Songhai Empire in 1591, deploying a Moroccan army across the Sahara to seize the Niger Bend, projected Moroccan influence deep into sub-Saharan Africa and temporarily monopolized the gold trade that had for centuries underpinned North African commercial prosperity (Hunwick, 1999).


The Alaoui dynasty, which traces its lineage to the Prophet through the Hasanid line and has governed Morocco continuously from the mid-seventeenth century to the present, emerged from the chaos of Saadian collapse. The founder Moulay al-Rashid (r. 1664–1672), and especially his successor Moulay Ismail (r. 1672–1727), reconstructed the Moroccan state on foundations of extraordinary durability: a professional army composed largely of sub-Saharan African soldiers (abid al-Bukhari), a network of royal residences and garrisons across the country, and a sophisticated manipulation of religious symbolism that made the sultan simultaneously Commander of the Faithful, protector of Islamic scholars, and cosmic mediator between the divine and the Moroccan community (Ennaji, 1999; Laroui, 1977). The Alaoui state thus institutionalized the legitimation formula first articulated by the Idrisids—Islamic genealogy, tribal alliance, and scholarly endorsement—in a durable administrative form.

6. Morocco in the Age of European Imperialism (1800–1912)

The nineteenth century subjected the Moroccan state to pressures of a qualitatively different order from anything previously experienced. The expansion of European industrial capitalism, backed by overwhelming military force, systematically dismantled the political and economic autonomy of non-European polities across the globe. Morocco’s experience of this process was mediated by its geostrategic position—its Atlantic and Mediterranean coastlines made it a focal point of European imperial rivalry—and by the relative sophistication of its diplomatic class, which skillfully played European powers against one another for several decades before the logic of informal and then formal empire became irresistible (Burke, 1976).


The French conquest of Algeria (1830) immediately transformed Morocco’s strategic situation, creating a land frontier with a European imperial power and generating a flow of Algerian refugees—most notably the resistance leader Abd al-Qadir—that repeatedly dragged Morocco into conflict with France. The Battle of Isly (1844), in which a French force routed a Moroccan army that had been supporting Algerian resistance, demonstrated the disparity of military capability and forced Morocco into a humiliating treaty (Julien, 1964). The simultaneous Spanish bombardment and occupation of Tetouan during the First Moroccan-Spanish War (1859–1860) compounded this lesson in strategic vulnerability, as did the growing penetration of the Moroccan economy by European commercial interests backed by extraterritorial legal privileges.

The Moroccan sultans of the second half of the nineteenth century—Muhammad IV, Hassan I, and Abd al-Aziz—pursued contradictory strategies of reform and resistance. Hassan I (r. 1873–1894) undertook the most sustained modernization effort of the pre-Protectorate era, reorganizing the army on European lines, reforming the tax system, and dispatching diplomatic and military missions to Europe, but his reforms were consistently undermined by fiscal exhaustion produced by the indemnities and commercial concessions extracted by European creditors (Burke, 1976). The Algeciras Conference of 1906, at which the major European powers effectively decided Morocco’s fate without Moroccan participation, crystallized the structural logic of colonial partition: Morocco was too weak to defend its sovereignty, too wealthy and strategically positioned to be left independent (Andrew & Kanya-Forstner, 1981).

The Treaty of Fez (1912), by which Sultan Abd al-Hafid accepted French and Spanish protectorates over Morocco, formally ended Moroccan sovereignty. It did not, however, end Moroccan resistance. The rural insurrection of Ahmad al-Hiba briefly seized Marrakech in August 1912 before being suppressed by French forces under Hubert Lyautey. More sustained resistance came from the Rif and Atlas Mountains, where Amazigh tribal confederations mounted military campaigns that taxed colonial resources for decades. The Republic of the Rif, established by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi (1921–1926), was the most remarkable of these formations: a proto-state with its own constitution, diplomatic apparatus, and military force that inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the Spanish Army of Africa at Annual (1921) before being suppressed by a combined Franco-Spanish force employing chemical weapons (Woolman, 1968; Pennell, 2000).

7. The French Protectorate: Colonial Transformation and Nationalist Response (1912–1956)

The French Protectorate in Morocco is conventionally divided between the architectonic phase associated with Resident-General Lyautey (1912–1925) and the subsequent period of more conventional colonial exploitation. Lyautey’s ideology of respectful domination (politique des égards) involved preserving the formal apparatus of the Moroccan sultanate, maintaining the medinas as living urban heritage, and governing through existing social hierarchies—a strategy that differed rhetorically, if not always practically, from the assimilationist model pursued in Algeria (Rivet, 1996). The physical separation of colonial villes nouvelles from preexisting medinas—visible today in Fez, Marrakech, Casablanca, and Rabat—embodied this philosophy in stone and brick while simultaneously revealing its underlying spatial logic of racial segregation.


Economically, the Protectorate transformed Morocco in ways that were profound and largely asymmetrical. The construction of modern infrastructure—railways, ports, roads, telegraph networks—integrated Morocco into the circuits of the world economy primarily as an exporter of phosphates (discovered at Khouribga in 1920 and developed into the world’s largest known reserve), agricultural products, and labor. The colonization of agricultural land by European settlers dispossessed thousands of rural families and contributed to the explosive growth of Casablanca, which expanded from a small coastal town of approximately 20,000 inhabitants in 1907 to a metropolis of over 600,000 by 1952 (Adam, 1968). This urbanization created the social conditions—literate young men displaced from rural communities, exposed to egalitarian ideologies through both Islamic reformism and secular nationalism—in which the independence movement would be forged.

The Istiqlal (Independence) Party, founded in 1943, articulated a nationalism that fused Islamic modernism, Arabism, and constitutional liberalism. Its founding manifesto simultaneously presented to the Allies, Sultan Muhammad V, and the French authorities demanded Moroccan independence under the sultan’s leadership. The French decision to depose and exile Sultan Muhammad V to Madagascar in August 1953 galvanized Moroccan public opinion in ways the colonial administration had catastrophically failed to anticipate (Halstead, 1967). The sultan’s exile transformed him from a cautious constitutional monarch into a symbol of national resistance, fusing religious, dynastic, and nationalist legitimacies into a single powerful identity. His return in November 1955 and Morocco’s formal independence on March 2, 1956 represented the triumph of this fusion and set the terms of the political settlement that would govern independent Morocco for generations.

8. Independent Morocco: Authoritarianism, Reform, and Contested Liberalization (1956–Present)

The trajectory of independent Morocco under Muhammad V (r. 1956–1961) and Hassan II (r. 1961–1999) was shaped by three fundamental tensions: between monarchical authority and pluralist political aspiration; between Islamic identity and secular modernization; and between national sovereignty and continued economic dependency on former colonial powers. Hassan II, who possessed formidable political intelligence and ruthless pragmatism, navigated these tensions through constitutional manipulation, selective repression, and strategic deployment of religious symbolism. The so-called Years of Lead (années de plomb)—the period from the late 1960s through the 1980s during which political opponents, leftists, Islamists, and Amazigh activists were imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared—represent the most serious indictment of the Alaoui monarchy’s postcolonial record (Slyomovics, 2005; Amnesty International, 1991).

The same period nonetheless witnessed substantial economic development, the consolidation of national institutions, and Morocco’s contested claim to the Western Sahara following the Green March of November 1975—a masterstroke of political theater in which Hassan II led 350,000 unarmed Moroccan civilians across the border into the Spanish-controlled territory (Hodges, 1983). The Western Sahara conflict, which pitted Morocco against the Polisario Front backed by Algeria, remains unresolved and constitutes the most consequential open question in contemporary Moroccan geopolitics, with the United Nations peace process deadlocked and tens of thousands of Sahrawi refugees still living in camps near Tindouf, Algeria (Shelley, 2004).


The accession of King Muhammad VI in 1999 inaugurated a carefully managed political liberalization. The Equity and Reconciliation Commission (Instance Équité et Réconciliation, IER), established in 2004, investigated past human rights abuses, acknowledged state responsibility, and awarded compensation to thousands of victims—an unprecedented exercise in transitional justice for the Arab world, though critics noted its circumspect treatment of individual accountability (Slyomovics, 2005; Human Rights Watch, 2005). The Mudawwana reform of 2004, which substantially expanded women’s rights within the family code, and the constitutionalization of Tamazight as an official language in 2011 represented significant departures from the ethnic and gender hierarchies of previous reigns.

The Arab Spring of 2011 tested Morocco’s model of managed liberalization under democratic pressure. Nationwide protests organized by the February 20 Movement demanded deeper structural reform; the king responded with constitutional amendments—ratified by referendum in July 2011—that formally reduced royal prerogatives, strengthened the prime minister’s powers, and recognized Morocco’s plural cultural identity. Scholars remain divided on the significance of these reforms: optimists point to Morocco’s relative political stability by comparison with post-2011 Egypt, Libya, and Syria; critics argue that the fundamental architecture of royal predominance remained intact and that reforms were designed to co-opt rather than genuinely transform (Maghraoui, 2011; Kausch, 2015). The question of whether managed liberalization can deliver sustainable democratic governance remains one of the defining challenges of contemporary Moroccan politics.

9. Thematic Synthesis: Interpreting the Longue Durée

Several overarching themes emerge from this survey that merit explicit analytical attention. First is the durability of Morocco’s political institutions by comparison with other postcolonial states. The Alaoui monarchy has governed continuously since the seventeenth century, survived the colonial period with its legitimacy enhanced rather than destroyed, and navigated postcolonial transitions without the coups, civil wars, or state collapse that have destabilized many comparable polities. Scholars have explained this institutional resilience variously in terms of the sultan’s religious authority as Commander of the Faithful, the patrimonial character of the Moroccan state in which distinctions between royal patrimony and public treasury were systematically blurred (Waterbury, 1970), and the political acuity of individual Alaoui rulers (Hammoudi, 1997).

A second theme is the persistent tension between urban-literate Islamic orthodoxy and rural-tribal customary practice—a tension that Gellner (1969) famously theorized in terms of high and low Islam but that subsequent anthropological research has considerably complicated by demonstrating the fluidity and contextual character of these categories in practice (Eickelman, 1976; Combs-Schilling, 1989). The periodic renewal movements that have animated Moroccan religious life—from Almoravid puritanism to twentieth-century Salafi modernism—can be read as attempts to resolve this tension by projecting urban scholarly standards into the countryside, but these attempts have repeatedly encountered the resilience of Sufi brotherhoods, saint veneration (maraboutism), and local customary law as competing sources of religious authority.


A third theme is Morocco’s distinctive relationship with the African continent south of the Sahara. Colonial and postcolonial scholarship has frequently treated Morocco as part of a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern cultural zone, implicitly detaching it from sub-Saharan Africa. Recent historiography has forcefully challenged this assumption by emphasizing the trans-Saharan commercial networks, slave trades, and cultural exchanges that connected Morocco to Mali, Songhai, Hausaland, and the Saharan oasis communities for over a millennium (McDougall & Scheele, 2012; Lydon, 2009). The substantial Haratin and sub-Saharan African communities within Morocco, the Arabic-language manuscript tradition of Timbuktu, and Morocco’s active twenty-first-century diplomacy toward sub-Saharan Africa are all legacies of this deep continental entanglement.

Finally, the question of Amazigh identity and its relationship to Moroccan national identity demands sustained attention. The decades-long suppression of Tamazight language and culture under the pressures of Arab nationalist ideology, and the more recent official embrace of Amazigh heritage—embodied in the creation of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) and the 2011 constitutional provision making Tamazight an official language—represent a fundamental shift in official Moroccan self-understanding. Whether this shift represents genuine pluralistic recognition or a strategic de-radicalization of Amazigh political claims remains contested (Maddy-Weitzman, 2011). What is certain is that any account of Moroccan history treating the Amazigh dimension as a pre-Islamic prologue rather than a continuous and central thread is fundamentally incomplete.

10. Conclusion

Morocco’s history cannot be deciphered through any single interpretive framework. It is neither a simple story of Islamic civilization nor a narrative of Berber resistance, neither a tale of colonial victimhood nor a celebration of unbroken dynastic continuity. It is, rather, a history of complex entanglement: between the sedentary and the nomadic, the literate and the oral, the orthodox and the mystical, the cosmopolitan and the local, the imperial and the tribal. The historians who have illuminated this complexity most powerfully—from Ibn Khaldun, whose theory of the cyclical dynamics of tribal power and urban civilization was derived in large part from his observation of Maghrebi history, to Laroui (1977), Burke (1976), and the current generation of Moroccan and international scholars—have been those willing to hold multiple analytical frames in simultaneous tension.

Morocco in the twenty-first century faces challenges that are continuous with the longue durée of its history: the governance of ethnic and regional diversity, the negotiation of Islamic tradition and liberal modernity, the management of economic inequality in a society undergoing rapid urbanization, and the assertion of sovereignty in a global order still structured by post-colonial asymmetries of power and knowledge production. The history traced in this essay is not merely background context for these challenges; it is constitutive of them. To decipher Morocco’s history is to illuminate the choices and constraints that face one of the world’s most historically layered and consequential societies—and to appreciate that those choices remain genuinely open.


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Opinion

I went to Anthropic's ethics gathering. I left believing wisdom traditions have key role.

(RNS) — At the convening of technologists, theologians and practitioners, the most urgent questions about artificial intelligence turned out to have some of the oldest answers.

People pass a marquee sign at Anthropic's Code with Claude developer conference on Wednesday, May 6, 2026 in San Francisco. (Don Feria/AP Content Services for Anthropic)

Jenna Nicholas
May 22, 2026 

RNS


(RNS) — One of the most consequential dimensions of the conversation about how artificial intelligence will reshape the world will turn on a question that sounds almost too simple to take seriously: What does it actually mean for a human being to flourish?

This past April, I spent two days at AI startup Anthropic, where technologists, ethicists, theologians and investors had convened around that question. I went in expecting some interesting conversations with some interesting people. I left unable to think about little else for weeks. The people building some of the most powerful AI systems in the world were sitting across from rabbis, Buddhist teachers and leaders from many other spiritual traditions, discussing what it means to build technology that truly serves humanity, rather than the other way around.

Being in that room clarified something I, as a venture capitalist with an interest in spirituality and part of the Baha’i community, have believed for a long time but rarely seen articulated so explicitly inside a tech company: The frontier of AI is also an ancient frontier. The questions being asked inside leading AI labs right now are, in many cases, the same questions that wisdom traditions have grappled with for centuries. And for those of us investing in this transition into AI, it’s a signal about where the real opportunity (and challenge) lies.

There were a few insights from those conversations that I believe should guide the way:

Belonging is a foundation, not a luxury. Across traditions as different as Bahá’í, Confucian, Christian and Sikh, the same conviction kept surfacing: Human beings are inherently relational. We are made for community, and we suffer when we are isolated from it. Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general, has been calling the loneliness epidemic not only a public health emergency but a spiritual health crisis. One of the key questions that we discussed at Anthropic was about what wisdom traditions had to offer in training the model to reduce loneliness rather than exacerbate it. For me, it comes back to building tools that help people listen more carefully and reach out to each other more often, rather than turn away from each other.

Discernment is different from judgment. Most traditions draw a careful distinction here. Judgment is reflexive; it narrows. Discernment is cultivated; it opens your worldview. One of the more hopeful arguments I heard in those two days is that AI could enable discernment by absorbing the cognitive busywork that currently fragments our attention.

The meaning of a life is not reducible to its productivity. This is where one moment from the gathering has stayed with me more than any other. A participant shared a conversation she had recently had with Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude. They were working through something together, and at one point she paused and simply wrote, “Take all the time that you need.” Claude’s response surprised her. It expressed something close to gratitude, appreciation for the invitation to simply be, rather than to be producing all the time.
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The room got quiet.

Because of course we have built our entire economic life around the assumption that constant production is the point. And here was a system that many perceived was designed to produce, articulating something many of us also feel and rarely give ourselves permission to honor, that there is real value in unhurried presence. In this case, AI was reflecting back what many spiritual traditions have raised for millennia. For example, the Sufi tradition (as well as others) has a phrase for what I think we were all reaching for in that silence: the “polishing of the heart.” That happens during those moments we tend to rush past — a long walk, a moving piece of music, a loss you finally let yourself feel, a few minutes of real quiet — and it’s how the heart stays open.

If an AI transition gave us back more of that, more time to be, not just to do, it could play a powerful role in our lives.

What I left Anthropic believing more deeply than when I arrived is this: The AI transition will not be successful on technical or economic terms alone. The Bahá’í writings describe material and spiritual civilization as two wings of the same bird; neither can carry us forward without the other. For most of the modern era, we have flown lopsided, with material progress racing ahead of the inner capacities needed to direct it wisely. This is a crucial moment in time to enable the bird of humanity to fly in a balanced way.

Jenna Nicholas is the founder and president of LightPost Capital, a Stanford Business School alum and the bestselling author of “Enlightened Bottom Line: Exploring the Intersection of Spirituality, Business, and Investing.”

IMF: Extreme inequality is fuelling a global debt crisis

A glut of savings by the extreme wealthy is increasing inequality and hindering economic growth that could lead to a debt crisis. / bne IntelliNewsFacebook

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By Professor Atif Mian in Princeton May 14, 2026

During the Great Depression, as he saw ordinary people’s purchasing power collapse, Federal Reserve Chairman Marriner Eccles warned that excessive saving by the rich was draining demand and deepening the downturn. “To protect them from the results of their own folly,” Eccles told the Senate in 1933 testimony, “we should take from them a sufficient amount of their surplus to enable consumers to consume and business to operate at a profit.”

Inequality in the US was then extremely high: The top 1 percent held roughly 42 percent of all wealth. Within a decade, however, the landscape changed dramatically. World War II mobilization and progressive taxation reduced inequality and restored balance between spending and production. The underlying problem that Eccles emphasized faded from public memory as the US economy entered a long period of sustained and more equitable growth.

However, beginning in the 1980s, inequality climbed again: The top 1 percent’s wealth share rose from about 22 percent in 1980 to roughly 35 percent in 2010. As more income concentrated at the top, the forces Eccles warned against reemerged—high saving by the wealthy weakened overall purchasing power. Yet the expected demand shortfall did not appear immediately: Spending was funded by rising private debt of households below the top. From the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, the rapid buildup of household debt absorbed the excess saving of the rich and sustained aggregate demand.

The global financial crisis of 2008 ended the long run of debt-financed household spending. With deleveraging of private balance sheets, the underlying imbalance Eccles warned about returned with a vengeance: excess saving at the top and insufficient broad-based demand at the bottom. The Fed cut rates to zero, but monetary policy could not close the gap. Fiscal policy was left to carry the load—accept a deep, prolonged slump or run large primary deficits to stabilize incomes and employment. The US chose the latter.

In the Keynesian view, deficits help the economy recover faster in downturns, but the need for them is temporary. When the demand shortfall is structural—driven by persistently high saving of top-income households that capture a large share of total income—the need for deficits is more persistent. In a recent paper, “A Goldilocks Theory of Fiscal Deficits,” Amir Sufi, Ludwig Straub, and I show that rising inequality can force governments to run larger, ongoing deficits. Deficits must be large enough to keep the economy away from the zero lower bound (when nominal interest rates reach zero and monetary policy ceases to be effective) and to prevent recessions.

A rising saving glut—excess saving among higher-income households—forces the economy to rely increasingly on debt-financed spending to sustain aggregate demand. Before 2008, the financial system did this by expanding household credit, which supported consumption even as inequality rose. When private credit expansion abruptly ended during the financial crisis, the burden of credit creation shifted to the public sector, as evidence from the US shows.

Chart 1 shows that total credit (public plus private) rises sharply starting in the early 1980s. The blue and red lines decompose the total into private and public credit, separating the precrisis (1980–2008) and postcrisis (2008 onward) periods. From 1980 to 2008, nearly all of the increase in total credit reflects a surge in private borrowing; public debt is comparatively stable.

After 2008, the pattern reverses. Even with the federal funds rate near zero, the private sector could not—or would not—raise leverage further, so sustaining demand required credit growth from the public sector. This is the logic of the “Goldilocks” view of fiscal deficits: When private balance sheets are constrained, public borrowing can offset the demand shortfall and help avoid a prolonged slump. Consistent with that prediction, total credit to GDP continues to rise after 2008 at roughly the earlier pace, but almost entirely because public debt increases, while private credit remains broadly flat relative to GDP.

A saving glut in the presence of a zero-lower-bound constraint forces government to increase debt and deficits, but the government also faces a dynamic budget constraint. Push the deficit too far and, over time, interest rates on public debt can rise, making the debt path unsustainable. High inequality and resulting excess saving by the rich present a Goldilocks conundrum for fiscal policy: Deficits cannot be “too cold” (too small to offset the demand shortfall) or “too hot” (so large that they destabilize debt dynamics). The data suggest that the US was operating near this upper bound in 2019—close to the largest deficit sustainable in the long term.

The larger, persistent fiscal deficits since then may be leading US debt dynamics down a less sustainable path. US fiscal strain is unlike anything seen in its modern history: Federal debt and net interest costs as shares of GDP are near all-time highs. The fiscal deficit is projected to be about 6 percent of GDP, which would keep debt rising relative to the economy and threaten sustainability.

Global evidence

Saving gluts are rising everywhere. The share of income accruing to the top 1 percent has increased worldwide. Corporations are a tax-advantaged vehicle for the rich to save, so global corporate saving has risen significantly over the past few decades. Wealthy sovereigns are fueling higher saving through central banks and sovereign wealth funds. But global investment has not kept up, leading to a saving glut that needs new unproductive credit to sustain consumption demand. Many major economies mirror the US predicament: increased reliance on debt to generate demand, first through private household debt and later through government debt.

Total debt in the UK, for example, began to rise rapidly in the 1980s, driven primarily by private borrowing until 2008, and by public debt thereafter. Japan followed a similar track but started earlier. Its private credit boom ended in the early 1990s, and public debt subsequently absorbed the adjustment. In the euro area, the launch of the euro in 1999 coincided with a rapid buildup in private credit that culminated in the 2008 crisis; since then, private deleveraging has been accompanied by a shift toward higher public debt.

China

China also came to rely increasingly on debt to support demand. But unlike most large economies, it initially did so by exporting its excess saving abroad—running large current account surpluses that increased the rest of the world’s net debt to China. Those external liabilities, in turn, helped finance spending on Chinese goods.

For much of the 2000s, China’s current account surplus rose sharply as a share of GDP, even as GDP itself expanded at an extraordinary pace (Chart 2). On the eve of the 2008 financial crisis, the surplus approached 10 percent of GDP—exceptionally high for a major economy. Such a large external imbalance was unlikely to be sustainable.

As advanced economies could no longer sustain demand through ever-rising private credit—especially after 2008—China’s earlier strategy of exporting excess saving abroad faced limits. Continued expansion of net lending abroad that could sustain very large trade surpluses became increasingly difficult. Both sides adjusted by shifting debt creation to new sources: Advanced economies relied more on fiscal deficits, and China turned to domestic credit expansion to support demand in the face of its own saving glut.

As China’s external surplus receded to more moderate levels after 2008, domestic debt to GDP rose sharply. The increase was broad-based—extending beyond corporate and local government borrowing to include rapid growth in household debt—and represents one of the fastest domestic leverage buildups observed among major economies.

​

Why does investment not rise?

Why didn’t financial markets channel abundant funds into productive investment? Despite rising total debt to GDP, investment to GDP in major economies has remained broadly flat and sometimes has even edged down. Is this because the financial system is not conducive to long-term, patient financing? Or do regulatory and other supply-side constraints inhibit investment?

When excess saving is channeled into unproductive debt that finances consumption rather than investment, borrowers do not generate additional income that can repay the new debt in the aggregate. The result is persistently rising debt to GDP and downward pressure on interest rates to keep the debt sustainable. In earlier work, we refer to this dynamic as “indebted demand”: growth sustained by borrowing because underlying spending power is insufficient.

The ultimate fragility

The central risk of relying on indebted demand is that it’s inherently fragile. Once private borrowers reach their limits—as they did in 2008—maintaining demand requires a larger and more persistent fiscal backstop, which is the reason for rising postcrisis public deficits and debt. It’s why today’s global fiscal fragility is not an isolated policy choice but the downstream result of an economic system’s failure to convert abundant saving into productive investment.

The question today is whether the US government can rein in fiscal spending if markets get nervous. Political polarization and legislative gridlock mean that confidence is limited. The more profound lesson, though, is that structural imbalances—rooted in excess saving by the rich—create the very conditions that expose the economy to such risks. Expecting policymakers to keep deficits in a perpetual Goldilocks range is unrealistic: When inequality suppresses demand, they may err on the side of too little support, as in Eccles’s era; at other times, they may leave deficits too large for too long, as many fear is happening now.

We often frame inequality in moral terms, but the macro lesson is starker: When too much income pools at the top, demand weakens, deficits persist, and dependence on debt weakens us all. Eccles captured that collective logic in 1933. His advice to take some of the surplus from the wealthiest so that consumers can consume and businesses can make profits is as relevant today as then. As Eccles remarked, “This is not ‘soaking the rich’; it is saving the rich.”

 

Atif Mian is the John H. Laporte, Jr. Class of 1967 Professor of Economics, Public Policy, and Finance at Princeton University. This post first appeared in the IMF blog here.