Research Grants Program | Cycle 6 Grantees and Projects

Mouloud Amghar, Morocco, University of Cadi Ayyad (Principal Investigator)

Zakaria Ibrahimi, Morocco, University of Cadi Ayyad (Co-Investigator)

Hassan Kamil, Morocco, University of Cadi Ayyad (Co-Investigator)

Project Title: Environmental and Social Justice Movements and Protests in Morocco from Imider to Jerada: A Comparative Study

The notion of environmental justice and its related network of concepts, such as environmental injustice, ecological movements, poor environment, ecological conflicts, green movements, feminist environmental movements, new social movements, social justice, ecological precarity, and ecological debt, are among the key scientific paradigms born out of a sociological approach to modern people’s problems and in post-modern societies where ecological problems, including social issues, have turned into the key discussion topics in public and scientific circles. Environmental demands have become entrenched in the discourse of new social movements, which consider ecological and social justice inseparable. In this study, we try to tackle the relationship between the environment and nature in general, and the political power in Morocco by exploring the development of forms of mine ownership and the local residents’ stance, the relationship between the political power and the local community and the impoverishment rather than development measures that the locals are facing today. We will also delve into the outcomes and social forms of ecological precarity in the regions due to long decades of exploitation of mines and these exploitation companies' disregard for their social and ecological commitments towards the local community. Finally, through this study, we want to research the logic behind the formation of social environmental movements that call for ecological, social, and political justice in the region, by examining how the local community understands the notions of social and ecological justice, ecological debt and dignity. These notions represent constant demands of these movements. At the same time, we will decipher how traditional cultural and social structures manifest themselves in the formation of these movements, and we will look into the patterns of solidarity, the symbols and the capital they invest to make their movement successful, to negotiate with the state, to win some rights or to pay the environmental price. We seek to reach an objective and informed understanding of social justice and ecological justice and the relationship between them. We want to grasp how ecological phenomena turned into structures that create social, economic and political disparity in two mining areas in Morocco — Imider and Jerada. We also want to explore how residents in these two areas are defying unjust conditions, and we want to unveil the forms of collective action created by local social movements in the hope of changing their social and environmental conditions. Therefore, we opted for a qualitative approach that allows us to collect field data instead of a quantitative approach. We believe a qualitative approach will allow us, on the one hand, to discover how natural phenomena - specifically the use, monopolization and privatization of resources - create social exclusion, disparities, political marginalization and economic fragility. On the other hand, this approach will help us understand the strategies and tactics used by residents to fight "injustice" and exclusion. We will rely on five techniques in our research, as we believe they allow us to collect the necessary ethnographic data to answer our problematic: interviews, observation, images, biographies and field notes.