Abstract
This paper examines how leadership in higher education institutions in Francophone North Africa remains shaped by colonial administrative legacies and explores how governance might be reimagined through decolonial perspectives. Although the region possesses a long intellectual heritage, contemporary higher education systems in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia continue to reflect bureaucratic hierarchies, linguistic stratification, and centralised authority inherited from French colonial rule. While leadership scholarship increasingly promotes participatory and collaborative models, limited attention has been paid to how colonial administrative rationalities continue to structure leadership enactment in postcolonial higher education contexts. Adopting an interpretivist qualitative design, the study draws on semi-structured interviews with academics across institutions in the three countries to explore how leadership is experienced and understood in practice. The findings reveal that leadership operates within three interrelated dynamics. First, enduring forms of administrative, epistemic, and cultural coloniality continue to shape authority, legitimacy, and institutional culture. Second, postcolonial reforms and global managerial pressures have layered additional governance logics onto inherited structures, producing hybrid institutional environments characterised by ambiguity, fragmented authority, and competing expectations of leadership. Third, despite this structural complexity, participants articulated ambivalent yet tangible visions of decolonial leadership grounded in locally rooted epistemologies, relational authority, and stronger connections between institutions and their social environments. By conceptualising leadership as a historically layered and negotiated practice, the paper advances a decolonial framework for understanding leadership in postcolonial North African higher education systems. It shows that transformation is not simply a matter of institutional reform, but of rethinking the epistemic foundations, cultural legitimacy, and relational purposes through which leadership itself is enacted.