ABSTRACT
Algeria was the first country in the Arab world to experience an ‘Arab spring’ at least two decades before Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya were to undergo their democratic intifadas. Yet that democratic moment was quickly subverted by a military coup d'état followed by a decade — long bloody civil war costing the lives of 200,000 people or more. The tripartite pillars of the Algerian state — party, army, Sonatrach — have maintained the political status quo since the 1992 coup in the face of a swelling discontent in civil society among a broad cross-section of Algerian youth, workers, women, Islamists, Berberists, and bourgeoisie, all demanding greater political freedom, economic opportunity, and social justice. This article analyses the complex manner in which the authoritarian Algerian state has been able to maintain its stranglehold over civil society at a time when it confronts a newly invigorated mass public energised by the democratic revolutions that have taken place in the neighbouring North African states of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.
