Social movements in Morocco: rethinking political opportunities in terms of claims and outcomes.

The close scrutiny of social movements in Morocco during the last decade shows that contentious politics changed dramatically from overt high-risk acts of indignation and public defiance in the streets during the Arab Spring to low-risk, tactical boycott campaigns on Facebook and single-issue movements during the last four years. The purpose of this paper is to suggest how we might read, interpret and understand the politics of contention in Morocco in terms of political opportunities. This article argues that political opportunities can be best apprehended using some context-dependent variables and showing the causal correlation between claims as an independent variable and outcomes represented by three dependent variables, namely recognition, policy change and repression. The aim is to map the field and study the political opportunities available to social movements through their contingent antagonistic interactions with the state. The study of variables revealed how structural features of the state and its conjunctural aspects shape political opportunities in Morocco. Though tactical variations were at play, the article delineated relatively constant mechanisms in these interactions. The article analysed data collected from social media and state television using a mixed method approach (netnography, grounded theory and critical discourse analysis). The results show that the Moroccan regime has been reluctant to respond positively to the social movements' claims and to implement any qualitative changes in policy, and reacted in most cases by smear campaigns, discrediting counter-narratives before using coercive means. The Moroccan state is more preoccupied with promoting its image internationally, though. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]