The democratization attempts of the authoritarian regime in Algeria resulted in the 1990s civil war. Since Bouteflika assumed power in 1999, his regime has sought to preserve the system in place since independence while personalizing it. Today, robustness and stability organized around sultanism characterizes the regime. The Arab uprisings had little impact on Algeria because the regime devised tactics to thwart potential protests and survive. However, little analysis has provided a compelling explanation of how and why Algeria has remained a stable and robust authoritarian regime. Undoubtedly, the regime succeeded in part because it concocted new mechanisms, such as superficial political liberalization and a deceptive multiparty system to hinder political and social contestations. The regime resorted to partial political liberalization as a palliative strategy, introducing only minimalist reforms that have done little to alter the nature of the political system and appeasing a population still terrified by the trauma of the 1990s. The regime has also managed the apparent multiparty system to create a façade of democratization that it can trumpet internationally. In fact, while offering a free, yet restricted, public space to the opposition and canalizing their activities into the institutional sphere, the regime still fixes electoral outcomes, manipulates the party system, and constrains the role of political parties, some of which it has coopted efficaciously. This strategy has guaranteed the stability and the robustness of the Algerian authoritarian regime. However, despite its soundness, this explanation remains insufficient. This paper proposes to revisit the concept of neopatrimonialism (Eisenstadt; Clapham, and their critics) and ‘Sultanism’ (Weber; Linz; Leca & Vatin) and apply them to Algeria. The main proposition is that Bouteflika, who presents characteristics of a Sultan, has not only increased the robustness of the regime but has also set in motion neopatrimonial and sultanist patterns that have pervaded the system. This provides a conceivable explanation as to the current authorities’ inability to agree on a successor (despite Bouteflika’s debilitating illness) and to the standoff that prevents the emergence of a “second republic” through a break with the present system. Based on hundreds of interviews in Algeria and abroad, along with extensive analysis of primary and secondary sources, the paper will challenge Bouteflika’s partisans’ insistence on continuity by demonstrating that his twenty-year sultanist rule is replete with flagrant failures at all levels. Only a break with neopatrimonialism and sultanism can help Algeria make its transition to more democratic governance.

Since independence in 1962, Algeria has sought to defend values linked to the country’s history and identity: Arab, Moslem, African and Mediterranean. Algerian leaders developed a foreign policy based on strong ideological principles, ranging from national independence, non-alignment, non-interference, and anti-imperialism beyond a strict and "calculated" conception of national interest. This prevailed during the era of President Boumediène with a sovereigntist assertion of Algeria’s foreign policy (Aït-Chaalal, Balta, Grimaud, Quandt, Mortimer). However, significant external and internal changes have influenced the conduct of Algeria’s foreign policy. The borderline between domestic and foreign policy became more fragile without being able to determine the primacy of one over the other. These two policies are in permanent interaction, the internal factors influencing external actions and external events reminding states of their obligations towards the world. Foreign policy can also help justify domestic policy orientations or can distract from domestic issues (Gelb, Putnam, Tsebelis). Algerian foreign policy does not depart from this rule reflecting changes and developments on the international scene intrinsically linked to the country's internal politics. This study seeks to highlight the changes in the conduct of Algeria's foreign policy and the relationship between foreign and domestic politics, under Bouteflika's rule since 1999. How has Algerian diplomacy, which had lost its vigor–after the October 1988 riots—gradually regained some dynamism? This paper argues that domestic improvements helped the president in under-examined ways to conduct an effective foreign policy. And conversely, the impact of the regional and international environment, globalization, and financial or security crises have had a significant impact not only on external and domestic policy but on strategic governing principles as well. Based on extensive fieldwork in Algeria, including an extensive analysis of primarily source material dozens of interviews over several years, this paper will focus on how Algerian foreign policy—defined around political, ideological, strategic, commercial, technical and financial axes—can serve internal political interests, and vice versa, in terms of stability, security and nation building. In addition, the way in which the political and ideological options persevere for several years have been undermined by developments on the international scene and have compelled Algeria to review its political orientation privileging the economy and security domestically, regionally, and globally.

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.

Algeria’s political opposition is rooted in the nationalist movement against French colonialism. Opposition has continued throughout post-independence in response to the regime’s evolution. The six approved opposition candidates—representing diverse ideological trends in Algerian society—all withdrew before the election of the current president, Bouteflika, in 1999, charging that the election was a fraud and that the army had chosen the sole remaining candidate as a figurehead. This paper proposes that opposition’s ongoing activism during political transitions and evolving priorities has been an instrumental force in Algeria’s struggle for a system of government based on rule of law, respect for human rights and citizens' freedoms. It also explores ways in which the Algerian regime has coopted the Algerian opposition, fragmented it, and how some opposition leaders, especially those in the “presidential alliance,” have maintained a democratic façade while effectively promoting the regime’s agendas. The paper examines the evolving roles of Algerian opposition through four periods of activism: - (1989 -1999) Democratic opening, the war on civilians, antiterrorism, the struggle for human rights, and reconciliation; - (1999 - 2014) Postwar reconciliation, lifting of the 19-year state of emergency (after the Arab uprisings), opposition to the fourth presidential mandate after Bouteflika’s 2013 illness - (2014 -2018) The economic crisis, popular protests, and legislative elections; - (2019 and beyond) Opposition to Bouteflika’s candidacy for a 5th mandate, post-presidential elections, and the future of opposition in Algeria. Within these periods, I address the following questions: - How have political parties evolved and changed? - What alliances have Algerian opposition leaders forged with the regime and/or with its elected government constituencies? - How has the opposition used the media in Algeria and abroad? - What is the role of the Algerian army in the 2019 elections? - What election strategies will the opposition adopt to impact the current political climate? Will there be popular support? - How does Bouteflika’s illness-related absence from governance affect his 2019 candidacy? - How will the election results change Algeria’s political and social climate? The author utilizes extensive fieldwork in Algeria, primary sources, oral histories, diverse historical documents and audio-visual resources, and uses secondary sources in Arabic, French and English.

The 1999 election of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika marked a turning point of Algerian antiterrorist strategy at the leadership level, a coronation of the shift from the “eradication strategy” to “National Reconciliation,” one based on “dialogue.” The strategy of national reconciliation, which departed from the ‘eradicator’ approach, characterized Bouteflika’s presidency. The national reconciliation policy helped him to gain wide legitimacy domestically and internationally. Furthermore, while this policy, which virtually grants amnesty to many of the militant Islamists who fought the regime during the civil strife, was meant to end within a year of its promulgation; however, this policy has remained in place and applied to terrorists who continue to surrender to the authorities. This paper will show that while the national reconciliation policy is indeed a milestone in Bouteflika’s rule, its precursor can be found in President Liamine Zeroual’s 1994 “Rahma Law” and in the September 1997 ceasefire between the authorities and the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), the armed branch of the Islamic Salvation Front. The paper will examine the context and the key elements of this strategy as well as its outcomes. One of the main conclusions is that while officially national reconciliation is still in place, as one of two opposing strategies since the mid-1990s, in practice, starting in 2013, due to a radical regional change (increased threats in the neighboring Sahel and the Libyan civil war), as well as a change in the structure and nature of the jihadi organizations in Algeria itself and abroad, there has been a shift back to the opposing (and failed) eradication policies of the early 1990s. The paper will also show that while there is a shift back to eradication in the fight against terrorism inside Algeria, the authorities have maintained and continue to promote the strategy of national reconciliation towards jihadist organizations across its southern borders and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East. The study will draw from years of fieldwork in most countries of the Maghreb and the Sahel, including hundreds of interviews both with government leaders, security officials, analysts, and jihadist leaders and sympathizers, and will include a critique of standard texts on the topic (M. Löwi, H. Roberts, L. Dris-Aït-Hamadouche, V. Arnould). The study will make an important contribution to the field of counterterrorism strategy: the case of a government implementing opposing and oscillating strategies domestically and internationally, and abandoning the growing international consensus on human security.