"On the Margins of the Throne"
How does fifteen years of archival inquiry reframe the reading of Moroccan nation-building through a figure who remained on the margins of official historiography — acting without ever leaving a trace?
A biography that defies easy classification
A work that brings together political biography, archival inquiry, epistemological manifesto and the sociology of economic elites, and that posits the notion of "discretion" as a political force at the heart of power relations in Morocco.
Irène Bono's book belongs to that category of academic works which defy easy classification — and it is precisely in this defiance that what makes it both provocative and conducive to reflection resides.
It is at once a political biography, an archival inquiry, an epistemological manifesto and a sociology of economic elites, in addition to constituting a theoretical contribution to the study of nationalism, of power, and of what the author calls "discretion" as a political force. That a single study should embrace all these dimensions without collapsing under the weight of its ambition is in itself a remarkable feat; and that it should achieve all this with consistent methodological coherence and analytical finesse — making it an indispensable reference for scholars of the political history of the Maghreb, of postcolonial studies, of the sociology of elites and of biographical research methodology — is no less so.
Irène Bono is professor of political science at the University of Turin; her research focuses on the unconventional forms of political action in the formation of the Moroccan nation-state, with particular attention to the modalities of political participation, to governance, and to the forms of violence engendered by economic, cultural and memorial practices. This book, her first single-authored work, is the fruit of more than fifteen years of research and dialogue with a central figure in Moroccan history.
The book's subject is Ahmed Benkirane, witness to nearly a century of Moroccan political transformations: a nationalist militant in his youth, a senior civil servant in the aftermath of independence, and a prominent press and business figure. Born in 1927 in Marrakesh, he nonetheless remains almost entirely absent from official historiography; for his significance lies precisely in his capacity to act and exert influence without leaving any trace that the official archives would take care to record.
Against the dominant narrative
To appreciate the scale of Bono's intervention, one must understand the historiographical field she enters. Moroccan national historiography remains organized around the three kings and a number of heroes of independence or victims of the "years of lead." This narrative pattern tends to order modern Moroccan history around martyrdom, royal charisma and resounding political confrontations, thereby producing heroes and victims as clearly defined figures, while consigning to oblivion a vast swath of actors who helped shape the political, economic and social structure of the nation through less visible and more ambiguous forms of participation.
Bono's book constitutes, in part, an extended argument against this historical reduction. By choosing a figure who falls into neither the category of the hero nor that of the victim, she compels us to reconsider the very structures of historical intelligibility: which figures merit study, and on what grounds? The choice of Benkirane as a subject is therefore not merely a biographical decision; it is, in its essence, a theoretical choice.
On this basis, the question of the archive occupies a central place in the book's methodological reflection. Starting from the self-evident, though often overlooked, premise that the source is not conclusive proof but an "indication" calling for interrogation and deconstruction, Bono reminds us that the biographical narrative is, above all, a discourse. This is not a mere methodological caveat but a fundamental epistemological claim: rather than treating archives as repositories of evidence awaiting extraction, Bono approaches them as spaces of political production, where what is said and what is left unsaid are actively and deliberately ordered.
Bono mobilizes the notion of "microstoria" proposed by the Italian school associated with Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi, extending it from historical research to comparative political science — a move that introduces methodological sensibilities the latter had hitherto been reluctant to adopt: attention to traces, to the obscure, and to all that escapes official classification.
Discretion: a political force
Bono's treatment of "discretionary power" as a political concept constitutes the theoretical axis of the book and is, in all likelihood, its most original and enduring contribution to the political literature. Discretionary power reveals less an arbitrary or informal character of political action than the value of intimacy and confidentiality in the conduct of public affairs. The author distinguishes discretion from neighboring but distinct notions: secrecy, informality and opacity. In her usage, discretion is not mere concealment of information: it is a mode of political existence produced by the social structure.
In the first part of the book, "Saving the Biography from the Nation," the passport Benkirane obtained in 1954 serves as the connecting thread for understanding his hidden political trajectories. The author argues that the plurality of social identities is the structural condition of discretion. It is not so much that Benkirane chose discretion in the sense of reserve and circumspection: it is his very social position — straddling class boundaries, institutional fields and political affiliations — that rendered him "relatively unsuspectable."
This concept unfolds further in Bono's analysis of what she calls the "discreet violence" of business relations, gift politics, social clubs and informal networks. In postcolonial Morocco, economic sovereignty was not won through state decrees alone, but through the patient construction of informal networks, personal loyalties and shared social practices.
For Bono, discretion refers to a state of social existence before it refers to a personal virtue or a deliberate strategy. Benkirane drew his political efficacy from the difficulty of pinning down his contours, the multiplicity of his commitments and the dispersion of his activity across the spheres of business, the press, diplomacy and party politics.
Biographical fieldwork
Perhaps what most distinguishes this book in terms of intellectual daring is its profound reflection on the conditions under which the knowledge it contains was produced. It emerged from a ten-year dialogue between an Italian scholar and a prominent figure marked by discretion. Bono develops the notion of "biographical fieldwork" to describe a methodological practice that belongs neither to classical ethnography, nor to standard archival historiography, nor to mere oral history.
Each chapter opens with a short text by Benkirane himself that sheds light on what follows, making this work a fruitful collaboration between the author and the subject of her study. The idea of "co-construction" raises questions the book addresses with transparency: how does the researcher preserve analytical distance from a collaborator who has read, discussed and enriched the manuscript? The choice of the abbreviation "Abk" to designate Benkirane is one of the devices by which the author seeks to manage this complex epistemological situation.
This methodological transparency is reinforced by the book's remarkable paratextual apparatus. The work is in fact extended through a website entitled "From the Book to the Archive," accessible via QR codes in the appendix. This digital extension is not a marketing tool but a methodological manifesto: by making the archival sources available, Bono invites her readers to assess her interpretive choices for themselves.
Moroccan political economy and unconventional political action
One of the book's major contributions lies in its account of the specifically Moroccan structure of political power, in the wake of the work of Mohamed Tozy, Béatrice Hibou and others, which she extends and broadens; a structure in which the formal institutions of the state were never the exclusive, or even principal, source of power. Bono thus joins Mohamed Tozy, who showed that power in Morocco is also a societal matter, in "another form of political action."
Ahmed Benkirane was an entrepreneur of the national in the dual sense of the term: a businessman supporting economic development, and a politically engaged man who, through his commercial activity, worked toward the country's monetary and economic sovereignty. Thus the struggle for nation-building passed through private-sector actors, beyond the political parties and the official authorities. The core of Bono's argument is not that the state is irrelevant; quite the contrary: she insists on the necessity of understanding the entanglement of state and economy, in postcolonial contexts, through more finely grained analytical frameworks.
On the limits of the analysis and its reach
The book's many strengths do not exempt it from critical scrutiny, and certain points warrant pausing over. Bono addresses the problem of representativeness on several occasions and with precision, but it remains a tension that a single case, however rich in context, cannot resolve. The notion of discretion may at times turn into an overly elastic category, liable to absorb very different phenomena under a single analytical banner. Likewise, the world of economic nationalism that Bono reconstructs appears, in its overwhelming majority, masculine.
Despite these reservations, the overall assessment remains positive. Irène Bono has produced a work that helps advance several fields simultaneously, and that offers a model of methodological and theoretical practices whose reach extends beyond the borders of Morocco. The scholarly rigor of this work deserves particular praise: every piece of information is documented and sourced. As for specialists of the Maghrebi and African political scene, the book offers them an indispensable account of the formation of Moroccan political economy in the postcolonial phase.
Restoring forgotten forms of national belonging is not an academic exercise, but an act of historical justice
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Bono's book formulates a compelling moral argument about the responsibilities of historical research. To analyze discretion is to bring to light forms of belonging to the nation that contemporary Moroccan society ignores, and even forgets.
Restoring these forgotten forms of national belonging is an act of historical justice toward the actors who built the nation by means its official memory could not, or would not, recognize.
Bibliographic reference
Bono Irène. Un entrepreneur du national au Maroc. Ahmed Benkirane, traces et discrétion. Paris, Karthala, 2024, 555 p.
