The Amazigh Movement in a Changing North Africa

This chapter traces transformations in Amazigh militancy over the past fifty years. Its engagements have gradually shifted from particular demands for cultural and linguistic recognition toward a broader advocacy for social justice, political transparency, and economic equity that parallel those of student, labor, feminist, and human rights movements. These are demands that congealed in the 2011 mass demonstrations across North Africa and that explicitly sought to transcend extant ethnic and religious divisions within the region. Today, the Amazigh movement’s imagination of a broader cultural-geographic space of Tamazgha (Barbary) stretching from the Canary Islands to the Egyptian Siwa oasis continues to provide an alternate model for thinking beyond the narrow national interests that had sunk previous, official efforts to enact North African unity. Even as Amazigh activists remain fractured along generational, class, and indeed regional/national lines, their efforts at organizing through “world” federations, supranational bodies, diasporic resources, and delocalized social media point to alternative vectors for rethinking North Africa beyond a set of discrete nation-states. The Amazigh movement thus provides a salient lens for examining contemporary social currents in North Africa.