After Algeria’s president Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his intention to run for a fifth term in early 2019, a popular peaceful uprising erupted calling for change. Bouteflika, who had been in office since 1999, was eventually forced to resign, but the Hirak (“movement”) continued to protest the country’s inequalities and entrenched ruling elite.The Suspended Disaster examines the dynamics of the Algerian political system, offering new insights into the last years of Bouteflika’s rule and the factors that shaped the emergence of an unexpected social movement. Thomas Serres argues that the Algerian ruling coalition developed a mode of government based on the management of a seemingly never-ending crisis, marked by an obsession with security and the ever-present possibility of unrest, violence, and economic collapse. Identifying this form of rule as “governance by catastrophization,” he shows how attempts to preserve the status quo through emergency policies and constant reforms can also lay the groundwork for a revolutionary situation. Serres contrasts the government’s portrayal of perpetually imminent disaster with the uncertainty, precarity, and indignity experienced by much of the population, which fueled the rejection of ruling elites, a profound mistrust toward institutions, and new spaces for grassroots opposition.Based on extensive fieldwork and theoretically novel, The Suspended Disaster sheds new light on the political, economic, and social processes underlying an uprising that changed the face of Algerian politics.
Thomas Serres is an assistant professor of politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a coeditor of North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, Culture (2018) and an editor for the Maghreb page on Jadaliyya.
Preface1. A Never-Ending Crisis?2. Struggles at the Heart of the State3. Cronies and Labyrinths4. Fragments of Order5. The Regulation of Freedoms6. The Crisis as a Lived Experience7. In Search of Lost MeaningCodaAcknowledgmentsAppendix A: Methods of InquiryAppendix B: A Time Line for Bouteflika’s AlgeriaGlossary of Terms and AbbreviationsNotesBibliographyIndex
Algeria is a country that has too often been proclaimed exceptional or illegible to outside observers. This book offers a fascinating account of grassroots politics in contemporary Algeria leading up to the 2019 Hirak. The study centers the voices of a wide variety of actors to reveal how Algerians have conceived of and lived within political crisis. At the same time, it offers bold theoretical tools to show how dissent is not only articulated by political opponents but also managed by the state. The notion of “governance by catastrophization” challenges dominant narratives and will be valuable for a wide range of scholars who study postcolonial politics in the Global South. This pathbreaking book is among the most exciting works on Algeria published in recent decades.
