The Cold War’s end coincided with a pivotal moment for political Islam in Algeria: the outbreak of the Algerian Civil War. The enlistment of Soviet-Afghan War returnees (‘Algerian-Afghans’) into the Islamist insurgency, fueled the Algerian state’s narrative that the civil war was caused by ‘radical’ Islamists and their ‘religious immoderation,’ cast as an importation of ‘foreign’ Islam that had no basis in Algerian practice. Meanwhile, the post-Cold War global order led the Algerian regime camp to pivot to western allies for moral and diplomatic support. This was made easy by Algeria’s enlistment in the U.S.-led War on Terror a decade later, where it joined a handful of states branding as exporters and arbiters of ‘moderate Islam.’ This paper explores how the discursive hegemony of ‘moderate Algerian Islam’ has impacted political Islam in the country since the 1990s. It argues moderation (al-i'tidal) has become a social imperative that organizes and regulates local Islamist doctrine, platform, and behavior. To do this, it examines shifts and adaptations in how the Movement for a Society of Peace (MSP), today the country’s largest Islamist party, distilled and deployed its movement doctrine of 'centrism and moderation (al-wasatiyya wa'l-i'tidal). Specifically, to negotiate the post-conflict discursive space and (re)situate itself in the national fabric, the MSP articulated and performed moderation through top-down discourses of ‘Islamic indigeneity’ and ‘Algerianness’. This paper thus also illustrates how moderation was dialectically-formed through interacting claims, a dynamic evident in the broader region as well. Findings result from a year-long ethnography of the MSP, including informal conversations, semi-structured interviews, and observation of movement events, supplemented by analysis of speeches, internal movement documents, and media sources, among others. This study aims to challenge the dominant literature on (Islamist) moderation that casts the concept as an objective or traceable position or process. In studying Islamists, moderation has become more instructive as a site of polemics and political meaning-making—notable for the ways, reasons, and contexts in which it is referenced, and for the values, dispositions, and connotations it conjures—than for what it “actually means” (Starrett 2010) or is intended to demonstrate. The concept’s ambiguity and the (often intentional) imprecision with which it is invoked, subject it to the orientations and subjectivities of its user. (Ibid) In this way, moderation is an "essentially contested concept" (Gallie 1956; Starrett 2010), an object of definitional dispute and contention despite near-unanimous social agreement on its importance.