Middle East Critique

Un/documented violence in Morocco: Traces and witnesses beyond the timeframe of recognized harm

The protests by GenZ212 youth, which have been at the forefront in Morocco since September-October 2025, have been met with brutal violence by the authorities. This brutality has astonished observers, both nationally and internationally, as it does not correspond to the ways of recognising and naming violence, and consequently denouncing it, produced by the transitional justice process twenty years ago to shed light on the "years of lead". The Equity and Reconciliation Commission (IER), established by the king in January 2004, submitted its final report in December 2005, after investigating some 20,000 cases of state violence, repression and abuse committed between 1956 and 1999. Since then, testimonies have multiplied, helping to establish a link between violence itself and the victims who suffered it.

The transitional justice process has thus influenced the commonly accepted understanding of what constitutes political violence, its locations, its victims, and the specific occasions and forms in which it is exercised. As a result, any other definition that deviates from this remains outside the public's understanding of the phenomenon. The demonstrations of September-October 2025 are only the most recent of the occasions on which unexpected violence has been unleashed on the mobilisations that have emerged since the conclusion of transitional justice: the Hirak Rif demonstrations of 2016, and previously certain episodes arising from the movement of 20 February 2011, experienced similar violence. In all these cases, the violence was unexpected, first and foremost because it affected very young demonstrators who did not identify with any political groups, unlike the acknowledged violence that had previously been directed at activists from anti-establishment organisations. In addition, what left the violence on the margins of the accepted frameworks for recognising it was its spread across the national territory where the demonstrations took place, outside the major cities that had been the epicentre of the political vanguards whose violent repression in the past has been recognized.

The persistence of this violence twenty years after the conclusion of the transitional justice process not only indicates that violence has remained structurally embedded in the political arena and power relations in Morocco. This persistence is also and above all a sign of the ongoing socio-political and ecological process of reinterpretation of the issue of reconciliation and, consequently, of the reparation that it implies. By ecological reinterpretation, we mean two things: on the one hand, a reconsideration of the ecosystemic dimension of violence and the complexity of the actors involved; on the other hand, a focus on the geography of violence, since, in addition to people, places, regions and environments were also victims and still bear its traces today.

By emphasising the problem of un/documented violence, we aim above all to direct the analysis towards the fields of its sayable and the unsayable aspects and the possible means of accounting for and documenting it. For the problem is also one of legitimacy and accessibility: which sources and witnesses are considered legitimate and credible in recounting this violence? How can we approach the multifaceted silences that surround it? How, from a methodological and theoretical point of view, can we circumvent the inaccessibility or unclassifiable character of the sources, witnesses and places that attest to it?

These questions summarise the objective of this special issue, which pays particular attention to the wide range of sources, witnesses and ways of expressing and concealing forms of violence, those that do not correspond to established definitions, in this case those of the IER, and which are therefore unclassifiable or unarchivable as such. This aim can be declined into several thematic directions.

Firstly, we wish to revisit the political transition process to examine how it influences the way in which past violence is defined, named and recognised in the present, and how this influence also extends to the accounting of time, by defining the phases of violence and peace, and by delimiting the political arenas concerned by these issues. Which forms of violence have been passed under silence during the transitional justice process? In which locations in which occasions and against which victims such violence took place? It is at this level that the complex relationship between traces (whether documentary, physical, spatial or linguistic), the responsibility of the perpetrators of violence, and the authority responsible for recognition and reparation plays out.

This also raises the question of "post-transitional" violence, its forms and public articulations, whether during the Arab Spring uprisings (the 20 February Movement), the popular Hirak movement in the Rif region, or, more recently, the GenZ protests met with spectacular police violence. What do these new manifestations of violence say about the politics of reconciliation, transitional justice, in which this process is embedded, and political transition more generally?

Next, we question the notion of "witness" and the political and epistemological frictions it implies. Indeed, the figure of the "key witness", enshrined by the IER, raises the question of what can legitimately be said about violence and how it can be heard; in other words, who has a more audible voice than others? Similarly, the notion of "key witness" is intrinsically linked to the issue of "victimhood" and the possibility that violence may become a "pedigree" conferring a certain legitimacy. Conversely, certain groups, often non-politicised, such as the illiterate, women or rural populations, but paradoxically also actors who occupy positions of power in the economic or cultural spheres or in senior civil service, often have less of a voice and are less heard in the official narratives of the transition. The question that arises here is how, from a social science perspective, to document violence and its experiences based on these underrepresented testimonies.

The two previous topics open up a crucial and often paradoxical aspect relating to the temporality of reconciliation and reparation. It is striking to note why, in many contexts, a fixed and limited temporality is often assigned both to the act of violence itself and to the expected process of reparation or justice. Such an approach suggests that there is a time limit for reparation, a deadline after which violence is considered to be no longer 'repairable'. It is precisely at this time limit that the notion of the irreparable crystallises. The irreparable is then defined not only by the intrinsically definitive nature of the harm suffered, but also, and more insidiously, by an institutional decision that thus freezes the aftermath of violence in the past and may, in so doing, not only hinder the work of memory and justice, but also condition the formation of political subjectivities in the present.

The reparation under question does not only concern individuals and communities. It also concerns the places that were victims and witnesses of the violence. Here, it is necessary to focus on these "places of memory" in order to examine, through their materiality, the policies that make and unmake them. The temporality here is different. It is that of the preservation of these places, i.e. how long can they continue to bear witness to the violence that took place there? Especially since many of these places remain unknown, inaccessible, destroyed or in an advanced state of disrepair. Hence the importance of the notions of "fragment" and "trace" in accounting for the evanescent nature of these places and the memories they carry.

We particularly encourage contributions that address the following interconnected themes, allowing for theoretical and methodological discussion of the significance of traces, fragments, silences, memory and oblivion in the (un)recognition and (non)denunciation of violence in the present:

1. The influence of transitional justice and reparation on current definitions of violence

2. Governmentalities of violence and its uneven technologies

3. Legitimate and illegitimate witnesses and sources of violence

4. Places and non-places of violence