ABSTRACT
The ‘Popular Committee Against Shale Gas, ’which emerged in the city of Ouargla in 2014 to protest governmental fracking plans in the Sahara, constitutes an interesting case of coalition building between a movement of unemployed and environmental activists, operating in Algeria’s uncertain post-electoral context. Given strong fragmentation of the contentious space, the question of what enabled these groups to converge becomes even more relevant. Drawing on research on contentious politics, resistance and participation in authoritarian contexts as well as on ethnographic fieldwork from 2014 to 2016, the paper explores how this unusual coalition was formed, analyzes the unemployed movement’s motivation to join the struggle against fracking, and examines the modalities of how both groups temporarily managed to overcome their differences by producing common mobilization frames. Despite the challenges this coalition faced, especially their differing class identities, diverging long-term interests and authoritarian destabilization strategies, this paper sheds light on the ambivalent power dynamics within the coalition and the transformation processes that become apparent.
