A Gendered Counter‐archive: Mining and Resistance in Morocco

Zakia Salime

Development and Change, 2022, vol. 53, issue 5, 1035-1058

Abstract: In August 2011, thousands of villagers climbed Mount Alebban in Imider, southeast Morocco. They shut off the valve diverting water from the mountain's reservoir to a neighbouring silver mine. The villagers’ encampment on the mount lasted for eight years, withstanding state violence, prison sentences and political containment. Although Imider was considered a political protest camp, this article explores it through the notion of counter‐archive, defining the counter‐archive as a collective record keeping of disruption. The Imider camp is a counter‐archive in the sense that it enabled unauthorized stories to surface and radical politics to emerge. As a counter‐archive, it revealed the hidden links between politics and profit, extraction and dispossession, and life and death. As a forbidden space, the camp engaged in a quotidian performance of collective modes of living that resisted erasure through artwork, gendered spatial arrangements, storytelling and record making. The goal of the article is twofold: to illustrate the everyday making of this counter‐archive by analysing the modes of disruptive engagement of the villagers with the mine, and the new communities they have generated; and to show the soft spots of radical politics and its vulnerability in the context of neoliberal governance.

Date: 2022
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