Sulâliyyât Women's Dynamic in Ahl Taroudant and Oulad Sbita: The Feminisation of Resistance to Collective Lands' Dispossession

The grabbing of collective agricultural land is generating a continuous process of socio-spatial change, impacting the way of life of farming communities and their landscape. That said, state intervention in the transfer of collective land has, from the colonial period to present days, provoked considerable resistance from tribal communities. Against this backdrop of resistance, the feminisation of sulâliyya communities' protestation has aroused considerable sociological interest, since the dawn of the third millennium. Based on ethnographic research comparing the protest dynamics of the sulâliyyât women in two tribal communities : « Ahl Taroudant » in the Souss plain, and « Oulad Sbita » around the capital of Morocco, our contribution aims to contribute in the analysis of sulâliyya communities protest movement's evolution. By analysing their accounts of dispossession and resistance, we were able to highlight what might be described as a process of metamorphosis in the two sulâliyya communities protest movements, since their beginning in concomitance with the ‘Arab Spring’ protest wave to present day. We have also concluded that the two sulâliyyât dynamics have certain features in common, such as a communal aspect with female leadership. They also both emerged in a context of dispossession. However, they differ in terms of the nature of their demands, as well as the modes and repertoires of their respective collective actions.