Youth Mobilizations and the Emerging of Youth as a Category of Public Policy in Morocco

In 2011, the protest movements in Morocco, the "20 February movement" was partly carried by a new generation of political and associative activists. Identified as an important issue for political responses, the question of a youth policy was raised from the conception of a new constitution adopted in 2011, but has seen many political convolutions. Local social mobilizations, particularly in peripheral areas and medium-sized cities with employment problems, especially youth employment, have reactivated the issue of economic integration of young people through legal employment, while at the same time, these mobilizations have raised gradually the broader issue of the country's development and growth model. Local movements “Hirak” at Hoceima 2017 or Jerada 2018 have increasingly addressed a general dissatisfaction with development models and an exhaustion of the client model of bargaining for employment. A local approach and investigation help to understand how youth employment movements have evolved from categorical demands to a much broader critique of local development models. From two specific locations, Khouribga in the phosphate producing aera where local activists burnt the State-owned company’s training center in 2011, to Jerada a former coal producing city where a Hirak took place in 2018, this communication will look into the structuration of these protest movements that have been organized by emerging local figures. These movements deeply rooted in the local identity of these towns, that gave birth to the Moroccan unionist movement in the 50’s, have distanced themselves from the former unions and from the political parties. Local content of these protests is key to understand their dynamic that bring to the fore a discursive content characterized by a strong feeling of marginalization. However, these movements are not to be objectified but to be analyzed in a dynamic perspective highlighting strategies of the actors who animate these protests and the intertwined local interests. Youth mobilizations have aimed to change some aspects of the local political economy but the dynamics of the movements can be analyzed as an ongoing bargaining around sharing of resources where protest or riot are one expression of social divides but also as one strategic tool to keep an upper hand on the reshaping of local configurations of power. Through evolution of relations between inhabitants and State-owned exploiting mining companies it is possible to highlight some aspect of the evolving relations between the Moroccan State and these territories and specifically the younger generations living in these parts of the country.