Conclusion

Abstract

This chapter concludes by situating a half century of transformation in the Mgoun Valley in global debates about supporting rural livelihoods and social life at a time of unprecedented political, environmental, and economic pressures. It recounts individual stories of making do, collective mobilizations asserting new claims, and the gradual reworking of the landscape as social, political, and agricultural acts. The accounts do, however, represent a genealogy of the present, an analysis of how residents in the Mgoun Valley have refigured a vibrant, if conflicted, rurality. The chapter also identifies more durable dynamics informing how people in this rural space constructed their social and economic worlds as fundamentally political projects. Ultimately, the chapter contributes to rethinking political agency and common action in rural North Africa and the Middle East by attending to the quotidian complexities of rural politics and land conflict.