Contention and Order

This chapter examines the re-emergence of nonviolent contentious politics under president Bouteflika’s rule, rising with the exhaustion of violent rebel politics of the late 1990s, an evolving into an important channel for citizens to present specific policy claims relating directly to the redistributive nature of Algeria’s rentier-based political economy. The government’s lenient and often accommodating responses to certain socio-economic and welfare-related demands has made this an effective means for achieving quick political results. While revolutionary contention exists on the margins, the majority of contentious events that Algeria has witnessed over the past decade have served to uphold the existing political order.
Protesters mainly mobilised around two broad policy areas: 1) the government’s welfare and social policies and 2) new regionalist, politicised sub-identities in North and South Algeria. The article argues that a long-term drop in financial revenue from the petro-export sector, which finances the perpetuation of the current political order, would be likely to trigger a transformation of the well-established repertoire of contention from its current system-sustaining nature to a more transgressive one.