ABSTRACT
Despite the stereotype of North Africa as an area of violent conflict, many of the most important challenges to authoritarianism and social injustice have included unarmed civil resistance. The dramatic events of 2010-2011 were not the first wave of mass protests to sweep North Africa and force political change. During the Algerian independence struggle there were significant popular protests, strikes, and other nonviolent forms of resistance which complemented the armed revolution. Elsewhere, there were a series of popular protests against conservative autocratic pro-Western governments which prompted military coups by left-leaning nationalist army officers in Libya and Egypt. These new regimes partially satisfied the popular yearning for asserting national pride, challenging imperialism, breaking up the old aristocracy, and making modest efforts at pushing wealth downward, but in most cases these nationalist governments also ended up strengthening oppressive state apparatuses and weakening civil society. In the 1980s, mounting foreign debt forced most North African countries, irrespective of their formal ideology, to cut back on subsidies for food and fuel and impose other austerity measures which brought millions of people into the streets. Through various combinations of liberalization and repression, however, the regimes largely survived. Armed uprisings by Islamist extremists in the 1990s, particularly in Algeria and Egypt, resulted in horrific acts of terrorism by insurgents and brutal crackdowns by the state, underscoring the repercussions of using military means to challenge well-entrenched dictatorships.
