Continuity through Co-optation: Rural Politics and Regime Resilience in Morocco and Mauritania

Abstract

Morocco and Mauritania's regimes differ radically in their political structures and contemporary histories, yet they employed several similar strategies to secure survival during the Arab uprisings. Besides limited repression, constitutional reforms and palliative concessions, both regimes also used a distinct strategy of co-optation to aid authoritarian resilience. Targeting rural politicians with weak party affiliations for co-optation, regimes used it to build and reinforce loyalist political parties in the late 2000s. Once the uprisings began, both regimes deployed these loyalist parties to undertake counter-revolutionary activities to contain and counterbalance the power of youth and Islamist movements.