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Colonial War and the Production of Territorialized State Space in North Africa

Rethinking the Colonial State

ISBN: 978-1-78714-655-6, eISBN: 978-1-78714-654-9

Publication date: 20 December 2017

Abstract

Why and how was the territorialized state form disseminated through colonial expansion? To begin to answer this question, this study proposes a relational account of the production of territorialized state space, drawing on empirical evidence from two understudied cases of colonial expansion in the early 20th century: Spain in Morocco and Italy in Libya. Drawing on colonial and local archival sources, I demonstrate how colonial territoriality resulted from a violent clash between an aspiring colonial power and a reactive, rural counter-state building movement, led by the Amir Abd al-Krim in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco and the Sanusi leader, Omar al-Mokhtar, in Cyrenaica in eastern Libya. Territorialization was not imposed from the outside by a European colonial power. Rather, it was produced relationally through violent interactions between the colonial state and a local autonomous political entity. This analysis contributes to the still-nascent study of colonial state space and to contemporary policy debates about political order in North Africa and the Middle East by emphasizing the importance of local political mobilization, the complexity of interactions catalyzed across local and translocal scales by colonial expansion, and the high levels of physical violence endemic to the production of territorialized state space.

Keywords

Citation

Wyrtzen, J. (2017), "Colonial War and the Production of Territorialized State Space in North Africa", Rethinking the Colonial State (Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 33), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 151-173. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-871920170000033006

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017 Emerald Publishing Limited