ABSTRACT
In 2019–2021, Algeria witnessed a wide and extensive wave of protests organised by the so-called Hirak movement. Continuous and widespread demonstrations led to resignation of the President Abdelaziz Bouteflika while many former governmental figures have been arrested and condemned to long jail sentences ever since. Before the 2019 uprisings, dozens of autonomous trade unions formed a heterogeneous political body within dispersed opposition. Activists within these unions challenged, alongside with other civil society actors, the state authorities through strikes, demonstrations, and sit-ins claiming for better working conditions and citizenship rights. This chapter theorises these nonviolent social contestations through the concept of “acts of citizenship” and it is based on ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation among autonomous trade union activists. It also discusses multiple state practices (restrictions, arrests, negotiations, and cloning) in order to discover how state authorities managed the pre-2019 uprisings and imaginaries of the social change.
