Development Strategies in North Africa

Abstract

The neighboring North African countries of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, each of which had in varying degrees been colonized by France, offer a convenient cluster for examining selective affinities and possible linkages between development strategies and political violence. Algeria’s development strategies in the 1960s and 1970s, fueled by oil revenues, were far more ambitious than its neighbors’; and subsequently, from 1992 to 1998, Algeria was convulsed in protracted violence pitting the authorities against Islamist insurgents, costing at least 100,000 lives, whereas its neighbors effectively included the Islamists in their respective political processes with little loss of life. It is tempting to invoke the significant differences between Algeria’s radical approach to economic development, on the one hand, and the Moroccan and Tunisian approaches on the other, as explanations of these very different outcomes. This essay will argue instead that economic and social conditions by the 1990s were at least as propitious for widespread violence in Morocco as in Algeria but that Moroccan investments in political infrastructure have—at least so far—contained the social unrest.