Family Code in Morocco. State Feminism or Democracy?
Paper to be presented at the 2nd ECPR Graduate Conference, Barcelona, August 26, 2008
Please do not quote without permission

Emanuela Dalmasso
University of Turin emanuela.dalmasso@libero.it

Abstract
The paper aims to analyse the new Family code in Morocco considered as a controversial issue of the democratisation process. First we address the analysis of relations between tribal system and national identity to explain the promulgation of the first Family code. Afterwards we focus on the role played by Moroccan civil society, especially the feminist movement, in the processes leading up to the 1993 and the 2004 reforms. We analyse the crucial moment of the latest reform in a double perspective: the transition to democracy and the political dynamics. The new Family code in a way improves women’s rights but on the other hand it was the result of a massive use of the King’s constitutional prerogatives which means that the government was completely marginalized. Furthermore analysing the review processes in Morocco means to point out the clash between who prompt for a radical reform and who consider a secularist code as the umpteenth granting to the imperialism of the West. Exploring how these approaches are constructed do not only expose the diverging ways to conceive Moroccan society but especially the diverging strategies adopted by the society to cope with its political system.

Keywords
Gender, Democratization, Africa, Civil Society, Islam.

Introduction
In Moroccan history there are two dates: 16 May 1930 and 16 May 2003, on the first a struggle began and on the second a struggle ended; both are strictly related to the power struggle, but in both cases the detonator was the issue of Code of Personal Status (Code de statut personnel, CSP). The correlation between the impact CSP and the women’s possibility to get into the public sphere, and so their real capacity to play a role in the development