Over the last fifty years, the emergence, circulations, and mutations of transnational armed non-state oppositional actors has increasingly come to be seen the primary security challenge facing the Middle East and North Africa. Governments in the region have uniformly responded to these challenges, first and foremost, by enhancing their already robust police, military, and intelligence apparatuses. Extra-regional powers have likewise taken forceful action to confront these groups, often resorting to military intervention, if not full scale invasion and prolonged occupation. Civil conflicts across the region have also come to be defined by the presence of both nationalist and transnationalist armed groups. However, despite their prevalence, rarely have they been conceptualized as a form of military labor, one that is co-constitutive of the spatially organized global political-economy in which they exist and operate. As with the phenomena of urban and rural insurgencies across the decolonizing world during the Cold War, analyses of contemporary transnational nonstate armed actors has emphasized ideological aspects to the almost total exclusion of any understanding of the material means by which they have been produced, are reproduced, and reproduce themselves. This emphasis on ideology has not only led to the reification of “terrorism” as a new and autonomous cosmology of war, it has created new fields of knowledge and operations of power organized around the concept of “jihadi” actors and ideologies. At the same time, critics of the North Atlantic world’s historical dominance in the region and America’s “oil for security” policies frame armed opposition as simply material and ideological reactions to the overbearing nature of outside influence on the region. A more elucidatory account would instead begin by centering the new geopolitical functions of the Middle East and North Africa that developed in response to the crises of postwar capitalism and US hegemony in the 1970s. As permanent war across the region became the primary mechanism through which profits and power were extracted from oil (oil for insecurity), new forms of informal military labor were variously cultivated by public and private forms of power, or emerged in the interstices of states and capitalism. Using Algeria as a case study and based on an extensive review of primary and secondary materials, this class-based analysis proves effective at explaining the last fifty years of organized violence across the region.