Red Lines: Legitimation and Dissent in Contemporary Morocco

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that co-optation enables non-democratic leaders to maintain power and popular quiescence. Along with repression and legitimation, it is one of three core pillars of authoritarian stability. This project challenges the prevailing view by developing a novel framework for understanding authoritarian legitimation that illustrates how co-optation can undermine legitimation over time. Using ethnographic evidence from contemporary Morocco, this project argues that autocrats’ legitimation claims are best understood as public standards of performance against which ordinary citizens can judge their behavior. When autocrats are unable to conceal behavior that contradicts their legitimation claims, they provide openings for ordinary citizens to directly criticize them. In regimes like Morocco, where leaders cast themselves as neutral arbiters above the fray of everyday politics, co-optation can weaken legitimation. Specifically, this project argues that by stripping political rivals of their credibility and prominence, co-optation can unintentionally expose incumbents’ political machinations and leave them vulnerable to direct public criticism over time. Evidence from contemporary Morocco supports this, where three decades of increasingly comprehensive co-optation have sidelined all the kingdom’s major independent political forces and left the reigning monarch exposed to an unprecedented wave of direct criticism.