ABSTRACT
In the late 1990s, a popular Algerian perception of the country’s elites was that they were to be found in Paris rather than in Algiers.1 This perception, exaggerated as it may have been, pointed to two developments that crucially shaped the politically relevant elite (PRE) in the 1990s and that were at the same time shaped by the PRE: the civil war and economic liberalization. The civil war between the Algerian security forces and armed (Islamist) insurgents, which by 2004 had ebbed away to what could be described as intermediate armed conflict2 in geographically isolated areas, led to a mass exodus of societal and political elites, primarily to France.3 Economic liberalization brought new (rent-seeking) opportunities in the 1980s and created a new business elite that emerged mainly from the military bureaucratic apparatus and commuted between high-security compounds in Algiers and luxury apartments in Paris. Not encapsulated in the ‘Paris metaphor’ were two further developments with a significant impact on the PRE: the Kabyle uprising that started in 2001 and that pushed new politically relevant actors to the national political stage; and the changing international environment, post Cold War and, a decade later, post 9/11, that pushed Algeria to reposition itself in the international arena. Finally, political system reforms, namely the return to constitutional institutions, initiated by the core elite, contributed to changing the face of the entire PRE including the core elite itself.
