Placing Algeria-Morocco tension within a wider system of Middle Eastern conflict is important, but hides elements specific to North Africa’s decolonisation politics.

What drives conflict between Algeria and Morocco? And what is behind its most recent episode? Severance of diplomatic ties between the two neighbours has generated a steady stream of articles, explainers, and timelines.

Foregrounding a regional system of competing alliances built around typically authoritarian Arab regimes, explanations have tended towards the familiar. But in assuming equivalence between Middle East and Maghreb, they might miss out a key element in the dispute.

A story of ‘axes’

Normalised through the Abraham Accords, relations between Morocco and Israel take centre stage in accounts of the rift. Fall out from US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, Morocco’s use of Israeli-made spyware, and Israel’s diplomatic ventures to Rabat, have been analysed in-depth by international media speculating of a new North African theatre to Israel and Iran’s cold war.

It’s a position underwritten by a body of literature from Europe and America’s leading research institutions, highlighting the role of normalisation in shaping a new regional order from Rabat to Tehran.

The argument feeds into a wider narrative of how friction between Algeria and Morocco interlocks with a regional system of axes battling it out through a blend of ‘hot wars’, proxy fronts, and inter-state rivalries. Termed the ‘new Arab Cold War’, it is this system which ties Morocco to Israel, Saudi and the Gulf, Algeria to Iran and its allies, that is oft-used to rationalise hostilities within the MENA region and beyond.

But as well as a force for conflict, regional axes are also framed as an ecosystem in that the rivalry acts as a resource for regimes to build their legitimacies internally. In this sense, regional states are as invested in reproducing the tension as they are in resolving it.

It’s a dimension of Algerian-Morocco relations that has certainly not gone unnoticed.

Of ‘feuding Arab states’

Indeed, the extent to which Algeria and Morocco tensions fits into the model of the ‘feuding Arab state’ is another central element of reporting.

Attention has focused for the most part on Algeria’s political crisis, and of a regime struggling to manage a pandemic, unstable oil and gas revenues, natural disaster, and popular pressure leading from its 2019 Hirak. The decision to sever ties with Morocco is thus described as a classic distraction tactic drawn straight from an authoritarian manual.

It is with the same brush that Morocco’s role in the dispute is painted, with analysts pointing to the importance of the ‘Algerian enemy’ in justifying an increasingly authoritarian arrangement of power in the country.

But in reaching for the same explanations used to make sense of regional tensions as a whole, the reporting community has failed to properly examine what makes the Algerian-Morocco dispute unique.

This is perhaps unsurprising given the disproportionate role played by commentators with fields of expertise east of the Libya border.

Decolonisation politics

One such aspect relates to North Africa’s specific politics of decolonisation. As nation-states, Algeria and Morocco are built on fundamentally different concepts of territoriality stemming from very different colonial experiences and subsequent projects of decolonisation.

In Algeria the almost total destruction of pre-colonial elites and creation of national ones through its war of independence invested colonial borders with a seemingly counter-intuitive sanctity. The same logic that demanded the end of colonial rule insisted Algeria’s boundaries be defined by it.

On the other hand, continuance of the pre-colonial monarchy under a French protectorate and the sequestering of its territories by multiple colonial powers, meant these same borders were disparaged for their artificiality within Moroccan anticolonial discourse.

In this way then, tension between Morocco and Algeria is perhaps more comparable to Ethiopia and Eritrea - where anti-colonial monarchism and revolutionary nationalism have similarly collided - than with the countries of the Middle East, where the colonial experience is altogether different.

Indeed, this dynamic is important to understand precisely because it falls outside of conventional narratives of the ‘Arab world’, and has thus been relegated to background ‘context’ or left out from the conversation entirely.

It explains why two neighbours were able to transform from blood brothers to bitter enemies within months of co-existence, and why chances for meaningful reconciliation are slim. History shows us that Morocco and Algeria are willing to stick to their ideological positions on questions of sovereignty even where these have led them into diplomatic isolation.

As Algiers prepares itself to host the Arab League summit in March, greater attention needs paying to the explicitly ideological dimensions of Maghrebi rivalry. As much as flexible alliances and short-term opportunism has aggravated a decades-long conflict, playing down this longer-term factor leaves out more than it invites in.