How Crisis Governs Algeria

A fascinating new book explores Bouteflika's regime, the legacies of the Dark Decade, and the politics of perpetual potential catastrophe

The 13th (!) season of the Middle East Political Science Podcast launched today, with brand new theme music by Malika Zarra, a conversation with Bob Kubinec about his book on business and politics in Tunisia and Egypt (see my review), and a “virtual poster session” I organized for four junior scholars whose APSA presentations were disrupted by… all that (Ansar Jasim, Elizabeth Parker-Magyar, Amir Mahdavi, and Ameni Mehrez). Listen here! And now, time for your weekly book review essay.

Thomas Serres, The Suspended Disaster: Governing by Crisis in Bouteflika’s Algeria (Columbia University Press, 2023).

Algerian politics are notoriously opaque, even to most Algerians. In a brilliant new book, just published in my Columbia University Press series, Thomas Serres digs deep into the implications of that opacity, taking seriously a politics of perpetual crisis and inscrutable power. He focuses on the two decades of rule by Abd al-Aziz Bouteflika, a period punctuated by the President’s incapacitation by stroke and subsequent re-election despite being unable to move or speak. Originally published in French, the English version is thoroughly revised and updated, including a fascinating new concluding chapter on the Hirak movement which successfully ousted Bouteflika but otherwise seemed unable to force meaningful structural change.

Algeria has long been understudied by political scientists, despite its importance, largely because of its inaccessibility to researchers. There have been some important books and other research, of course. Among the most notable: Michael Willis has written several important political histories, Luis Martinez authored a fascinating analysis of the horrific civil war of the “Dark Decade” and edited (with Rasmus Boserup) the rich collection Algeria Modern, and Miriam Lowi examined the peculiar political effects of oil wealth in the Algerian context. Serres builds on such work, but advances his own highly original theoretical perspective rooted in postcolonial thought backed up by years of research on the ground.

Serres spends a good amount of time digging deep into the ruling system in Algeria, unpacking the connections and contestations among generals, intelligence services, and the Presidency itself. His detailed analysis of these conflicts makes for fascinating reading, particularly the distinctive role of the younger, less comatose Bouteflika in centralizing power and strengthening the institution of the Presidency. The narrative veers into the surreal with Bouteflika’s 2013 stroke, as the competing internal factions prove unable to settle on a replacement and end up running the incapacitated incumbent - who, of course, wins the carefully controlled elections easily. Astonishingly enough, a full presidential term wasn’t long enough to resolve these internal conflicts, and so the powers opted to nominate Bouteflika again — an insult too far for Algerians, who took to the streets in the Hirak protesting his candidacy.

Pulling back the veil on the machinations among the power elite, while illuminating, isn’t enough. Serres is at his best explaining the real opacity of Algerian politics and the political functions it serves. As he points out, Algerians actually observe many of these political struggles play out in the media and across the rumor mill; much of what Serres describes is common knowledge to politically savvy Algerians. But, crucially, visibility is not the same as legibility. In an analysis reminiscent of one my favorite essays on Algeria, Paul Silverstein’s “Regimes of Untruth” (published in MERIP), Serres explores the profound inscrutability of a political system even where information about its inner workings flows wildly and freely. Bouteflika’s Algeria, he argues, is “a polity shaped by a long-standing systemic crisis, one that has impacted every domain of social life” in which “the extreme violence of the Dark Decade remained the bedrock of the subsequent political order.”

The legacies and enforced forgetting of the Dark Decade looms large in this analysis. Serres argues that Bouteflika and the Algerian system deploys the possibility of a return to civil war as a key instrument sustaining the status quo, a mobilization of potential crisis which operates across multiple levels to create what he calls “governance by crisis.” The “catastrophization” of politics acts as an ultimate trump card, a warning that things could, in fact, always get worse. His analysis of the temporal politics of a civil war which has ended but in other ways never truly ends reminded me of Sami Hermez’s brilliant 2017 book on Lebanon in the decades following the putative end of its civil war. Serres evokes the lived experience of Algerians amidst a “social imaginary of emergency” based on “the anxious wait for a disastrous turning point.” In his theoretical telling, Algeria’s “governance by catastrophization” meets Agamben’s “state of exception” in which it is impossible to differentiate between war and peace or to imagine a normal politics.

Serres doesn’t leave his analysis at the level of high politics, though. Some of the most interesting passages delve into the lived experience of Algerians under these conditions, employing more of a political anthropology approach through his extended field research. The book opens with several such vignettes, and a powerful chapter late in the book expands upon this approach from below, as does his “coda” addressing the phenomenon of the Hirak. Here he explores the frustrated ambitions of youth, the painful realities of social inequality and economic despair, and the enraging encounters with corruption and clientalism. His account of the routinization of social movements, and the repertoires of contention prefigure the 2019 Hirak. But it also cautions about the limits of such activism, and the resilience of a system designed to block revolutionary momentum. Even after Bouteflika was finally ushered from the scene under intense popular pressure, the system endured.

This is a major contribution to the study of Algeria, and one well worth reading by anyone interested in the comparative politics of the region. It’s theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, and really does a great job of reframing longstanding debates and observations into a unique perspective on a country in perpetual movement but still in the grip of a still unshakeable system. The focus on the political and social effects of the unending wait for the next round of violence fits well within the emerging body of thought on “warscapes” which has been my own interest for quite some time. Highly recommended — I’m thrilled to have it in my series.