Mockery from outside and from within: A neocolonial approach for human rights non-profit organizations in Morocco

This article investigates how non-profit organizations (NPOs) in Morocco deploy mockery to respond to reporting pressures of an international humanitarian regime. Theoretically, we develop a neocolonial framework that integrates the inner and outer dimensions of mockery with its key mechanisms—epistemic filtering, template imposition, and tactical compliance—to explain the co-production of contested non-cooperative spaces. Based on multi-sited fieldwork in NPOs working in Morocco, the study makes three contributions. Firstly, we reposition epistemic neocolonialism not only as error (misrepresentation) but as performance (mockery): a ritualized genre that diminishes participation, manufactures non-cooperation, and undermines resistance. Secondly, we go beyond the dominance/resistance binary by theorizing complicity, conviviality, and parody as co-present in NPOs, showing how refusal and compliance interpenetrate within hybrid authoritarian governance and donor-driven regimes in Morocco. Thirdly, we extend research on NPOs in the Souths by offering a spatialization of neocolonial power in the non-profit sector, which ties mockery to the creation of contested non-cooperative spaces: our study shows that marginalized groups do not merely encounter discursive misrepresentation but are structurally positioned in non-cooperative environments where neocolonial actors systematically stifle cooperation.