Symbolically, the National Liberation Front’s (Front de Libération National, FLN) position in Algerian politics is incontestable. It spearheaded the War of Independence (1954-1962) and enjoyed single-party status until the advent of the multi-party era in 1989, losing local and national elections in 1990, 1991, and 1997. The FLN has been ascendant since the election of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in 1999, winning local and national elections in 2002 and 2007. Institutionally, the party apparatus is described as a transmission belt used in conjunction with national unions and associational groups to channel the regime’s policies to the most local-level). With few exceptions, analysis has been elite-driven, macro-institutional, and contextualized in a “top-down” framework. While revealing the broad contours of the Algerian political system, macro-level studies nevertheless offer conflicting and sometimes confusing analysis of the party’s gravitas and role in the political system. On the one hand, scholars underscore the FLN’s inherent weakness, largely due to internal rivalries dating to the anti-colonial struggle or the “clannish” and divided nature of Algerian elite politics . On the other hand, the FLN has been widely considered as the third leg of the so-called “iron triangle” of military, bureaucracy, and party. Viewed exclusively from the “top-down” perspective, the divergent narratives appear irreconcilable (i.e. iron pillar of the regime or myth / façade), creating a debate which obfuscates the nature of Algerian politics by under-articulating the political processes through which the “transmission belt” links the local and national political arenas. This paper seeks to reconcile the two narratives by looking at the institutional and political links between the Algerian state and FLN party at the local, regional, and national-level. Using the case of the FLN party’s Oran-based cells and regional federation during the 2004 presidential, and 2007 local assembly elections, this study shows that while weak at the national-level, the party’s political importance is at the local-level, where the regime uses the local FLN networks as a support base, often bypassing political decisions of the FLN Central Committee and Political Bureau at the national level. It also show how FLN cells and federations negotiate the mobilization capacity of their local networks with the State in order to reinforce bargaining power with the FLN national leadership, especially in determining party lists. A bottom-up approach complements extant macro-level studies by clearly defining the processes by which the local and national arenas are linked in the Algerian political system

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.

The alleged incommensurablility between logics at the level of the ‘macro’ and the ‘micro’ — a mimic of the agent-structure debate — is an important site of knowledge production for political and international theory. Here is a sketch of the problem: master narratives claim sovereignty over all processes of identity and action in armed conflict yet they are often incongruent with local reasons for participation in mass violence. Furthermore, such parallel or counter-logics at the micro-level are not easily detected or are inadvertently submerged. One of the faults of the macro-dependent theories, accordingly, is the elision or erasure of the micro-level. The incumbent/insurgent opposition — one of the many ontological divisions of labour that have become central to contemporary civil war theory — is one such structure. Not only we can see these structuring operations at work in a number of theoretical and comparative studies on civil war, but also we see them deployed during the international debates about whether or not to intervene into Algeria. After the armed conflict in Algeria took hold in 1992, it soon produced an escalating wave of civilian massacres, peaking from 1996 to 1998. Some of these massacres claimed hundreds of lives in a single episode and, in the second half of 1997, spurred more and more calls for international action. Yet from the beginning, commentators, analysts, academics and policymakers inscribed the Algerian civil war as a dyadic conflict pitting armed groups (insurgents) against a military regime (incumbents). This binary rendering was carried forth as the governing framework for an understanding of the massacres and, as such, became the schema that structured calls for intervention.

The corpus of writings on contemporary Algerian politics is characterized by “top-down,” systemic or macro-institutional approaches based on aggregate data, which is rarely interested in local-level political phenomena. While useful for addressing broad questions of regime-type and political economy, the macro-level approach has led researchers to ignore a number of important questions. For example, the focus on Algeria’s “liberalized autocracy,” has drawn attention from analysis of local-, if not national-level, elections. The intellectual justification is that, in the current political context, elections are a façade and therefore not of interpretive interest. Anthropological approaches have the inverse tendency: While they seek to study particular cultural and social phenomena, they largely ignore the effects of the political regime. The relationship between legislative elections, state institutions and Algerian tribes presents an opportunity to break with certain pathologies inherent in the two approaches. Tribal conflict has become increasingly manifest in Algeria in recent years. The bloody conflict between two tribes along the administrative border of the Provinces of Laghouat and Djelfa in June 2006; and deadly clashes between the Berber community and the Chaamba tribe in the Mzab valley in 2008 and 2009 are noteworthy examples. Tribalism in politics, moreover, is evident in the drawing up of party lists during legislative elections, and in the widely reported presidential visits to tribal notables. While clearly on the rise, tribalism remains an understudied aspect of Algerian politics. Why, after more 132 years of rupture, dating from the French conquest in 1830, the administrative disaggregation of the tribe during colonial period, the rise and success of the nationalism, Socialism and Islamism – ideologies inherently in contradiction with tribalism – is the tribal question so prevalent in contemporary Algeria? Is the revival of tribalism part of a larger social process, or is it an anachronistic anomaly? Using concepts from drawn from political science and anthropology, this paper analyses the relationship between the tribe and the Algerian state in the Province of Tebessa between the 2002 legislative and 2004 presidential elections. Specifically, it looks at the electoral sociology in the local political arena, situating the revival of the tribal question as a part of President Bouteflika’s neo-makhzan strategy to consolidate his regime by playing tribe against social class. Algeria is witnessing a form of “tribalism without tribes:” while the tribe as a system of social organization is structurally impossible, the tribe as a means of social identity is not.