Sovereignty without statehood: International relations, Marxism and the forms of political rule in Morocco

Mabrouk, Meriam (2025) Sovereignty without statehood: International relations, Marxism and the forms of political rule in Morocco. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This inter-disciplinary thesis asks the following question: How can sovereignty be conceptualised in a non-capitalist space? This thesis reconstructs the forms of political rule in Morocco to demonstrate the specific cumulative historical processes that shaped the production of sovereignty without modern territorial statehood. Situated in International Relations/International Historical Sociology, it does so through a comparative historicist methodology which compares state-society-international relations within two periods: 1666-1727 (ecosystems) and 1860-1895 (ecocide). To overcome defective debates in the literature, which conceptualise sovereignty and statehood as permanent transhistorical fixtures, or anomalise the Moroccan political trajectory by over-relying on cultural criteria such as ‘tribalism’, this dissertation traces this dialectical and dynamic process to the intersections of endogenous and exogenous tensions that marked the geopolitical terrain. Thus, this dissertation introduces the concepts of ecosystems of sovereignty and ecocide as analytical frameworks analysing the long-term transition to different forms of politics and shows the historically contingent relationship through which they were forged. These concepts stretch the conceptual frameworks of sovereignty in IR, and might help to better understand the different layers, cultures, and levels of political claim making in the Moroccan context, as well as the changing relationship between actors in different environmental contexts. Through case studies of political accumulation (slavery and piracy) and accumulation under imperialism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, this dissertation investigates contradictions between articulations of political practice and the context which characterised the transition from an ecosystem of sovereignty to a system of ecocide in which territoriality was negotiated with empire. By focusing on different forms of accumulation – of labour, of racial and religious differences, of money, of diplomatic rights, and of territory in the context of empire – this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which the expansion of capitalism and empire in the Moroccan milieu irreversibly altered its political forms.

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