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 dedicated to the subject.

Foregrounding a regional system of competing alliances and diversionary tactics deemed typical of authoritarian Arab regimes, explanations offered by experts of the ‘Arab world’ tend towards the familiar. But in assuming equivalence between Middle East and Maghreb, they might miss out a key element of the dispute.

A story of ‘axes’

Normalised through the Abraham Accords, relations between Morocco and Israel take centre stage in accounts of the rift. Successive impacts from US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, use of Pegasus spyware against Algerian officials, and the Israeli Foreign Minister’s visit to Rabat, have been analysed in-depth by regional and international media speculating of a new North African theatre in Israel and Iran’s cold war.

Underwritten by a body of literature from Europe and America’s leading research institutions, the newfound importance of Israeli relations in shaping regional order has pushed discussion of longer standing ideological tensions to the background.

In particular, it has brought attention to how friction between Algeria and Morocco interlocks with a wider system of axes built around a blend of ‘hot wars’, proxy fronts, and inter-state rivalries. Often termed the ‘new Arab Cold War’, this dynamic is pivotal to understanding developments in MENA and beyond.

It is lent greater import by media organisations representing states on both sides of the divide.

Tying Morocco to Israel, Saudi, and the Gulf, and Algeria to Iran, conflict between these competing actors drives instability across the region. But it is also framed as an ecosystem, in that the rivalry acts as resource for regimes to build their legitimacy internally. In this sense, regional states are as invested in reproducing the tension as they are in resolving it.

This dimension of Algerian-Morocco relations 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, falling oil and natural gas revenues, forest fires, water shortages, and the persistence of 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 large role commentators with fields of expertise east of the Libya border play.

Decolonisation politics

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

In Algeria the almost total destruction of pre-colonial elites and creation of national ones through an anti-colonial war of independence, invested colonial borders with a seemingly counter-intuitive sanctity. On the other hand, continuance of a pre-colonial monarchy under the French protectorate and sequestering of its territories by colonial powers, meant that these same borders were disparaged for their artificiality in Moroccan national parlance.

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

This dynamic is important to understand precisely because it falls outside of the narrative conventional narratives of the ‘Arab world’, and has thus been misunderstood or left out entirely from the equation.

It explains why two neighbours were able to transform from blood brothers to bitter enemies within months of Algerian independence, and why the chances of meaningful reconciliation are slim. History shows us that Morocco and Algeria are willing to stick to their positions on Western Sahara, Palestine, and other questions of international sovereignty even where thesehave led them into diplomatic isolation.

Greater efforts should be paid towards understanding how this longer-term ideological dispute continues to play out. The logic of contrasting anti-colonial nationalism conditions the tension as much as do short term opportunism and flexible alliances, playing down this factor leaves more out than it invites in.