Chapter 8 systematically compares immigration politics in Morocco and Tunisia and brings to the fore some striking continuities and parallels across democratic and autocratic contexts. I show that the state’s imperative to ensure its legitimation and sovereignty drives some of the key similarities in Moroccan and Tunisian immigration policymaking, such as the tendency to safeguard state power by creating exemption regimes or enacting changes informally. I also demonstrate that histories of state formation and official national identity narratives are key to understanding contemporary immigration politics in both countries. Lastly, I tease out how Morocco’s autocratization and Tunisia’s democratization affected the role, weight and interactions of state apparatus, civil society and external actors in immigration policy over the twenty-first century. I show that while the power of the executive and the weight of domestic political and civil society actors seem sensitive to a ’regime effect’, bureaucratic and international policy dynamics around immigration seem largely unaffected by political regime dynamics.

Chapter 3 dives into the contrasting cases of Morocco and Tunisia. I introduce immigration policy developments in Morocco and Tunisia against the backdrop of both countries’ political regime dynamics. In particular, I provide concise accounts of Moroccan and Tunisian state formation trajectories and national identity narratives, as well as focused overviews of immigration and emigration patterns and policies from the early twentieth century until the end of 2020, including Morocco’s and Tunisia’s treatment of migrants during the first year of COVID-19. This offers the empirical backbone for the book.

Chapter 7 dissects power dynamics among actors involved in immigration policy in Tunisia through the 2011 regime change: democratic state institutions and the administration; CSOs and migrant associations; international organizations, legal actors, and the private sector. I show how democratization affected immigration policy processes in ambiguous ways and explain why the increase in citizens’ political freedoms and civil society activism has not spilled over into more openness towards immigration. After 2011, policy processes became more inclusive, as the role of Tunisia’s parliament and civil society was strengthened. However, democratization also brought inter-actor dynamics to the fore that put a break to immigration reform plans, such as turf wars within the administration or governmental volatility. At the same time, the democratic transition has only partially affected immigration policymaking, as dynamics of international norm adherence and the ambiguous role of employers in Tunisia’s largely informal economy remained relatively unaffected by the regime change. In this context, political elites opted for restrictive policy continuity instead of translating migratory experiences and democratic ideals into liberal immigration reform.

Chapter 2 offers a first systematic attempt at rethinking immigration policy theories across political regimes. I map dominant theories of immigration policymaking - namely political economy, institutionalist, historical-culturalist, globalization theory and international relations approaches – and reflect on their relevance for understanding immigration politics across the democracy–autocracy spectrum. In doing so, I draw on my in-depth case studies of Morocco and Tunisia, the rich scholarship on immigration policymaking in the Global North and Global South, as well as broader comparative politics, international relations and political sociology literature on power, politics and modern statehood. Hereby, I seek to stimulate future comparative research and systematic theorizing of immigration politics.

The Conclusion returns to the book’s central ambition: to leverage the contrasting cases of Morocco and Tunisia for more systematic theory-building on immigration politics beyond the liberal state. I summarize my key empirical and theoretical propositions and reflect on how they contribute to research on Moroccan and Tunisian migration politics, theories of immigration policy, and broader comparative politics, international relations, and political sociology scholarship. I also reflect on the most promising avenues for consolidating theory-building on immigration policymaking across the Global North/Global South and democracy/autocracy divides in the future. In particular, I hope to inspire readers to question the analytical power of binary categories such as democracy or autocracy for theorizing political processes, and to mobilize immigration policy as a lens to research political change and the inner workings of modern states.

The chapter explains how youths, families, and the educated middle class took over Tripoli’s al-Nour square during Lebanon’s revolutionary moment in October 2019. Al-Nour square had been the site of Sunni Islamist demonstrations of solidarity with the Syrian opposition, and against the Shiʿa Hizbullah movement from 2011-2013. The 2019 protests in al-Nour Square, against the sectarian political system, challenged the widespread idea that Tripoli was a conservative Sunni Islamist city, where non-Sunnis could not feel welcome.

Tripoli faced a number of interlinked challenges. Although security in Tripoli deteriorated in the shadow of the war in Syria, it was not the primary challenge for the city. A 2014 security plan helped Tripoli regain some stability. Lebanon’s and Tripoli’s primary struggle lay in the collapse of its public services and the decline in the rule of law. People felt that the country’s sectarian political leaders, including Saad Hariri, ultimately only served their own interests, yet no real alternative leaders emerged. Tripoli’s clientelist political system continued to show some degree of resilience even after the 2019 revolutionary moment.

This book has asked whether and why Sunni secondary cities in the Middle East have a higher propensity for unrest and ideological-political activism than capital cities. Taking Tripoli in northern Lebanon as a microcosm of the crisis of Sunnism in the broader Middle East, the book tells a story of urban violence in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Throughout the Tripoli case study, this book identified a feature of secondary cities that I call city corporatism. The root of violence in secondary cities is that these cities often see themselves as united during national turmoil, as a base for one political faction, generally the opposition.

The book identifies four causal mechanisms that jointly explain why urban violence erupts in secondary cities: external meddling; the personal ambitions of local elites; local residents’ willingness to join the fighters; and the existence of competing, or hybrid, Lebanese sovereignties. Each mechanism helps explain why Tripoli has been prone to violence in recent decades.

Tripoli, October 2019: Young people from various religious backgrounds and all walks of life sang and danced together in the city’s central al-Nour Square, shattering the myth of Tripoli as a ‘cradle of terrorism’ or ‘citadel of Muslims’. The Islamists who had often dominated Tripoli’s urban space retreated, and youths, families, and members of the educated middle class filled al-Nour Square during Lebanon’s revolutionary moment.

Why and how did Tripoli become the country’s prime centre of contentious politics in otherwise-peripheral Lebanon?

The introduction presents the main argument of the book, introducing the concepts of the dethronement of secondary cities, politics of autochthony, and erosion of city corporatism in Tripoli. It then discusses the broader lessons of the Tripoli case, which speak to three strands of literature: studies of Lebanon and the Levant; discussions on sectarianization in the Middle East; and debates on the ‘Sunni Crisis’ in the Middle East. Lastly, the research methods used for data collection are presented.

The 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri unleashed a political earthquake in Lebanon. Tripoli and its surroundings became a Sunni base for the Future Movement, led by Rafiq Hariri’s son Saad and other neoliberal elites from Lebanon’s nouveaux riches political class. For the first time, Tripolitanians rallied around a political party based outside their own city.

Many Tripolitanians supported the Future Movement in 2005 because they hoped that Saad Hariri, with his personal wealth and connections to Saudi Arabia, might bring investments to marginalized areas in northern Lebanon. However, these expectations were not met.

The Future Movement was an elite-based party, and its strategies of outreach to the poor had severe shortcomings. It used divisive sectarian (anti-Shiʿi) electoral strategies in Tripoli and empowered Sunni radicals, leading to a spiral of violence. Sunni hardliners gained prominent roles in Tripoli after Hizbullah and its allies turned their weapons inwards in Beirut in May 2008. However, this sectarian resource was insufficient to help the Future Movement maintain its popularity in Tripoli in the long run.

How did Tripoli, a medium-sized secondary city, become the centre of Lebanon’s anti-imperialist and Arab nationalist protest movement?

Anti-French mobilizations in Tripoli created a unique city corporatism that helped to unite most of the Sunni population politically until the 1970s. When Tripoli was carved out of Syria and attached to the new state of Greater Lebanon in 1920 by the French mandate, the city lost its importance and was demoted to secondary status.

This paved the way for a strong, Arab nationalist city identity in Tripoli, driven by Abdulhamid Karami, a man of religion turned politician. Tripoli’s nationalist identity subsequently morphed into various Islamist trends, involving the bourgeois Islamists, the pro-Palestinian Islamists and the Maoist-turned-Islamist urban poor.

Nationalist and Islamist ideas found a foothold in Tripoli due to the many ties between the city and prominent nationalists and Islamists in Syria. However, Tripoli’s ʿAlawites and Christians contested the Arab nationalist identity of Tripoli as formulated by its Sunni leaders.

This chapter departs from the curious Memorandum of Understanding signed between Hizbollah and some of Tripoli’s Salafis in 2008. Tripoli’s Salafis, who perceived themselves as custodians of the Sunni doctrine and identity, were known for their very antagonistic discourse vis-à-vis the Shiʿa Hizbollah movement.

This chapter shows how sectarianism and the new political polarization in Lebanon after the Syrian pull-out in 2005 caused the Islamists in Tripoli to change their strategies and divide. The more liberal, but highly conflictual, climate empowered the Islamists on the one hand, but also divided them along a variety of political issues being debated in Lebanon on the other. Some aligned themselves with the March 14 Alliance and the Future Movement, while others came closer to Hizbullah, Future’s opponent. Yet, Islamists in Tripoli also came together to collectively engage in pan-Islamist protests. This indicates that most of Tripoli’s Islamists are independent actors, and that Islamists cannot be viewed as one collective political force.

The Islamic Tawhid Movement, an Islamist militia, emerged in 1982, and seized military control of Tripoli, which lasted until 1985. This chapter explores the Islamic Tawhid’s curious alliance with its most significant sponsor, the nationalist Palestinian Fatah group, and how they failed to mobilise support from Tripoli’s conservative middle class.

The emergence of the Islamic Tawhid Movement was closely linked to regional political events. The Lebanese Left and the Palestinian commando movement in Lebanon suffered a humiliating defeat during the 1982 Israeli invasion, and nearly 15,000 Palestinian commandos were forced to flee to Tunisia.

Tripoli became the last resort in Lebanon for al-Fatah. However, Syria, with a troop presence in Lebanon since 1976, did not accept the arrival of the Palestinian commandos, and a Syrian–Palestinian war broke out in the city. Tripoli’s Sunnis were generally pro-Palestinian and fiercely opposed to the Syrian Assad regime. Many youths in Tripoli turned to Islamism after the demise of the Left. However, the conservative middle class in Tripoli loathed Tawhid’s violence against civilians and despised its weak religious foundations.