Description
Book SynopsisAfter Algeria’s president Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his intention to run for a fifth term in early 2019, a popular peaceful uprising erupted calling for change. Thomas Serres offers new insights into the last years of Bouteflika’s rule and the factors that shaped the emergence of an unexpected social movement.
Trade ReviewAlgeria is a country that has too often been proclaimed exceptional or illegible to outside observers. This book offers a fascinating account of grassroots politics in contemporary Algeria leading up to the 2019 Hirak. The study centers the voices of a wide variety of actors to reveal how Algerians have conceived of and lived within political crisis. At the same time, it offers bold theoretical tools to show how dissent is not only articulated by political opponents but also managed by the state. The notion of “governance by catastrophization” challenges dominant narratives and will be valuable for a wide range of scholars who study postcolonial politics in the Global South. This pathbreaking book is among the most exciting works on Algeria published in recent decades. -- Bassam Haddad, coeditor of
A Critical Political Economy of the Middle EastThe reconsolidation of the Algerian state after the crisis of the 1990s and its subordination to the increasingly centralized, corrupt leadership of the Bouteflika regime (1999-2019) has finally been accounted for in this erudite study by Thomas Serres, who brings to bear an impressive empirical apparatus, including extended periods of in-country field work. -- Jacob Mundy, author of
Imaginative Geographies of Algerian ViolenceTable of ContentsPreface
1. A Never-Ending Crisis?
2. Struggles at the Heart of the State
3. Cronies and Labyrinths
4. Fragments of Order
5. The Regulation of Freedoms
6. The Crisis as a Lived Experience
7. In Search of Lost Meaning
Coda
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Methods of Inquiry
Appendix B: A Time Line for Bouteflika’s Algeria
Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
