Enacting and contesting citizenship in Algeria beyond the Hirak:The strategic uses of exit, voice and loyalty

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the place of citizenship in the Hirak protest movement with the view to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the current modes of being citizen in an authoritarian regime in the Arab world. It identifies and analyses the tensions and frictions that generate change and the strategies of the ruling elites and the social movement to articulate and implement their choices. In this perspective, we frame the popular discontent that resulted from the candidature of Bouteflika to a fifth presidential mandate as a case of social mobilization giving a ‘voice’ to new projects of citizenship. We analyse key demands and propositions of this ‘voice’ strategy in relation to the ‘loyalty’ counter-narratives of the regime and its clients. Beyond the attempt at revising civil and political rights, we also link these modes of protesting and being to the experiences of lived citizenship under authoritarianism and how these fuels ‘exit’ strategies discounting formal citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarianism
• social mobilization
• strategic choices
• identity
• citizenship
• Hirak

1. Introduction

The Algerian protest movement known as the Hirak has been commonly investigated as a post-Arab uprisings’ reformulation of anti-regime mobilization, in a country little affected by the 2011 groundswell of contestation. Our contention is that beyond its pertinence for understanding mobilisations in the Arab world, the Hirak movement is also particularly relevant to document and evaluate trajectories of citizenship in the authoritarian systems of the region. Whatever revolutionary or negotiated political transformation will happen in Algeria and the region in the near future will be grounded on the understanding that citizens have of their relationship to the state. Hence, explaining how people, individually and collectively, approach their putative agency as citizens during mobilization processes clarify the likely avenues for transformative political action.

In this perspective, we document and analyse top-down and bottom-up narratives and practices of citizenship in contemporary Algeria, using the Hirak as a current focal point. Framing our initial inquiry in terms of Hirschman’s model of ‘exit, voice and loyalty’, we investigate some of the most salient strategic choices of the Algerian regime and of different ‘types’ of citizens regarding the rights and duties associated with their preferred notions of citizenship. For analytical purposes citizenship functions here as a container for cost–benefit analyses that people make regarding the rights and duties, advantages and drawbacks associated with specific types of relationships with the state. While cost–benefit perspectives have commonly been used in the literature to evaluate the options available to ruling elites during upheavals, we contend that similar insights can be gain by focusing on the options available to citizens as ordinary polity members.

In our approach, we outline the historical top-down trends favoured by the Algerian ruling elites to instrumentalize the notion and practice of citizenship to foster a narrow nationalistic version that serves to exclude dissenting voices. We also note how these top-down dynamics are underpinned by bottom-up social currents grounded in those socio-economic groups that most benefit from the current redistribution of the oil rent by the regime and its networks of patronage. In contradistinction of these trends that can be broadly conceived as falling into the category of ‘loyalty’, we document and evaluate the trajectories of grassroots mobilization of the Hirak as a case of ‘voice’, embodying and enacting new models of citizenship. In addition, we also consider the failings of the dialogue between the regime and the Hirak, and the disenfranchised particularly in the case of migrants, as illustrative of ‘exit’ strategies.

The enactment and contestation of citizenship is analysed in terms of the political and socio-economic factors underpinning the State’s demands for the loyalty of its citizens and the related provisions of rewards for ‘good’ citizenship. The same factors are also considered in the way in which different categories populations challenge and bypass official discourses and practices to rearticulate their own version of citizenship beyond a conservative nationalistic framework. These processes are particularly investigated in connection to the new dynamics that unfolded during the Hirak protest movement in 2019 and in its aftermath. However, as our longer historical perspective indicates, we do see current events as part of a wider process of evolution and transformation/widening of citizenship in Algeria (and the region).

Conceptually and analytically, the key issue that our investigation of the place of citizenship in the Hirak interrogates is that of the strengths and weaknesses of the current modes of being citizen in an authoritarian regime in the Arab world. It queries the areas of frictions that are likely to produce change and the strategies deployed by ruling elites and social movements to articulate and implement their choices. Our approach is qualitative as we focus on views and strategies of individual actors belonging to different constituencies within the Hirak or opposed to it. We also take note of the positioning of actors who have not being involved in the sequence of upheaval one way or the other.

In this perspective, we frame the popular discontent that resulted from the candidature of Bouteflika to a fifth presidential mandate as a case of social mobilization giving a ‘voice’ to new projects of both formal and lived citizenship. We analyse some of the key demands/propositions of this ‘voice’ strategy in relation to the ‘loyalty’ counter-narratives proposed by the regime and its clients. Beyond the formal revision of civil and political rights that characterise authoritarianism, we also connect these modes of being a citizen to the everyday experience of lived citizenship and how these fuels ‘exit’ strategies that discount citizenship.

The next section outlines the important characteristics of citizenship in the contemporary authoritarian regimes of the Arab world. Then we introduce the historical context in which the Hirak emerged in Algeria and the main discursive and practical challenges that it posed to the regime. Subsequently, we investigate the counter strategy of the ruling elites and their interactions with client networks. Finally, we consider the ‘exit’ strategies involving both internal withdrawal and actual exiles in relation to the options made available by ‘voice’ and ‘loyalty’. We conclude with a reflexion on the general trends illustrated by the Algerian case.

2. Revisiting exit, voice loyalty in authoritarian contexts

Citizens of authoritarian states make strategic choices that can be broadly subsumed under Hirschman’s (1970) generic ‘exit, voice, loyalty’ model but these three categories themselves encapsulate multiple options. In his analysis of the role of legitimacy in authoritarian orders, Gerschewski (2018) distinguishes between 8 types of support/opposition to a regime based on the views and actions of the citizens. From this perspective, voice is the easier to pin down as it requires a visible anti-regime behaviour, whether people actually have strong views about the regime or whether they are merely carried along by a wave of protest.

Exit is also relatively easy to identify as it also implies a specific, though less visible set of behaviours taking people away from the regime. The difficulty here is more practical in the sense that exits can occur in very different fields – social, political, economic, etc. – and thus different groups of people could potentially be located in this category depending on the variable that is used. The concluding part of our analysis effectively highlights the multipolicy of exit strategies that reflect the different views on state–society relations endorsed by citizens.

Perhaps surprisingly, loyalty in the category that is most difficult to identify. Precisely because the context is authoritarian, there are significant variations between views and actions. We obtain a spectrum of position ranging from the true believers, whose views and actions are pro-regime, at one hand, to opportunists, whose view are against the regime but whose actions support it for personal gains, at the other. In between, we have uncommitted citizens whose views are indifferent, but whose actions display a pro-regime or compliant bias in order to avoid repression/sanctions.

Although individual choices are time bound and context dependent, they reflect common strategic positions vis-à-vis the type of governance exercised by the regime. As Hirschman outlined, there are basic cost–benefit calculations that are repeatedly made by the actors and which underpin the exit, voice or loyalty strategy. The spectrum of positions abovementioned also indicates that there can be movement within categories as well as between them. While Hirschman subsequent emphasis on ‘possibilism’ is probably oversanguine, the impact of an unexpectedly changing environment on standard strategies is nonetheless highly pertinent.

As the intersubjective strand in the literature on social movement illustrated, there is evidently much more than rational choice calculations that are at play in a systemic way (Jasper 2018). The 2011 Arab Uprisings showed how these factors are all the more relevant during sequences of heightened uncertainty when the evaluation of what constitutes costs and benefits is particularly difficult to establish but also when the actors are more likely than before to change their views of the situation (Volpi and Clark 2019; Volpi and Jasper (2018).

The strategic interactions that we consider in this analysis are spread out over periods of relative stability and sequences of more hectic changes. The mobilisation initiated by the Hirak in 2019 constitutes the latest episode of instability in the country, which comes after a longer sequence of regime stability during the Bouteflika presidency (Volpi 2020). We map therefore the strategic orientations that emerged over the last three years in connection to the protest movement against the background of already established trends that were visible during the Bouteflika period and even before. The trends that we highlight contribute to a better understanding of the social and political changes that are taking place within Algerian society whilst the regime still remains able to maintain an authoritarian hold over political and institutional life.

Taking our cue from Turner’s (1990) approach to citizenship, we investigate the options available to citizens in the light of top-down (state) and bottom-up (societal) structuring factors. The dimensions of citizenship that are pertinent in this case are both political and socio-economic. As Turner outlines, these dimensions make citizenship more active (public and embodied) or passive (private and formal), thereby creating for broad contexts for citizenship to express itself, at least in a democratic system. While the pseudo-democratic system in place in Algeria as in many other countries of the Arab world does not (and is not meant to) function as an institutionalised democracy, it nonetheless provide similar modes of being/acting as a citizen.

The postcolonial states that established themselves across the Middle East and North Africa in the second half of the twentieth century generally follow the same pattern as their European counterparts in grounding citizenship around civil and political rights – a major demand of decolonisation movements – and then in building a system of social rights. The latter element soon became the foundation of ‘populist social contract’ in which the population came to accept under duress a bargain that promised increased benefits from the state welfare system in exchange for the limitation of various civil and political rights (Hinnebusch 2020). It is the progressive downsizing of this financially unsustainable welfare system in the region from the 1980s onward that increasingly led citizens to challenge this ‘social contract’ and put forward more forcefully demands regarding more civil, political and social rights. In their turn, authoritarian regimes developed their own counter-strategies of authoritarian upgrading in order to redirect the internal and external pressures directed at them (Heydemann 2020)

In authoritarian systems in particular, the top-down dimensions of citizenship validated by the states in terms of specific rights and duties, and entitlements and restrictions that apply to particular categories of citizens establish crucial patron–client relationships. These top-down dynamics entrench models of citizenship that favour the status quo in support of the established ruling elites and portray alternative perspectives as disloyalty to the nation/regime. As Heydemann (2020) highlighted in the Arab region, this state-imposed set of rules for citizenship enables regimes to withhold the benefits associated with citizenship, notably social and political rights, as a form of indirect repression of those individuals or groups which are deemed to be a challenge for the ruling elites.

Statist strategies have a direct impact on bottom-up constructions of citizenship as they provide different incentives and obstacles for citizens to propose more (or differently) inclusive forms of citizenship. In particular, it shapes the competition between different social groups regarding the type of rights that are to be prioritized and why. In these authoritarian contexts, where the benefits of citizenship are made into a zero-sum game controlled by the state, individuals and groups strategically align themselves with the positions that can provide particular rewards. Horizontal social interactions between individuals and groups both undermine and strengthen these state-sanctioned patterns of interactions (Ismail 2011). Thus, top-down constructions of citizenship are reinforced by bottom-up articulations of pro-regime discourses and strategies.

It is in this perspective that the notion of ‘lived citizenship’, which addresses what being a citizen means in practice, in contradistinction with the formal dimensions of citizenship, can be usefully deployed in authoritarian contexts (even though it derives from a critical analysis of democratic polities). Lived citizenship focuses on people’s actual social, economic, cultural, and other circumstances that enable them to practice being a citizen, or prevent them from doing so fully (Kallio, Wood, and Häkli 2020). Thus, beyond demands articulated to reclaim civil and political rights from an authoritarian regime, citizens’ movement in the Arab world also challenge the way in which social rights are defined and implemented by the state. As illustrated by the Arab uprisings, these demands often centre on a fairer redistribution of pre-existing social rights – hence the prominence of corruption in these debates. In addition, it also involves the emergence and recognition of new subjectivities social actors moving beyond the traditional nationalist (and/or Islamist) notions of citizenship (Challand 2013).

The experiences of lived citizenship of migrants, minorities, women, and so on, are finding a degree of recognition, albeit in a context where the larger strategic confrontation between the regime and established social and political groups advocating more traditional approaches to rights and duties retains the upper hand. Isin and Turner (2007) stressed how the historical trajectory of citizenship necessarily weigh top-down processed of citizenship formation on the side of pre-existing forms of (national) solidarities. At the same time, new structures of citizenry are constantly being produced through ‘acts of citizenship’, many of which are embodied and expressed through protest movements (Isin 2008).

Beyond the central challenge of formal political citizenship in an authoritarian context, the different strategic trends illustrated by exit, voice and loyalty shape and are shaped by these multiple perspectives. In our Algerian case study, the voice strategy of the Hirak is clearly articulated in relation to political rights – free and fair elections, freedom of association and expression. Yet it also voices a host of related demands reflecting the particular predicament of Algerian citizens faced with the formal and informal involvement of state actors and their supporters in multiple aspects of social life – religious practice and expression, access to employment and private trade, redistributive policies and welfare, migration and travel documents, etc. (Souiah 2020). These lived citizenship aspects not only contribute to the choices that people make in joining the Hirak but also to the choices that they make in showing loyalty to the regime, or in existing social and political live of the country. The exit and loyalty strategies that help contextualise the movement are themselves anchored in the possibilities for lived citizenship that structure social order in Algeria

3. The Hirak as the ‘voice’ of a citizens’ movement

The term citizenship is used in a broad and polysemic way in contemporary Algeria as in many other Arab countries. It often refers to social demands, housing, access to health care, infrastructure, etc. Nonetheless, with the Hirak, we are witnessing an increasing awareness of what political citizenship means. It articulates a popular will to change peacefully the nature of the regime by putting forward a transformation of civil and political rights (Dris Aït-Hamadouche and Dris 2019; Belguidoum 2020). It is also invoked in pro-regime ‘loyalty’ counter-discourses that reaffirm the formal postcolonial citizenship advocated out by the state, and its accompanying developmentalist policies. It appears mostly as a negative concept in ‘exit’ strategies, identifying what is lacking and forces exile.

This positioning has its roots in the early mobilization against the fifth mandate of President Bouteflika. The Muwatana (citizenship) movement was created on 6 June 2018 by 14 personalities (politicians, journalists, writers and academics), to mobilize the population against this new mandate and to give back their voice to citizens in a project of ‘national re-foundation’. This early mobilization was clearly articulated to demand regime change, as underscored by one of the organisers, El Khabar journalist Saad Bouaakba, but there also was an underlying ambition to ‘bring Algerians together’ and to create a ‘collective consciousness’.¹

In this perspective, it the Hirak does not represent an entirely novel form of mobilisation but should be seen in the continuation of earlier protest actions trying to ensure that the political and electoral system empowered the citizens. Five years before the Hirak, another movement already attempted, without much success, to oppose President Bouteflika’s fourth term in office. Like Muwatana, it presented itself as a ‘peaceful and autonomous citizen’s movement, which rejects the 4th mandate and campaigns for the establishment of a true democratic regime in Algeria’. Unlike Muwatana, its mobilisation process remained limited to the Algiers region and it was thus swiftly repressed by the authorities.

While the objectives of these movements were primarily to prevent the renewal of the President’s mandate, the Hirak mobilization rapidly became a wider endeavour to make sure that the ‘voice’ of the citizens was heard and listened to. In this sense, the Hirak can be qualified as a grassroots citizen movement that gain momentum within a project of democratic reconstruction that bypassed established political organisations by providing a collective voice for the demands of individual citizens. As a postgraduate student present in the early protests in 2019 declared;

Citizenship shouldn’t be a slogan […] here it is the street that decides what Algeria we want, what president we elect […] Citizenship isn’t just a slogan. Citizenship is a practice and I believe that the Hirak is an opportunity to get together to bring down this gang [i.e. the ruling elite].²

As in many similar protest movements around the world, mobilization in favour of the Hirak became an ‘act of citizenship’ that highlighted emergent and new political perspectives (White 2015). This grassroots input could not easily be ordered by political parties or even the initiators of the Muwatana. While this openness was a key factor in the success of the mobilization, it also quickly generated practical difficulties when it came to interacting with institutional actors.

From the start, the ‘voice’ (in the singular) of the Hirak was therefore loudest and clearest in articulating what it was against. In this respect, the movement was clearly an outcome of a long-running crisis of political representation in Algeria. Besides the Bouteflika issue, the very abstention high rates during elections over the years signalled a growing ‘exit’ strategy for formal electoral processes. The Hirak articulated this dissatisfaction with a process that many associated with a sham democracy and an ‘electoral masquerade’. The rejection of this flawed system of representation was there at the start with slogans such as ‘Le pouvoir [the powers-that-be] do not represent me’ and remained central after the new round of elections organised by the regime, as illustrated by the prevalence of the slogan ‘Tebboune is not my president’. At the same time, the calls for mobilisation in favour of the Hirak invited Algerians to assume their responsibility and to act peacefully – silmiyya (peacefully) being one of the most ubiquitous calls during the protests – not to give in to provocations, to show solidarity, to resist but to accept the other.³

This explicit rejection of the existing political system extended to the powers behind the official political leadership, namely the military backers of the regime. One of the most consistent slogans chanted by the protesters was ‘dawla madaniyya’ (civil state) which was set in opposition to ‘dawla ‘askariyya’ (military state). Although this position underscored a substantive content to the political citizenship that was aimed at, it was a potent mobilization element due to its opposition to the military. Throughout the summer of 2019, one of the main objectives of the Hirak was therefore to end the hold of the military institution over the political system. Yet, without an articulated institutional voice, the protest movement failed to stop the engineering of a presidential election by the military-backed institutions; election which led to the election of an apparatchik supported by the Chief of Staff. At the end of 2019, with the imposition of rigged elections and the routine presence of the military in the political process, citizens were once again left outside the decision-making process (Volpi 2020).

Alongside the political representatives of the regime and its military backers, the Hirak also voiced a clear rejection of the existing political parties. Various personalities from political parties were forced to leave the protest marches under the slogan ‘get out’. They included Louisa Hanoune, president of the Trotskyist Workers’ Party, Abdallah Djaballah, president of the small Islamist party FJD, and Said Saadi, former head of the secularist and Berber-dominated RCD party. This rejection illustrated two types of opposition. First, it was directed at political organization that had collaborated with the regime – both Hanoune and Saadi had been involved in ruling coalitions, whilst Djaballah merely participated in the parliamentary system set up by the regime. Second, it was a reaction against the political agendas (leftist, secularist, Islamist, etc.) that these politicians attempted to foist upon the Hirak. This anti-political party positioning was thus at the same time an attempt at getting rid of the symbols of the Bouteflika regime, accused of corruption and incompetence, and at enabling a new mode of political participation unfettered by the demands of exiting political parties.

These occurrences of a common ‘voice’ or position for the Hirak were accompanied by clear cases of polyphony, at best, and discord, at worse. The various actors from political parties and civil society working together within the protest movement can be divided into two main groups regarding their strategy for political change. The first set of actors supported the notion of working with the authorities to generate reforms, while a second group opposed the idea and pushed for an institutional break and a democratic transition. Yet even those actors seeking a democratic transition struck a careful reformist tone by demanding the application of constitutional articles that validated their political demands.⁴ The Hirak sought to establish itself in the public sphere as an actor with pre-existing constitutional rights only demanding the full application of these rights, and particularly the respect of the popular will in electoral processes.

Beyond the issue of formal political equality in a democratic system, the voices of the Hirak pushed the boundaries of the principle of equality among citizens. Civic networks such as Nidaa 22 (The Call 22), the Collective Citizen Initiatives for Change, the think-tank Nabi (We Build) put forward proposals to strengthen the principle of equality along different dimensions of citizenship. In particular, their narrative on socio-economic inequalities tried to bridge the divide between lived and formal citizenship by framing systemic corruption and nepotism of the regime and state administration as creating different categories of citizens.

The system of ‘oligarchs’ embedded in the Bouteflika administration and the pervasive clientelist networks that flowed from it was condemned by the street as a system of privileges that set some groups of citizens above all others. The crony capitalism approach of the Algerian regime to economic reform not only dissatisfied ordinary citizens who did not derived any tangible benefit from it but it also alienated emerging middle classes and entrepreneurs who felt marginalised. As Selim Otmani, a prominent Algerian businessman involved in the Hirak, remarked of the Association of Entrepreneurs:

They benefit from important financial aid while the projects of other serious entrepreneurs are blocked because they did not support Bouteflika’s campaign and are not close to the regime’.⁵

In this perspective, formal citizenship shapes lived citizenship by structuring the different socio-economic opportunities enabled and/or constrained by the state institutions. Thus, for the protesters, to make citizenship works signified to put an end to the privileges enjoyed by a minority close to the regime. In response, it is hardly surprising that the military elites and their political allies should chose to frame their own actions at the time of the Hirak, as an effort to ‘clean up’ the corruption of the Bouteflika regime in order to reassert their political leadership.

4. Citizenship as loyalty toward the regime

It would be over simplistic to view the role of the regime in establishing conditions of citizenship in Algeria solely as a case of authoritarian control and predatory exploitation – though both of these elements are certainly present. The postcolonial Algerian state built overtime categories of citizenship which rewarded those actors who contributed to the defence of the nation with additional rights and socio-economic rewards. In this perspective, loyalty to the regime is not merely an instrumental strategy to retain the privileges that have been granted, but a normative discourse that legitimizes the prerogatives of the ‘revolutionary family’ – i.e. the mujahidin (fighters in the war of independence), the children of mujahidin and the children of shuhada (martyrs) – and the burdens placed on the traitors and the terrorists, and families and entourage, be it in relation to the war of liberation or the civil conflict of the 1990s.

The support networks of the Algerian regime have always been built around the ALN-FLN dyad (National Liberation Army-National Liberation Front) and the mass-based organizations that they oversee. For these networks, loyalty to the regime is thus commonly framed ideationally in relation to the defence of the interests of the nation, against the internal and external enemies of Algeria. This rhetoric has been in use since the war of liberation in the 1950s and pervades the political discourse as much as the everyday opinions expressed by ordinary citizens, be they part of those networks or not. It is a near-hegemonic discursive template that is now used by proponents and opponents of the regime to justify and legitimise their actions.

At the heart of these networks, derived from a praetorian-republican approach to what being a citizen mean are the members of the revolutionary family (mujahidin and shuhada) who embody the martial ethos of the nation and whose status (and that of their descendant) is difficult to challenge openly by other citizens. The families of these two groups of actors benefit from specific socio-economic advantages. They are granted a state pension, state licences (liquor stores, tobacco shops, taxis, car imports), full state social security, travel discounts, early retirement benefits, and so on.⁶

While this first circle of citizens is closest to the military in ideational and socio-economic terms, a second, wider network of supporters is articulated in a model of citizenship which, until 1989 and the demise of the one-party system, used to represent the official Arab-Socialist orientation of the FLN. They comprise the successors to the mass-organisations created by the ruling party – General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA), National Union of Algerian Farmers (UNPA), Algerians Union of Algerians Students (UNEA), Algerian Union of Algerian Youths (UNJA), National Union of Algerian Women (UNFA), which operated as the control apparatuses of the regime by diffusing its propaganda at grassroots level and providing practical support for its policies (agrarian reform, industrialization, etc.).⁷ In the tradition of homo sovieticus, belonging to the state administration and/or its associated organisations entailed some legitimate advantages due to the services to the State that one provides. Unavoidably, this type of justification has been losing steam since the heydays of Arab Socialism and exists nowadays mainly as neotraditional patronage networks.

In recent decades, since the formal advent of political pluralism in Algeria, a third type of support network has been encouraged by the regime, which is made up of thousands of civil society associations of unequal importance active in various fields of charity, religion (zawiya and Sufi brotherhoods), sports and culture, and even human rights. Like their socialist predecessors but in a nominally liberal-democratic framework, these pro-regime civil society organisations diffuse the preferred message of the regime concerning what citizenship ought to mean, and work to show that the policies of the government are in line with the requirements of Algerian national identity. In the contemporary context, they are particularly present in the mobilization and counter-mobilization efforts of the regime in times of elections and protest, to demonstrate popular support for the initiatives of the ruling elites and to castigate their opponents.

At the outbreak of the Hirak, the organizations close to the FLN had supported Bouteflika to run for a fifth term. The UGTA (General Union of Algerian Workers), the main trade union of the country and the only social partner recognized as such in collective negotiations, was the locomotive for many of these pro-regime networks (Beddoubia 2019). From a traditional ‘social contract’ perspective, the Union leadership considered that President Bouteflika had served the (state) workers well and deserved their endorsement even as the dissenting voices of the Hirak gained traction among workers. This loyalty was also justified in their view by the stability of Algeria under Bouteflika and the social gains achieved – e. g. distribution of social housing, increase in wages, job creation, etc.). As the Union Secretary General, Abdelmajid Sidi Said, declared:

The commitment of the UGTA alongside President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is the result of the many economic and social gains made by the workers during the process of national reconstruction in peace.⁸

Yet, as Bouteflika increasingly came under pressure from within the regime, the UGTA soon repositioned themselves at the forefront of the mobilization in favour of the reforms proposed by military elite. Following the intervention of Chief of Staff Gaid Salah who asked for the application of Article 102 of the Constitution and the resignation of Bouteflika, the UGTA formally endorsed this position which became in its view, ‘the best framework to overcome the political crisis that our country is facing today’.⁹

Pragmatically, the UGTA sought to remain a central actor in the redistributive networks of the Algerian regime by siding with an increasingly popular Hirak to denounce the corruption of departing elites associated with Bouteflika. At the same time, they endorsed the policies and strategies of the remaining ‘clean’ elites close to the military to make sure that the system within which they operated was not fundamentally transformed by genuine political reforms. In the face of a growing international support for the demands of the Hirak, the UGTA redeployed well-used nationalistic arguments to reject was they presented as of foreign interference. On 1 December 2019, they organised a protest march to denounce a resolution of the European Union Parliament that called upon the Algerian authorities to reform their legislative framework.¹⁰The new Secretary General of the UGTA, Salim Labatcha, declared on this occasion of this march that the views conveyed by such external actors were part of ‘a policy of provocation of the Algerian people'.¹¹

Other pro-regime organizations were active during this event, including the National Union of Algerian Farmers (UNPA) whose leadership had promised a few months earlier to gather 5 million signatures to support the candidacy of Bouteflika for a fifth mandate (though it only managed to obtain 300,000). The National Organization of the Mujahedeen (ONM), which had initially sided with the Hirak when the movement had gain early momentum, had revised its position by then. In March 2019, the ONM took the view that:

this protest is centred around a fundamental demand: to turn the page of an accumulation of painful realities generated by institutions that were not up to the legitimate aspirations of our people.¹²

However, it changed its approach later in the spring to support the process imposed by the army when the Chief of Staff expressed his own views on reform. For the Mujahedeen, this reorientation to support the regime was also expressed as a requirement for safeguarding national unity. After the election of President Tebboune in December 2019, all of these organisations were swiftly involved in a round of ‘consultations’ with the new government to show the support of civil society organisations for the political reshuffle orchestrated by the military.

These organizations will also be mobilized to participate in the campaign for the Constitutional referendum of 1 November 2020. They will be joined by other pro-regime movements that will challenge the representativity of the Hirak and articulate a counter discourse putting forward the notion of internal enemies of the nation. Notably, the National Union of Algerian Women (UNFA) organised several rallies in different cities in order to encourage Algerians to vote for the constitution. The Secretary General of the organisation framed their action in a traditional nationalist discourse by proclaiming that ‘the Algerian people will be at the rendezvous to reconcile with itself and reconnect with its history, to meet the great challenge of the sustainability of the Nation and block the road to the plotters’.¹³ Thus, these pro-regime civil society organisations endorsed the general goals of what, following the discursive framing commonly invoked by President Tebboune, they called the ‘blessed Hirak’. However, they emptied these demands of their substance by arguing that the reform process was best served by the policies devised by the ruling elites.

The UNFA leadership declared that they supported the constitutional amendments proposed by the new government (but rejected by the Hirak) because they were:

the emanation of the grievances of the people, raised by the blessed Hirak and expressing its desire for profound change, correction of the old dysfunctions, consecration of the equity of the citizens in their rights and freedoms, moralization of the political life and the fight against corruption.¹⁴

At that time, the engagement of pro-regime associations with the Hirak was primarily an instrumental strategy designed to show the relevance of these organisations for the new factions of the regime in power, and thus to retain or acquire more state rewards. As a result, the UNFA generally reasserted the state's perspective on gender relations and ignored the demands articulated by women mobilizing against the regime who set up alternative organisation to represent them (femmes algériennes pour un changement vers l’égalité (FACE), mouvement national des féministes algériennes (MNFA)) (Djelloul 2020).

The process of expressing the will of the people by displaying loyalty to the regime underpinned the jockeying for position that took place after Tebboune’s election to gain the favours of the new government. It was at the heart of the strategy of the General Confederation of Algerian Businesses (CGEA) to take the place of the Forum of Business Leaders (FCE), formerly an unconditional supporter of the Bouteflika administration. This repositioning of the business organisations followed the imprisonment of the FCE leader, Ali Haddad, caught up in the very ‘public relations’ anti-corruption campaign launched by the military against part of the Bouteflika administration.

After initially supporting the Hirak, the CGEA president came out forcefully in favour of Tebboune’s candidacy and the electoral process backed by the military. Beyond jockeying for positions, the choices of the pro-regime associative networks were crucial to diffuse the standard narrative about the nationalist social contract as the foundation for formulating demands about of citizenship. Whatever the reasons behind the strategic choices of these diverse pro-regime networks to initiate a dialogue with the Hirak, particularly via the Initiative of the National Forces for Reform created in August 2020, these actors facilitated the continuation of a status quo rationale. Once the military leadership explicitly went ahead with its own ‘reform agenda’, in a context where the Hirak still struggled to find a unified institutional voices, pro-regime networks began to shift decidedly behind the new faction in power thereby showing loyalty to the regime whilst claiming to be a part of the wider Hirak movement.

The short-lived ‘Initiative’ had brought together leaders of political parties (from the Islamists to the nationalists), the Forum of Algerian journalists, entrepreneurs represented by the CGEA, lawyers, the Union of magistrates, the organization of scouts, the Association of Algerian veterinarians, the National Council of Imams, the Association of Consumer Protection, among others. When it faltered, many of its component elements then showed their support for the regime in order to obtain positions in the new administration. By contrast, those organisations not playing the loyalty card will be excluded progressively from the political and media landscape. Eventually, the most vocal among them would be targeted by security measures on vague grounds of endangering national unity and security. The Rassemblement Action Jeunesse (RAJ), the main independent youth organization, founded in 1992, would be dissolved by the Courts in October 2021 following a request from the Ministry of the Interior accusing it of violating the law on associations. Similarly, the Ministry of the Interior decided to suspend the activities of the Socialist Workers’ Party (PST) and to close its premises on the grounds that it did not comply with the law on political parties.¹⁵

Throughout the period of the Hirak, it is worth noting the continuing loyalty of the (state-controlled) religious authorities in Algeria. Imams under the authority of the Ministry of Religious Affairs have been called upon since the beginning of the movement to explicitly encourage Algerians to remain calm. A letter addressed to the imams by the minister specifically asked them to devote the Friday sermon on 22 February 2019, the day of a major Hirak demonstration, to call for ‘the safeguarding of national achievements, the protection of the state, loyalty to the nation, vigilance against calls of discord (fitna)’.¹⁶ The same communiqué from the Ministry of Religious Affairs further encouraged imams to remind people during the Friday sermon ‘of the benefits of the security enjoyed by Algerians and the advantages of national reconciliation and the misdeeds of the black decade’ and ‘to be wary of anonymous calls for rallies, which may be from Algeria or from abroad’.

The regime explicitly sought to mobilize the religious establishment to relay its well-rehearsed narrative that citizenship should acknowledge ‘loyalty’ to the nation, as expressed by its ‘revolutionary’ nation-builders, and reject all external influences as they may come from enemies of the state. Beyond the state-nominated official imams, the representatives of the zawiya were also encourage to call for calm and support the regime as it was best placed to safeguard social harmony and national unity. The National Association of Zawiya thus endorsed ‘an institutional transition and not an anarchic transition’.¹⁷ The Association, composed of about a hundred of Sufi brotherhoods of various sizes, would thus encourage Algerians to go to the presidential elections orchestrated by the military and call on the army to play its role in preserving national unity. Its positioning reflected the closeness it had cultivated with the Bouteflika administration over the year and explained its strategic choice to publicly support the candidacy of Tebboune (Boukhars 2021). In turn, acknowledging the role played by the Association in mobilizing voters particularly in rural areas, President Tebboune would continue the policy of state funding for its members, as well as named a special adviser in charge of their religious affairs and appointed one of its main leaders to the post of rector of the Great Mosque of Algiers with the rank of minister.¹⁸

5. Forms of exit: between resistance and resignation

Among the many forms of ‘exit’ from the polity, there are well-established forms of political exile. In Algeria, these dynamics started as early as the war of independence with the opponents of the FLN. They gained a new momentum in the 1990s in connection with the Islamic activism initiated by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and the ensuing confrontation with the military that underpinned the civil conflict. Former cadres and militants often had to seek refuge in Europe. As the conflict intensified and generated tensions within the regime even former pro-regime actors, including military personnel, sought asylum in Europe as they voice their disagreement with the ruling faction. In 2019, many political opponents in exile embraced the ideas put forward by the Hirak and joined the movement from abroad in an attempt at reengaging directly with the Algerian population. Contributing to the Hirak was thus more than a case of ‘voice’, it was an opportunity revisit the ‘exit’ strategy that they had been forced to choose earlier. In this context, the new media in particular facilitated the articulation and diffusion of the messages of the diaspora from all over Europe, across political divides (Mattoni and Sigillò 2022).

Re-entering the public debate in Algeria was nonetheless fraught with dangers notably due to the nationalistic propaganda of the regime that painted any ideas and policies coming from abroad as manipulations. Unsurprisingly, Islamist leaning organizations such as Rachad, which was banned in Algeria, toned down their Islamic rhetoric to join forces with the mobilization movement of the Hirak. For Rachad, joining forces with the Hirak was seen as an opportunity to generate a popular consensus to change the Algerian regime. Their leadership encouraged Algerian citizens to use ‘the fundamental rights inherent to the freedom of association to organize and work for the change that only a structured, independent and civil society will be able to bring about’ (Secrétariat du Mouvement Rachad 2020). Although this open democratic approach was not uncommonly undermined by the more uncompromising Islamic demands of militants on the ground, it illustrated the willingness of actors with very specific political agenda to get behind the generic demands about citizens’ empowerment articulated by the Hirak. As the regime’s strategy of orchestrated elections to maintain the status quo gained momentum, the state-led media campaign directed against ‘external’ actors intensified and most of them were forced to retain their exit strategy (Mattoni and Sigillò 2022).

The other common form of political exit’ that the Hirak contributed to make more salient was the active dis-involvement of the citizens from electoral processes organized by the regime. In this case, exit is not physical since people still live in Algeria, but social and political since they chose not to participate in political processes orchestrated by the regime. This form of internal exit was common during the civil conflict of the 1990s when many Algerians chose to stop supporting the military-back regime. In its turn, the regime commonly deprived of various rights (healthcare, pension, passports, etc.) those citizens who had chosen not to participate in the elections it organized by requesting a stamped election card for many administrative processes (Martínez 2000). These sharp forms of exit became less common in the 2000s with the efforts a reconciliation led by the Bouteflika administration. Yet, over the years, disaffection with the pseudo-democratic system put in place by the regime grew, and rates of electoral participations declined steadily. In 2019, the boycott process initiated by the Hirak brought the levels of abstention to new high, and the claimed electoral legitimacy of the ruling elites to new lows under President Tebboune (Volpi 2020).

This form of political ‘exit’ is tightly connected to the articulation of the political ‘voice’ of the Hirak. In so far as the non-participation in the electoral processes organized by the regime is a direct response to the calls for boycott, then this exit strategy a form of ‘voice’ seeking to influence the strategic choices of the ruling elites. This strategy contrasts with more straightforward forms of ‘exit’ involving citizens leaving the country altogether to find a better life elsewhere. In this case, rather than acting to attempt to change the system, these actors have given up reforming a politically controlled system of socio-economic opportunities (Belhocine 2018). In this respect, the flow of people leaving the country as the Hirak rose to prominence did not appear to change significantly from what could be observed in previous years, with the estimated number of illegal migrants remaining near 5–7000 people every year (Souiah 2021).

This exit has a distinct socio-economic rationale in the case of the illegal migrants known as harraga, from the term ‘to burn’ (one’s identity document when crossing the border). Yet they commonly link the socio-economic predicaments of their country to the choices of the political elites. The narrative of the ‘bad life’ developed by Souiah (2013) from interviews with harraga summarizes the difficult conditions experienced by young Algerians, and the connections they make between the link between their socio-economic hardships and the political system in place in the country. One of them compares the ruling elites to ‘sharks’ that ‘eat everything and leave nothing’; which leads him to conclude that he will never vote in elections (Souiah 2013, 112). Another points out that if he could get a job, he would make his life in Algeria, but that if he waits for an opportunity to open here he will have nothing and will waste his life. A third harraga concludes despondently: ‘I love my country; it’s my country that doesn’t love me’ (Souiah 2013, 110).

The lived dimension of citizenship provides a bridge between the political and socio-economic aspect of these situations. In multiple Hirak events held in Algiers, protesters chanted ‘we came to the capital as harraga’, to challenge the security measures taken by the regime to physically stop people from traveling near the seat of power (Souiah 2020, 53). Souiah stressed that in the context of Hirak, the protest significance of harraga evolved and took new resonances that echoed the suffering and the fight for social and economic change embodied by these actors.

From the perspective of the regime, it is worth noting that the exit of the harraga is institutionally repressed by the Algerian state, which sees it in the framework of its nationalistic narrative as an act of desertion. Not only are these citizens criminalized in their host country by virtue of being illegal migrants but they are also criminalized in their home country by the Algerian authorities. In recent years, primarily in response to the demands for the securitization of migration coming from the European Union, illegal migration has become punishable by prison in Algeria (Benantar 2021). Conscious of the unpopularity of this measure, the regime constructed a discourse based on a dereliction of citizenship to castigate the harraga and justify its judicial response.

To strengthen the nationalist narrative blaming the migrants for letting their country down, the regime also articulated a religious-moral approach to good citizenship that condemned this behaviour as un-Islamic. The state-appointed High Islamic Council thus issued a fatwa condemning clandestine migration as illicit (haram) for Muslims, because they likened attempting to cross the Mediterranean on illegal boats to suicide.¹⁹ Islam being the religion of the state in Algeria, harraga are therefore misbehaving both as citizens and as faithful. In practice, unable to improve the lived experience of citizenship in Algeria, the regime strove to increase the costs of seeking alternative experiences of citizenship abroad. While the Hirak protests enable the plight of the harraga to be articulated against the official state and religious discourses – ‘harraga are martyrs’ (Souiah 2020, 46) – the falling momentum of movement contributed to the declining visibility of the issue.

6. Conclusion

Marking the first anniversary of the first large mobilization of the Hirak, protests, President Tebboune declared on 22 February 2020, that this date would be a ‘national day of fraternity and cohesion between the people and the Army for democracy’.²⁰ Participating in the event, the Minister of Religious Affairs vaunted the merits of the ‘blessed and authentic Hirak’, in the official terminology adopted by the Tebboune administration, which was in this official narrative peaceful and conciliatory.²¹ These efforts by the ruling elites to lessen the challenge posed by the protest movement by seemingly endorsing its goals and objectives underscore the significant socio-political transformations taking place in the country in opposition to the authoritarian status quo.

The Hirak gave ‘voice’ to a number of demands reflecting the changing relationship between citizens and the state in Algeria. The most visible demands concerned political citizenship and illustrated the continuing pressure from below to exercise their political rights in actually choosing their elected representatives. This quest, and the associated efforts to secure civil rights for opposition actors seeking to participate formally in the political system, generally failed as the movement lost momentum over time and failed to organise itself as an institutional counter-power. What the Hirak, as the latest iteration of Algerian protest mobilizations, succeeded in doing politically however was twofold. First, as voiced by the abovementioned representatives of the authoritarian elites, it weakened further the legitimacy of these elites, to the point when those actors had to portray the demands of the movement as legitimate and themselves as the harbingers of change. Second, it contributed further to reducing the divides between various opposition actors, and particularly between Islamist and secularist movements, which managed to tolerate each other or the first time after the civil conflict of the 1990s; even though this rapprochement fell short of a joint initiative.

The demands voiced by the Hirak also revealed the dynamics of ‘loyalty’ to the regime, or at least the mechanisms supporting the status quo within the citizenry. This ‘loyalty’ is structured by regime patronage networks that are meant to underpin a specific form of postcolonial citizenship. It is defined by a social ‘contract’ in which welfare provisions are provided in exchange for political quiescence. In this perspective, any defiance toward the state is portrayed as disloyalty to the nation (and even connivance with foreign powers), while support for the regime is an act of good citizenship defined in nationalistic terms. While the Hirak sought to broaden the scope of rights and practices associated with modern notions of citizenship, the members of pro-regime networks emphasised instead modes of civic allegiance going back to the war of decolonization and the early period of the developmentalist state. This positioning served to justify the differentiated treatments and levels of benefits that different groups of citizens could receive from the state, as loyalty increased deservedness and thus rewards.

Finally, the wave of mobilizations of the Hirak also contributed to show the continuing appeal of various ‘exit’ strategies from an authoritarian context. Domestically, the rhetorical endorsement of the goals of the protesters by the ruling elites did not suffice strengthen the legitimacy of the regime as illustrated by the very low turnout in the elections that it orchestrated. The boycott of the electoral process promoted by the Hirak added to a much older trend of citizen exiting the formal political processes out of disappointment with the system. Beyond such forms of political ‘exit’, the socio-economic inequalities resulting from the failing social ‘contract’ proposed by the regime ensured the continuing appeal of (illegal) migration as an enduring exit strategy.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Aix Marseille University’s Institute for Advanced Study, IMéRA, for its support during their fellowship.

For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Interview with author, Algiers, 2 November 2019.

2. Interview with author during a student protest, Oran, 18 June 2019.

3. The prominent slogans of these protest events have been identified by the authors when they were present and by reviewing the Algerian press and social media otherwise.

4. Article 7: ‘The people are the source of all power. National sovereignty belongs exclusively to the people’. Article 8: ‘The constituent power belongs to the people. The people shall exercise its sovereignty through the institutions that it gives itself. The people also exercise it by means of referendum and through their elected representatives. The President of the Republic can directly resort to the expression of the will of the people’. ‘Constitution de da République Algérienne Démocratique et Populaire’. Journal Officiel de la République Algérienne, (JORA). no.82, 30 December 2020.

5. Interview with author, Algiers, 31 October 2021.

6. The law of April 1999 stipulates that these are entitlements are for the widow(er)s, sons and daughters of the mujahidin and shuhada. Journal Officiel de la République Algérienne, (JORA). no.25, 12 April 1999; The number of beneficiaries is sizeable considering that there are still 150 000 mujahidin alive in 2020. ‘‘SG par intérim de l’ONM: “environ 150 000 Moudjahid sont encore en vie”’. Algérie-eco.com, 27 October 2020. https://www.algerie-eco.com/2020/10/27/sg-par-interim-de-lonm-environ-150–000-moudjahid-sont-encore-en-vie/.

7. While the UGTA claims a membership of 3 million Algerians and the UNPA says it has 1.4 million members, little verifiable information is available regarding these organisations membership.

8. Quoted in ‘Présidentielle: le changement passe par un dialogue “sage et constructif”’, Algeria Press Service (APS), 11 March 2019. https://www.aps.dz/algerie/86733-presidentielle-le-changement-passe-par-un-dialogue-sage-et-constructif.

9. Quoted in ‘UGTA: Sidi Said lâche Bouteflika’, Tout Sur l’Algérie (TSA), 27 March 2019.https://www.tsa-algerie.com/alerte-lugta-soutient-la-decision-de-gaid-salah/.

10. European Parliament resolution on the deteriorating situation of human rights in Algeria, in particular the case of journalist Khaled Drareni (2020/2880(RSP)), 25 November 2020. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RC-9-2020–0375_EN.html.

11. Quoted in ‘Résolution du PE: marche dans la capitale à l’appel de l’UGTA’, Algeria Press Service (APS), 30 November 2019.https://www.aps.dz/algerie/98225-une-marche-des-travailleurs-dans-la-capitale-pour-denoncer-l-ingerence-du-parlement-europeen-dans-les-affaires-internes-du-pays.

12. Quoted in, ‘L’ONM soutient les manifestations, dénonce la collision entre le pouvoir et les forces de l’argent’, Tout Sur l’Algérie (TSA), 6 March 2019.

13. Quoted in ‘Constitution: l’UNFA mobilisée pour assurer le succès du référendum du 1er novembre’, Algeria Press Service (APS), 5 October 2020.

14. Ibid.

15. ‘Tribunal administratif d’Alger : Dissolution de RAJ après 28 ans d’activité’, El Watan 13 October2021. https://www.elwatan.com/edition/actualite/tribunal-administratif-dalger-dissolution-de-raj-apres-28-ans-dactivite-13-10-2021; ‘Menacé de dissolution Le PST saisit le premier ministre’, Liberté, 23 February 2022. https://www.liberte-algerie.com/actualite/le-pst-saisit-le-premier-ministre-373857.

16. خطبة جمعة موحّدة تستبق احتجاجات الجزائر [Unified Friday pledge precedes demonstrations in Algeria], Arabi al Jadeed, 1 March 2019.

17. التيار الصوفي في الجزائر يخرج عن صمته ويطالب بحفظ كرامة بوتفليقة ويحي الحراك الشعبي.

[The Sufi movement in Algeria breaks its silence and demands the preservation of Bouteflika’s dignity and revives the popular movement], Raialyoum.com, 21 March 2019.

18. ‘Algérie : qui est le nouveau recteur de la Grande Mosquée d’Alger nommé par Tebboune ?’, JeuneAfrique.com 23 March 2022. https://www.jeuneafrique.com/1332852/politique/algerie-qui-est-le-nouveau-recteur-de-la-grande-mosquee-dalger-nomme-par-tebboune/.

19. ‘Phénomène de la harga: La polémique continue’, Le Quotidien d’Oran, 6 February 2018.

20. Quoted in Official Journal of The Algerian Republic, no.9, 19 February 2020.

21. Quoted in وزير الأوقاف الجزائري: التصويت لصالح التعديلات الدستورية من مراحل تحصين البلاد”. [Algerian Minister of Awqaf: Voting in favour of constitutional amendments is one of the steps that fortify the country], Shourouk, 23 October 2020. https://urlz.fr/jiMP.