This project sets out to explore the changing state-society relations in Morocco and Tunisia from the rural margins Taking contentious politics as a starting point it wants to understand how social movements in the margins of society provoke political change and actively contribute to solutions to the challenges they (and society) face In spite of the fact that people living in the margins of Arab societies are predominantly portrayed as victims of centralized policies that favor, for example, large-scale industrial agriculture, resource extraction and/or metropolitan growth, they are also agents in the reconstruction of a new political world, especially within the ‘ost-Arab Spring’context As such, this study attempts to revalue the position and role of ‘he margins’in wider political transformations and problematizes the dominant trend of focusing primarily on what happens in the centers of power to understand political change in the region (ie in cities, on large public squares, within the ‘egime’ By using contentious politics in the margins as an entry point, the project contributes to the existing debates in three academic fields: development studies, (post-)democratization studies and social movement theory (SMT)