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Recent exchanges I have had with certain journalists, essayists, and European propaganda relays—long committed to a critical, often hostile reading of Morocco—reveal a recurring narrative in certain European circles: a simplistic dichotomy opposing a “Makhzen” portrayed as centralized, opaque, and authoritarian to a Moroccan people presumed passive, deprived of agency and political capacity. This trope is not merely simplistic; it is erroneous. Worse still, it is used as a framework to characterize any policy or initiative as a “Makhzenian calculation” by a ruling elite that supposedly in no way reflects the desires and aspirations of the Moroccan people.
The origin of this trope lies in Algerian power discourse of the 1960s and 1970s—a revolutionary discourse intoxicated by the successes of the Algerian revolution and celebrated in global leftist circles at the time. It was later taken up by segments of the radical left in France and Spain, becoming a Cold War interpretive grid that opposed a supposedly wounded people to a regime described as authoritarian, anti-progressive, and anti–Third Worldist. The Makhzen thus became a convenient signifier to designate a counter-revolutionary elite allegedly controlling and preventing the emancipation and liberation of the Moroccan people.
This caricature stems from an anachronistic projection of the European oligarchic authoritarian phenomenon of the 18th and 19th centuries. This ethnocentric bias tends to equate the very existence of an executive monarchy with abuse of power, by recalling the excesses of European monarchies and their ruling classes before the rise of democratic currents in Europe. In other words, the dichotomy between an authoritarian central power and a dominated people is historically European; yet part of the radical left mechanically transposed it onto non-European societies without questioning its contextual relevance. In this framework, the shift toward a “Third Worldist” discourse denouncing non-aligned or non-“progressive” regimes—whether in Algeria or elsewhere—occurred almost naturally.
But this trope is also deeply Orientalist. The figure of the power-intoxicated sultan, locked in absolutism and indulging in palace pleasures, belongs to a long-standing Orientalist imaginary. It was woven over centuries into European culture since the introduction of The Thousand and One Nights and other Oriental narratives into the Western imagination beginning in the 16th century. This exoticizing imagery, which freezes the Orient in a despotic and sensual alterity, continues to unconsciously structure certain contemporary readings of power in Morocco by essentializing the monarchy and the Makhzen within categories that stem more from cultural fantasy than sociological analysis.
The vision of the Makhzen as an “opaque apparatus controlling Morocco from above” is not only simplistic and exoticizing; it is false from cultural, sociological, historical, and anthropological perspectives. The Makhzen is certainly a center of power, but it is equally a cultural, symbolic, and sociological reality integrated into everyday practices and Moroccan imaginaries. Drawing on the academic work of Susan Slyomovics, Elaine Combs-Schilling, Mohammed Tozy, Abdeslam Maghraoui, Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, and Daniel Zisenwine, I seek to refute the idea of an occult and opaque Makhzen and instead advance the idea of the Makhzen as an integral part of the sociological, cultural, and historical lived experience of Moroccans.
I focus here on contemporary sociological reality, but this reality refers back to a historical depth that Combs-Schilling’s work traces to the Saadian period. This symbolic and political continuity can be found more broadly in Moroccan imaginaries, including the foundational periods of the Almoravids and Almohads, when the relationship between power, sacrality, and social order gradually sedimented into collective representations.
External readings—mainly journalistic and political—are fascinated by the concept of the Makhzen but reduce it to a secret, coercive, and vertical apparatus. This interpretation is reductive because it projects onto Morocco the European model of central power derived from post-medieval absolute monarchies. The result is a biased understanding and simplistic categorization that fail to do justice to the sociological, cultural, and symbolic reality of the exercise of power in Morocco.
As Susan Slyomovics noted in The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (2010), the Makhzen is far more than a simple “European-style” administrative state: it is a ritualized monarchy, a system of symbols, and a staging of power. Ceremonies, the bay‘a, and public performances play an essential role in the exercise of monarchical authority.
Legitimacy is produced through representation, memory, and ritualization. This staging creates among citizens a dual relationship of respect and affective identification (in the Brechtian sense), making ritual a unifying act—a suspension of time in which the people recognize themselves in the gestures of the sovereign as supreme representative.
Sovereignty therefore does not derive from an all-powerful monarch but from a symbiosis between a power invested in the sovereign through the bay‘a and a people who, as living social actors, actively—and partly uncontrollably—participate in the staging of power.
Elaine Combs-Schilling, in Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice (1989), analyzes Makhzenian power as an internalized sacred performance. For her, the Makhzen constitutes a performative regime of authority, articulating sacrality, gender, and the staging of power.
The legitimacy of this power is produced through lived Islam, through the sacred time of ʿAïd al-Adha, the Mawlid, and through the authority of Amir al-Mu’minin. Combs-Schilling goes further by showing how the Makhzen is internalized in social life, notably through the anthropological example of the “sultan for a night” in marriage practices and imaginaries.
Thus, the Makhzen embodies a moral, cosmological, and sacred order (linked to the sacralization of marriage in Moroccan culture); it is not merely a political device in the narrow sense, as some Western observers superficially and naïvely assume.
For Mohammed Tozy, the Makhzen is far from the mysterious, rigid, and anachronistic power described by exoticizing readings; rather, it is a hybrid, adaptive, and evolving system. It combines tradition, bureaucracy, modernity, and clientelism, functioning as a mediating device among different registers of legitimacy and power.
The Makhzen thus possesses a triple legitimacy:
– traditional, stemming from the centrality of the monarchy in the Moroccan political imagination, religion, and the bay‘a (an Islamic practice of political allegiance in place since the 8th century);
– administrative, based on institutions, procedures, and law;
– pragmatic, concerned with public order, stability, and a distribution of resources perceived as legitimate.
For Tozy, the Makhzen is less an occult entity than a network of concrete actors—caïds, notables, mediators, administrative agents—who “cascade” authority in everyday life and weave links between the central state and society. It is a situated, relational, and socially embedded mode of governance, not an abstract apparatus detached from the social body.
For Abdeslam Maghraoui, the Makhzen is the manager of reform from above. Reform under the new reign has become both a source and a resource of legitimacy. It embodies, in the eyes of citizens, strategic patience—a long-term horizon that goes beyond short-term political calculations. The monarchy reassures because it is anchored in duration, stability, and strategic patience.
Bruce Maddy-Weitzman (Contemporary Morocco: State, Politics and Society under Mohammed VI, co-edited with Daniel Zisenwine, 2012) distinguishes the monarchy—respected and venerated by Moroccans—from the bureaucratic Makhzen, perceived as a source of frustration. This distinction serves a sociological function: it channels criticism without targeting the sovereign figure.
However, the problem with Maddy-Weitzman’s reading is that he does not clarify the status of the elected government in this configuration. In contemporary political practice, it is precisely the government that assumes much of the bureaucratic role traditionally associated with the Makhzen. The implicit question remains: is the government part of the Makhzen or not? What should have been stated more explicitly is that since the new reign—and even more so since 2011—a significant portion of the bureaucratic dimension of the Makhzen has shifted to the government emerging from the ballot box.
In current political discourse, a distinction increasingly operates between the Makhzen “around the palace,” associated with the long term, strategy, and symbolism, and the government, situated within the short term and electoral time. This distinction does not deny power asymmetries, but it allows us to move beyond the conspiratorial fiction of a homogeneous and omnipotent Makhzen. It allows power to be understood as a differentiated arrangement of registers rather than as a unified and timeless conspiracy. This distinction deeply unsettles anti-Moroccan narratives, as it destabilizes the mythologies and political fantasies surrounding the concept of the Makhzen as a monolithic and occult entity.
All this means that the Makhzen is a genuine social Weltanschauung. It is a full-fledged cultural system: one identifies with Makhzenian attire, cuisine, rites, and festivities. But it is also a cultural system of power—a way of channeling, sharing, and negotiating authority, built over time and constantly reconfigured according to historical contexts. We are therefore far from the rigid idea proposed by some intellectually lazy journalists. The Makhzen is also a crossroads of elite networks and institutions, but above all a powerful symbolic order intimately linked to the monarchy and Islam. Over time, it has developed a pragmatic device for social mediation.
The relationship of Moroccans to the Makhzen is neither pure submission nor pure opposition. It is ritualized through the bay‘a, but also lived, negotiated, and embodied in daily practices. Strictly “authoritarian” readings fail because they do not make the effort to grasp this fundamental sociological complexity.
Informed readers must therefore reject the caricatured reading of the Makhzen as a mere opaque machine of domination. It is a system of meaning and social and political relations, historically rooted and culturally lived. Above all, it is a system that adapts and transforms over time. The precolonial Makhzen differs from the Makhzen under the French and Spanish Protectorates. Hassan II established a highly centralized apparatus based on a network of territorial authorities allied with the central power, tasked with structuring allegiance and channeling grievances. Under Mohammed VI, administrative powers have been delegated to the elected government, while the Palace retains the strategic and sovereign functions of the state.
The Makhzen is therefore a dynamic and flexible system, while remaining a symbolic and identity-based center of gravity for Moroccans.
