This paper seeks to construct a multidisciplinary analytical framework for understanding the nature and reproduction of authoritarianism in contemporary Algeria. In doing so, it uses empirical evidence from extensive fieldwork in Algeria to back the theoretical argument. Its point of departure is the observation that Algerian authoritarianism is highly diffuse in that it is not simply being exercised or reproduced top-down but has developed intricate dynamics with respect to actors, channels and mechanisms for its reproduction. For this reason, elite-centred transition approaches, much en vogue in the 1990s, are of limited explanatory power. Not just because of their implicit assumption of a democratic transition indeed taking place, but because of their focus on actors and processes on the national level. In doing so, they on the one hand neglect international structures and factors constraining the range of manoeuvre of the national decision makers. On the other hand, they tend to ignore the local linkages of national elites as well as the socio-cultural and economic structural factors that again strongly define the elites’ range of manoeuvre or what shall be termed in this paper the “elite corridors of action”. This paper, nevertheless, argues that an elite-oriented transition approach, i.e., an actor-centred approach, is a good point of departure for understanding the nature of Algeria’s authoritarian structures and their reproduction, given the difficulties of separating formal-institutional and informal politics in Algeria. However, this approach needs to be expanded in order to place national elites in their socio-cultural and socio-economic context, i.e. it needs to include a dimension of political economy and political anthropology. Hence, this paper proposes to combine the analysis of elite divisions, pacts, settlements, etc. with a micro-analysis of the multiple ways in which political elites are embedded in socio-cultural structures and economic networks, local, national, and international. This allows for identifying constraints, obligations, opportunities, and interests arising from embeddedness in clientelist networks and from specific solidarities – be they primordial (e.g. tribal, regional or ethnic) or ‘modern’ (e.g. revolutionary). It, moreover, reveals the diffuse channels of recruitment and mechanisms of reproduction of the authoritarian elite.