You back them up. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
My name's Eugene Rogan and as director of the Centre, it's a great pleasure to welcome you to join us for a special celebration tonight.
The Middle East centre often has occasion on a Tuesday evening to invite authors to talk about their books.
We take it as part of our mission to be exposing our community to the very latest word that's come out of scholarship in our field.
But it is a particular celebration where we are celebrating the publication of a new book by one of our own fellows.
And for 19 years now, for nearly 19 years now since he was appointed the inaugural.
Let me get this title straight. His Majesty King Mohammed, the fifth fellow in Moroccan and Mediterranean Studies Eagle Michael Willis,
has been at the very heart of the Middle East centre.
He came to us with a remarkable pedigree from his B.A. at Redding, where he had the privilege of studying with a future colleague of Islam,
his M.A. at the NSC, his Ph.D. at Durham, where he worked with our colleague, the legend, Tim Niblock.
Michael served for seven years as professor of politics at Howard University in Morocco,
where he learned as much about the politics of Morocco as he was able to teach to his
very fortunate students who've been very loyal to Michael down to the present day.
Many of them still in touch with him as I speak. At the time of his appointment, Michael already had published his first major single authored book,
The Islamist Challenge in Algeria A Political History, which came out in 1997.
Since taking up his Oxford Post, he's produced his magisterial study of politics and power in the Maghreb, Algeria,
Tunisia and Morocco, from independence to the Arab Spring, which came out to much celebration and fanfare in 2012 here in Oxford.
So it is Michael Willis's third single offered volume that we celebrate tonight Algeria, Politics and Society from the Dark Decade to the Hirak.
Few scholars have enjoyed the privilege of studying the politics of Algeria up close from within the country itself.
It is one of the distinguishing features of Michael's work in producing this book that it is based on field work conducted in the country.
Very much in keeping with Michael's approach to political science, to talk to the people and to walk the ground where it happens.
This book, Algeria, is something of a sequel,
bringing up to date the political transformation that has gone on in the country since the dark decade of his first book,
studying the Islamist insurgency that tore government and society in Algeria apart right through the 1990s,
up to the hirak or the popular uprising that continues to challenge politics in Algeria today.
So with that knack for writing the book that we all want to read,
to better understand a country that remains one of the most important countries in the North Africa and Southwest Asia region,
the biggest country in the African continent,
a country whose tortured history and secretive politics have made it a subject of perennial fascination to us all.
Bobby Don If it's not Michael Willis who gets the book out first to share the findings of his research and to get us off to a proper celebration,
I'd like to hand the floor over to Michael Willis. Will you please join me in giving him the biggest say down to his Middle East centre?
Welcome. Well, thank you very much, Eugenie,
for an extraordinary kind introduction and for giving us background to some of the things I've done, which has been wonderful.
But thank you very much and thank you for for arranging this. And thank you.
I want to thank my colleagues at the Middle East Centre for inviting me to give this talk today and talk about my book quite a bit.
To get my glasses on, we will get a very different talk if it was the way that my own rather shorter I imagine.
And I think having having stood as many of you will know at this podium on a very regular basis,
introducing over the years other people to talk about their books,
it therefore feels rather slightly surreal but very nice to be finally talking about my own book, so thank you very much for arranging this.
Invited us to Why have I written this book?
Well, I think we can really break this down into two things.
Why are my books written? A book on Algeria and why I written this particular book on Algeria.
And I'll try and say a little bit about both of those things to explain what I've tried to do this book.
So why a book on Algeria? Well,
mainly to try and explain something about a country that is perhaps one of the
least known and thus understood in the Middle East and North Africa region.
Now, this unfamiliarity extends not just to the general public, but also, I think, to academia,
including people who work on the wider region of the Middle East and North Africa.
Those of us who work on Algeria will be familiar with a rather sort of quizzical
look that crosses people's faces when you tell them that you work on Algeria.
People often remark when you tell them that you work on Algeria,
that they have seen and appreciated the film The Battle of Algiers, and then they usually mumble something about friends Fanon.
And then the look becomes sort of even more quizzical when you tell them that you work as I do in Algeria since independence,
since the end of the French colonial rule.
And then when I say that, it's usually ventured that they say something like, didn't they have some problems there in the 1990?
Yes, they did. And we'll talk a little bit about that.
Now, I think that this sort of sense of unfamiliarity is frequently fed by how Algeria's often described in journalistic coverage of the country,
even by those familiar with Algeria or indeed from Algeria.
The adjective most commonly used I've often found when talking about Algeria's structures or dynamics, especially the elite level, is opaque.
Everything is opaque. Opaque this opaque that opacity.
Opacity is the noun from opaque. This is a very regular description.
Tellingly, almost every journalistic account of politics over the last few decades has contained
the word secret in its title The Secret History of the Independent Algeria Bouteflika.
The Secret History. The Secret History of the Fall of Bouteflika.
There's a lot of secret. It's a very secretive country. It's remarkable.
I found even more ones that I didn't even know about. They all have secret somewhere in the title.
Once there is this sense of in Algeria and particularly its politics, are not just little known but also hidden or even somehow sort of unknowable.
Indeed, I was intrigued and and amused to see a comment on social media when my book was released a few months back.
And the comment said, and I quote, I have not read this book,
but it is certain it is going to be full of mistakes and errors because no one really knows what is really happening in Algeria.
And this was from an Algerian. And this is common.
Both of you are familiar with Algeria. Well, some people might say that, well,
perhaps Algeria isn't well known and can remain opaque and secret because maybe it's not really that important.
Now, I obviously would beg to differ.
And I want to give you a few statistics to illustrate why Algeria is important and why it matters to try and find out what is happening there.
So here are a few of the things, just some headlines. Algiers is geographically, I think you mentioned this in his introduction.
Algeria's geographically the largest country in the Middle East and Africa.
It's the 10th largest country in the world. It has the second largest population, 45 million of any Arab.
Please notice the quote marks around Arab from my Amazon friends.
Arab states second only to Egypt in terms of population in the Arab world.
It is not only not small, but also not remote or unconnected is only 100 miles from Europe.
Several million Algerians live in Europe and it is one of the largest armies in Africa.
Crucially, for current times, it is a significant producer of oil and especially gas.
So a major objective reading and writing this book was to try and introduce Algeria and its politics to a broader audience.
This book is really for a broader audience. People who aren't familiar, not many say people who know Algeria well, but those people, again,
to which it's always been unfamiliar for the sort of reasons I've just mentioned,
and therefore somehow I hope it make Algeria a bit less opaque and a bit less secret.
And this is what the objective really has been.
Algeria is not an easy country to do research on or do research in, but because it's yeah, it's difficult.
In my view, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Sometimes.
Often we we end up not doing things because we can't be perfectly.
The book is imperfect, but I wanted to do something to fill this gap about this country.
So that's the first question why book analogy? So second question is why this particular book?
Well, I wanted to write something on more recent history and developments.
I had written my first book and the PhD thesis on which it was based, which Eugene very kindly referred to on Algeria,
which substantially focussed on the tumult and conflicts of the 1990s.
And I therefore wanted to look at the period since then.
I decided to focus on examining politics of the last two decades and not because of the sort of neatness
of it coinciding with the turn of the millennium and the last two first two decades of the 21st century.
But because the end of 1990 and the beginning of 2000 saw three developments in Algeria in the areas of leadership,
economy and society, but in my view, really recast the political landscape in Algeria.
And I want you to look at that. So what were these three things?
Firstly, and most obviously was the election of Abdelaziz Bouteflika to the presidency of Algeria in 1999.
This was a position that he would hold for exactly 20 years until his enforced resignation in April 2019.
Bouteflika had been Algeria's foreign ministry for minister for the 1960s and 1970s and
had been brought back to try and rekindle a sense of optimism and stability of period.
After this, the eighties and nineties of the upheaval. So the first change would really have becomes in his presence.
Second change was the perceptible decline in levels of violence, but have been a major feature of the 1990s.
Algeria had experienced a prolonged and bloody civil conflict in the 1990s between the government
and armed Islamist groups following the cancellation and abandonment of elections in 1992.
But an Islamist party, the Islamic Salvation Front, had been poised to win decisively.
The conflict claimed tens of thousands of lives. We're not even entirely sure how many lives produce seven tens of thousands.
By some estimates, hundreds of thousands.
It's difficult to know, but the violence associated with began to define quite perceptively towards the end of a decade,
and especially after the turn of the millennium into the 2000. That was the second factor.
The third factor that changed at the turn around the turn millennium and I believe was probably the most important,
was the steady climb in the international price of oil that began in the second half of 1999 and continued for well over a decade,
increasing fivefold over time. So the revenues increased in, prices went up five times.
This transformed, as you can imagine, the state finances of the Algerian state,
which had long been heavily dependent on the country's oil and gas resources.
Collectively, these three developments leadership, society and the economy allowed Algiers to make something of a break.
With the tumult and turmoil of the previous two decades, the eighties and nineties, which had witnessed financial crisis,
uncertain change in political leadership, and most prominently, of course, that this the bloody civil war was the conflict.
I therefore really intended this book to be both in an account, an analysis of this reconfigured political landscape,
notably about how a country emerges from a serious civil conflict.
A lot of that is in the book is trying to explain what happens in a civil war in this way.
To this end, three chapters in the book are dedicated to these themes of leadership, economics and the decline of the armed conflict.
Chapter two looks at elite politics examining the impact of Bouteflika's presidency from 1999,
notably his battles to assert himself against the military leadership,
the leadership, the intelligence services which a security service which is very important in Algeria.
Chapter three examines the decline of it occurred in the 2000s and the levels of violence associated with civil conflict of the 1990.
It looks at how a ceasefire and amnesty were negotiated with a less hard line of Iran's Islamist groups.
It explains the initiatives taken by President Bouteflika to bring an end to the conflict through the granting
of these amnesties and also legal protection was granted to members of the Army and security services.
Finally, Chapter four addresses have a steady rise in the international oil price affected Algerian politics,
not only through providing the state with resources to rebuild the country and dampen opposition,
but also how it drew in a new class of businessmen into elite circles and deepened institutional corruption.
Much later on, which became a real major feature of this period.
Now the relevance of understanding this period was further sharpens by mark
changes that came towards the middle of the second decade of a new millennium,
about roughly eight or nine years ago.
In two of these three big defining things and features, but as a start and much of a course of what I've outlined now.
The first of these changes came in the field of leadership.
In April 2013,
President Bouteflika suffered a major stroke but physically incapacitated him as president to the point that he was rarely seen in public thereafter.
Despite official assertions that he retained his mental faculties,
his physical decline and advancing age indicated that his presidency was approaching
its end despite his securing of a full five year term in office in 2014.
He didn't appear in the campaign. The only thing appeared to was to vote.
That's the only thing he did in the entirety of the campaign.
Secondly, and this is the other change and a much more long consequence was the fall in the international price of oil,
but occurred from the latter part of 2014,
losing more than 70% of its value in just 18 months, although the long years of high prices meant that Algeria had a sizeable financial cushion.
You didn't need to be an economist to see that in considering existing patterns of consumption and public spending.
Algeria would eat through its reserves in just a few short years.
Now this place, the huge dark cloud, not over just over the Algerian state finances,
but also future social and political stability over previous decade and a half.
There had been vast increases in state spending on salaries, job creation, housing and infrastructure funded by revenues from the oil and gas bonanza.
These had made a significant contribution to the improved social and political space Algeria enjoyed over this period.
Now a scaling back of the spending stood to potentially reverse these effects.
And furthermore, and quite naturally, there were even fears the financial crisis might undermine the third pillar of this period that I just write,
which was the decline of the civil conflict.
State spending had played a. Play a role directly and indirectly in securing the cease fire of members of the armed Islamist groups.
Generous official compensation had also helped soothe the resentment of victims and their
families and all sides of the conflict and therefore some resurgence in these animosities.
But a cause for conflict of the nineties might be expected from the ending of this sort of palliative of state aid,
especially given that no systematic public recognition county of a conflict had ever occurred.
There was no peace and justice commission in Algeria.
The participants were simply amnestied and paid off on all sides and told to forget about it and move on.
One phrase would often use and it wasn't amnesty, it was amnesia with all.
It works better than French amnesia, and amnesty works better in France.
But the purpose, therefore, this book was such when it began in 2015,
was to attempt not to explain, only to explain the count for the preceding period,
but also develop some perspective on what the consequences of a new shifts would be with these changes.
By the time the first draft of this book was finished in late 2018, no major shifts were yet detectable in the Algerian political landscape.
Bouteflika was still alive and president, though he was rarely seen in public.
Social and political peace and stability seemed to be holding.
But the sense of political drift, absent leadership and impending financial crisis, indicated that this soon might fray.
Now, the weakness of a formal political opposition and organised civil society, something I explored in detail in Chapter five of the book,
indicated that opposition and civil society would not be able to marshal the anger and frustration of the ordinary population,
but would inevitably develop, especially when the financial crisis began to be felt.
It seemed likely then, and this is my view at the time, that this discontent would soon manifest itself in unstructured,
even anarchic and violent ways, starting locally in a pattern but already being seen in developing across the country.
Now, interestingly, popular unhappiness with the situation did indeed begin to express itself,
but somewhat earlier than expected and in a way that few had foreseen or predicted.
The emergence and flourishing of a mass protest across the country in late February 2019 seemed to take everyone by surprise.
I remember receiving a phone call from a friend participating in a seminar and he was had his mobile phone marching
down the main street in Algiers in a mass protest and was the first thing I knew about and I had no idea about it.
But protest was specifically sparked by the announcement on ten February that Bouteflika would seek a fifth consecutive term as president in office.
And what were initially local protests rapidly grew, culminating in thousands coming onto the streets of Algiers on Friday, the 22nd of February 2019.
The organisation of these events came not from the opposition parties or established associations,
but rather initially from social media before developing their own structure and links through the weekly protests themselves largely leaderless.
They drew their support from across the ideological spectrum.
Their central demands, expressed unambiguously through banners and chanted slogans,
were first the departure of Bouteflika through denying him a fifth term in office
and removal of a wider political leadership and reform of the whole system.
If we see if we see here, this was when he wanted a fifth term and this became unfit.
And then there was a proposal. It was quite interesting. This dialogue began.
There was a brief proposal that Bouteflika would stay a little bit longer.
So everybody came back with four, four plus.
With that ruled out in sight.
And every time it was as, yes, they ought to be longer, they would change it and say each time, no, this is not happening.
It was also reformed. The whole political system I really like this from this is right down to the ascent of Algiers.
If you know anything about this says in French general clean up and it's non-recyclable rubbish and it's all
the politicians in the in the wheelie bin but they're saying all of these should not be non-recyclable,
rubbish needs to go in the bins. There's a big clean up there.
The humour in the protest was wonderful, as in often in these cases, pressure from the protest movement, which became known as the Hirak.
The movement in Arabic led to Bouteflika's resignation as president, the member dismissal,
and frequently the arrest and prosecution imprisonment of most of his key supporters and ministers over the months that followed.
Here is two big prominent promises Ahmadiyya and that parliament itself would be by basically kept on changing positions all way through.
And that's certainly most of the initial terms. I think up they were they went up to about 40 years each but kept on coming in and out of court.
But these were bouteflika's two most important party prime ministers.
Now, even more astonishing to our outside observers in particular was the near complete absence of any violence from the protest.
Despite their enormous size and diversity now, the diverse,
peaceful and civic minded character of the protests evoked unavoidable parallels to the early days of a mass protest movements.
But it flourished elsewhere across the Midlands, the North Africa, on which now became known as the Arab Spring or the Arab uprisings of 2011.
But interestingly, in 2011, it had very little echo in Alger.
And I'll come back to that in a moment about why that was the case.
However, Algeria's movement soon distinguished itself in many ways from other earlier movements in the region by sustaining these trends over weeks,
months and eventually even years that followed.
Now, such achievement was remarkable in its own right in being able to keep going, but was of special note in the country but certainly beyond.
Algeria was was widely known for a history marked by violence and bloodshed.
Such a history encompassed not just the period of the civil conflict of the 1990s,
but the long struggle for independence from France, which had cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
This had led to a widespread trend in many journalistic and sadly, even some academic narratives of Algerian history,
as one characterised by nearly unremitting bloodletting and conflict.
But it consequently forged a population that was somehow inherently predisposed
to acts of violence when confronted with political crises and problems.
Now such narratives not only ignore the very particular and different contexts of the 1990,
the 1950s, but also betray a dubious stereotyping and a centralising of a whole society.
Now, the enduring peaceful nature of a protest movement that emerged in 2019 and continued for over a year.
In the first instance, this was not a much longer than in the Arab Spring.
Incidences showed really how flawed these narratives of inherent violence were.
Moreover, it was no accident or coincidence, but rather an undeniably explicit and conscious choice of those participating in marches
who made the peaceful nature of their protests one of their two defining features,
alongside the commitment to just keep on coming out every week and keep on protesting.
Now the conscious choice of the participants in the hirak to actively reject and move away from a past experience,
but had been widely assumed to somehow define them,
confirm their agency in the face of historical legacies that they were supposedly powerless to resist.
Indeed, the enduring commitment to a fully peaceful protest became a badge of honour for the movement.
These were enormous protests. I think they were completely peaceful.
Algerians bitter experience of bloodshed and turmoil, rather than making them more prone to repeating it,
had created a resolve to avoid at all costs, really, a conclusion that should not be as surprising as it was to so many people.
Now, in addition to the Pacific Nature, another feature of the protests that took people,
especially outside observers, by surprise was the fact that they actually happened at all.
Now, Algeria, after all, had been markedly, as I mentioned, unaffected by the events of 2011 being the only country on the North African littoral,
but had seen the emergence of a mass protest movement of a sort that had shaken,
insecure the departures of the leaders of the countries to the Middle East, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.
Even Morocco, further west, supposedly renowned for its stability, saw much larger and sustained protests than Algeria in this period.
Why then, having been strikingly unaffected by the uprisings of 2011,
did Algeria then produce a mass movement just eight years later that bore significant similarity to those that occurred across the region,
but in many cases was larger and ultimately more sustained.
Now, at this point,
I find myself pausing slightly because the question of why did Algeria see mass protests of 2019 in 2019 and not in 2011 is an essay question,
but I now set pretty well every term as a student. So anyone who's taking my taking my option or future terms, I'll see you.
Lean forward and take notes. I won't give you back, but I'll give you some hints and tips if I see this reproduced on there.
But I'll be flattered. But however I will address it.
I think a number of things changed in the eight intervening years between 2011 and 2019.
First time around with leadership in 2011.
In contrast to most of its neighbours, there was a noticeable lack of popular antipathy towards the head of state.
Bouteflika was widely viewed as having helped bring significant peace and prosperity to Algeria in the wake of a civil conflict in 2011.
Although suffering worsening health, Bhutto was still able to appear in public, speak and provide visible leadership.
However, the stroke he suffered in 2013 significantly debilitated him,
necessitating regular periods in hospitals in Europe and restricting him to only occasional public appearances in a wheelchair,
looking frail and often blank and confused.
However, his continuation in Morocco,
visible debilitation and diminishing number of parents in public led to questions as to whether he could really still be in control of the country.
And if he wasn't a man who was actually running the country.
The announcement that Bouteflika would seek a fifth presidential term thus ignited fears that this arrangement was continuing.
Many Algerians felt humiliated by the fact they didn't know who was actually leading their country and
that their former president was not able to appear in public and meet foreign leaders and visitors.
Moreover, and this is something that really, Robert was increasingly represented at national events by giant framed photos of himself.
Some interesting enough, they chose ones where he looked younger and better looking than when he was later on.
And this was actually he would appear when president was supposed to appear.
And in Algeria, this was a sense of feeling of humiliation that they would you know,
how James would say, what are we, North Korea, that we have some veneration of pictures of leaders?
Oh, God forbid. Are we Morocco? That was the other way around where you have people where you have pictures of your leaders south, everywhere.
It did, however, leave the. I want to show you one of my Algerian cartoonists in the newspapers some of the best and funniest cartoonists.
And I wish I could I could spend the whole evening showing you cartoons. But they did some wonderful.
But this particular one, when he put it because of the comparing just in portraits, is look at this one.
Now, this is when Bouteflika tired. This is when the ban Saleh was the interim president.
And it says in French, Ben Stiller takes the place of Bouteflika.
So he's the pace if president is to be in a in a portrait, in a frame.
And if you notice, he's standing on a general because the army helped him into power and he's getting into the picture frame,
because that's some place that the president is.
You don't have a normal president. You have to beat your enemy in a fright. Corruption was another big thing that changed between 2011 and 2019.
Like most countries in the region,
Algeria had a long problem with corruption and almost inevitable result of the same people being in power for extended periods of time.
However, what was slightly different in Algeria was that corruption had increased, notably in the years up to 2019.
One of the main factors why President Bouteflika had been popular and how he was able to help Algeria come for trauma of the 1990s,
was the substantial rise in the international price of oil soon after he became president.
This gave a government substantial resources, as we saw, to rebuild Algeria, construct houses and give jobs and subsidies to ordinary Algerians.
However, the availability of large amounts of money led to increasingly corrupt practices.
Wealthy businessman who funded Bouteflika's successive re-election campaigns were awarded
with huge government contracts and became key figures in the presidential entourage.
Although enough money was spent to improve a lot of ordinary Algerians and effectively eradicate poverty.
Knowledge. But huge amounts of money were being stolen angered ordinary Algerians,
especially as government spending began to be reduced with a fall in the price of oil.
The current president doing an anti-corruption drive, announced this week.
But in somebody's private house in the town in the east, they been found, I think it was something like 5500.
But in terms of dollars, that's about 30, $36 billion worth,
I think was owner of a mattress or in the wardrobe or something that they found in somebody's house.
The thought of it probably not billion. It was billion, wasn't it?
I think it was, Bill. It was billion. It was I'll that this was exaggerated.
We're talking a lot of money, huge amount to get out. But yeah, I, I had to get an accusation as well.
But that's just to give you an evidence of it. It was therefore not surprising that denunciations of corruption and calls for
departure of specific major businessmen featured on banners and chants of protesters.
That's the equivalent of what we call in Britain, the CBI. That Alec dead?
Yes. Again, he's in he's portraying now. This is what the Algerians are saying. We don't have a president.
We just threw him in the portrait. And these are the prime ministers and that's them.
That's the president's brother as well. The family have got in on the act.
Another factor that explains why things changed between 2011 and 2019 was a very Algerian desire to not be in step with the rest of the region,
which sounds rather strange, but it's, I think, matters Algerians.
And I don't want to. I've got Algerian friends here to to generalise have a very huge sense of national pride and exceptionalism,
the belief that they are different from other countries. And although all countries have it to a certain degree,
it is particularly strong in Algeria because it comes from a feeling of pride and distinction
in having won their independence from France and created their own country for an uprising,
but against the odds and achieved at the cost of great bloodshed.
This has led most prominently to Algerians being hugely resistant to any form of foreign intervention or interference,
and also a belief that Algeria has forged its own path irrespective of other states.
But when popular protests erupted across the rest of the Arab world in early 2011,
there was resistance among Algerians to the idea that they should merely follow their neighbours.
In fact, Algerians were almost universal in asserting that we were not joining the Arab
Spring because they had already had their own Arab Spring more than 20 years.
When Algerians had come on to the streets in October 1988, leading to a partial opening up the system, but was ultimately just shut down in 1992.
Now, this was not empty rhetoric, the tale of popular protests, political openings, Islamist electoral victories and regime repression.
But unfolded in the late 1980s and early nineties in Algeria was one that had
remarkable echoes in the events that unfolded across the region from 2011,
especially in Syria and Egypt.
In this way, Algerians like to think that the 2019 protests were not a late Arab Spring, as some commentators like to argue.
But perhaps Algeria leading the way in a second wave of popular protests against the authoritarian and undemocratic regime.
So what became of the hirak and what are now the prospects for Algeria now that Iraq was able to sustain its weekly mass
protests for over a year and only suspended them voluntarily in March 2020 with the arrival of the COVID pandemic.
They were successfully revived in February 2021,
but by the spring had been obliged to spend once again in response to renewed surge in the pandemic, but also due to pressure from the authorities.
A campaign of arrests, intimidation and repression of the activists.
Together with a huge police presence on the streets of Algiers,
Algeria's main cities each Friday has ensured that Hirak has been unable to revive for a third time.
This is a picture taken on one of the Fridays after its council. This is what one of the main street I'm trying to work out.
Exactly. What I'm trying to work out is if this isn't Mohamed promises it or not, or this it is to do [INAUDIBLE].
I wonder if to do one of the main street and this is every Friday.
You wouldn't really want to go out and protest without mounted police there. And this is a live event.
This is every Friday.
I think it's still most of you know, it's still turning out these sort of these sort of numbers of police to stop people coming out to protest.
Just basically huge numbers of police on the streets. Not anymore.
Not anymore. But this is in 2020, 2021, although a significant presence of my friends have been showing me still on the streets in many places.
What happens next in Algeria is really beyond the scope of my book.
My book is really trying to understand these these first two decades.
But what I can do is give some pointers based on what I learned through writing this book about Algeria and its politics.
First, it's the remarkable resilience of the regime and political system in Algeria,
surviving a series of serious challenges since its independence in the wake of a departure from the French in 1962.
An enormous financial crisis in the 1980s. Electoral victories by opposition parties.
A large scale insurrection and most recently, a mass protest movement.
One of the facets of this, and part of the explanation of it was the ability to change the regime senior personnel,
including those at the very top with minimal impact on the structures and exercise of power.
The Hirak movement, for example, was able to secure the departure of President Bouteflika in 29,
followed by every single senior figure in the regime but had surrounded him for two decades.
However, these figures were swiftly replaced from within the system with hardly an external,
perceptible ripple in the control operation of the system.
So you basically replace the entire leadership with new people, and it was with hardly a beat with this, which is quite unusual and quite remarkable.
The new in reality recycled figures who have now assumed the formal positions
of power in the system show no real intent to replace or meaningful reform
the undemocratic and sclerotic power structures that they have inherited and
which have become an established feature of the Algerian political system.
In my view, and I set this out in chapter two of the book.
This phenomenon illustrates one of the characteristics features of the Algerian political elite,
the lack of the importance of of individual figures and leaders, in contrast to much of the rest of the Arab world.
Power seems not to reside in a few specific, sometimes individual hands,
but in a set of institutional actors for change by leading figures with seeming ease.
These institutions include the army, the intelligence services and the administration,
without one institution ever predominating for any sustained period,
resulting in what one observer, Thomas Serres, has called a cartel arrangement of political power.
How are these structures the profoundly unsuited and unprepared to deal with the future challenges that Algeria faces?
The emerging consequences of these challenges, which we've been talking about, particularly on the economic level,
strongly suggest that even though the Hirak movement ultimately seems to have been defeated by the state,
another popular movement will take its place as Algerians seek to secure a better leadership for the state and a better life for themselves.
Now, in Chapter six of a book, I've tried to get a sense of what ordinary Algerians impulsively just want to give the go.
Think about politics.
And I did it through combing through survey data I could find in cross-references with ethnography and my own interviews and experience.
And one noticeable feature that seemed to come through consistently in surveys of a period that I've been
examining was that despite a deep sense of cynicism and alienation from formal political processes,
Algeria seemed to retain a more profound optimism about the efficacy of political action more generally.
There was still a belief that things could change and things could be improved for the better.
Which, given everything has happened, is quite remarkable.
And I think this demonstrates what I think is the profound and unusual resilience of the ordinary population, the resilience state,
the resilience of the population even more than the regime, which is not only survived the huge trials and traumas of the past century,
but is constantly surprised outside observers going back to the liberation struggle against the French, which it should not be forgotten,
was launched with few hopes of success against one of the major world power continuing through
the emergence out of a brutal civil war and expressing itself peacefully in the right.
How do we explain this resilience of the population to keep on coming back and keep on believing?
Well, I think it lies in a very clear belief held by most Algerians.
But Algeria is a country that belongs to them, the ordinary people.
The great slogan of the liberation struggle was One hero, the people.
Again, no individual heroes. And it helps explain why individual leaders are so unimportant in Algeria in Chapter seven of a book.
I look at some of the distinctive subregions of Algeria that have experienced significant political upheaval in the last two decades.
Kabylie the Mosab and the Sahara and South. Now, one striking thing about these very distinctive regions is despite being very distinct,
that despite having upheavals and frequently enormous unhappiness with the central government,
there are virtually no calls for separation or autonomy from the Algerian state.
Rather, there are demands for greater involvement, an integration of state that pays them more heed, notably through greater democracy accountability.
These regions don't say we need to separate. They said, you need to give us more. We need to give us as part of Algeria.
You need to do more for us.
Indeed, I think it is this fervent belief among Algerians more generally, but a better governments and better rulers are what is owed to them.
After the sacrifices of the anti-colonial struggle of the 1950s and the horrors of the 1990s,
that may continue to surprise outside observers and may one can only hope one day will bear full fruit.
Thank you very much. Michael, thank you so much.
You've given us all a foretaste of the pleasures of reading your book,
and you've really told us the gaps with the book is filling in terms of our understanding and the analysis of
the transformations that Algeria has experienced in the course of the first two decades of the 21st century.
And I think your explanations for why a hit that happens in 2019, did it happen in 2011?
It's been fun to be your colleague through this period because you've shared the jokes with us and you take tremendous pleasure in the
deployment of humour by the crowds mobilised to challenge what they saw as the absurdity of a political order with a dead man at its head.
And it's wonderful that they didn't deploy anything sharper than their wit in the demonstrations that they mobilised.
So I guess the question that I have for you, in light of Algeria's history of fighting conflicts for independence or against Islamist insurgency,
is what accounts for the fact that the regime itself did not turn to violence, that you had a peaceful response from demonstrators is remarkable.
But we saw that the Arab Spring, too, and in many of the Arab Spring uprisings,
it was the moment when the government turned on the people that the people took up arms.
And what's quite striking in Algeria is that what had once been a very ferocious two world.
Do not deploy as violence is time. Why do you think that is?
I think that's a that's a very interesting question. And I think in many ways it learned lessons like the hereafter.
But where does this end up? The initial response since the 1990 had been to try and stop any protests.
But I think in there's been a ban on any street protests in in Turkey, in Algiers.
And the way they dealt with it was just flooding the streets, as you saw with police.
The people couldn't do anything. So in one sense, you don't have to be violent if you can't if you.
So it's like kettling, like we do in British in policing here.
And I think they did that and they they thought they could they could exhaust the hirak.
They wouldn't have to be violent. We've just run out of steam eventually with COVID and gradually a bit more repression did run out of steam.
But what we're seeing now is the violence of a regime, a much lower level, but equally insidious ways.
The numbers of arrests of people involved in the hirak and activists of people online.
They I saw a commentator say recently that the regime isn't worried about the street anymore.
It's worried about Facebook. And it's going through. Somebody said to me, you used to get in trouble for posting things on Facebook.
Then you got in problem for retweeting things on Facebook and now you're getting arrested for liking things like that.
Yeah, that's the sort of level and we're talking huge scale and it's really quite
depressing what's happening at the moment with the repression of lots of parties.
The main human rights organisation which is really held, held aloft in light of liberty in Algeria,
is now being tried to be officially broken up by the regime. So the violence that happened subtly and effectively against the Iraqi model.
But it is notable it didn't use it. It tried in the face of the crowd, resisted it.
So you did have this rather interesting standoff that the but the absence of the Hirak movement obviously convinced that if they went to violence,
then it would just unravel again. But it didn't. And the regime also looked at as well.
Exactly. Which is it? Was it learned the lesson of the 1980s? Well,
I think the whole thing involved and this is the this is the thing I hope that influences
you get this situation in the nineties where you get extreme levels of violence,
both from the state and from the opposition. And then you get this peaceful movement where both of the people said,
let's just let this let us know where this went nowhere on this and trying some of it.
Right. But ultimately, the violence of of people being beaten up and tortured,
the police stations and prisons and being arrested, how this sort of violence is now happening, which is very depressing.
Michael, what are the things that you're seeing with your work on this book is? Of course, you did get to Algeria to do fieldwork in the country.
Could you just show us a little brief reflection on what it is like to be doing political research in Algeria and from your experiences?
Yes, it was it was great. I hadn't been able to because of my my Ph.D. I haven't been able to go to our job and do fieldwork in the 1990.
It was the height of the violence, but I was able to go this time, so I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity.
As I said, Algeria isn't an easy country to do research in.
All these are is difficult. Getting a visa.
I can no longer get a visa to go to Algeria and that's just been a restriction on a lot of people getting it.
I was lucky. I had support. I was able to get a visa and got four or five to go.
It's not particularly easy. It's not a culture where people are open to open up.
And I'd worked on the other two countries to work on Morocco and Tunisia, where you you would you get a lot done much more quickly.
People would talk to you. I mean, I it is a common feature, particularly for foreigners settling into Algeria.
You start to get a bit paranoid because you don't get very far.
People don't talk to you can't make interviews, you don't get much out.
And I began to think that there was something wrong with me as a researcher. After two weeks, I was finding very little out.
And then I started talking to other researchers and I saw experience for my PhD students, my Dphil students, and it was very similar.
But you just you carry on. And I found that it was difficult because you go and see the opposition.
The opposition say what I think is a bit bad and we're really unhappy about it.
And you go and see people who like the regime. They said, well, she's not too bad, such quite good.
And that was more difficult, but it was face.
No, what I used it to do was just have ordinary conversations with people, get a sense of how people felt about things.
The little clip in the book from conversations I've had with people just illustrating how things work.
I also used it to try and gather. A big thing was to try and gather locally produced material written by Algerians,
things that weren't being available outside Algeria but could actually get out.
And to be able to use that, I think is very important to general moving this culture to move away from people who aren't connected.
I wanted to get local voices coming through and get us to try and create a picture, a picture of that.
So it wasn't easy to do research there. But as I said, just because it wasn't, it wasn't particularly easy to do it.
And I still found all sorts of interesting things out from my time there.
Oh, I think it made a huge difference to the work.
And I think it's going to have it's going to ring true for the effort you made to go and do your work there.
Well, Michael, and bringing this evening to a close, I speak on behalf of all of your colleagues in the media, etc., and I'm pleased to see.
To those here tonight. Congratulations. You've done this proud.
Thank you. Not only do you put a movie centre on the map in North African studies,
but as you've just done again with this book, you really put us at the top of the game.
So we're all delighted with thrilled to see the book out in print and for encouraging such an amazing audience to show up tonight.
And so, dear audience, in a word to you, celebrate.
Come on upstairs and join us in a drink to continue the conversation with Michael.
Grab a copy of the book for yourself and just mix and mingle around in this beautiful building so we can all enjoy tonight as a very special night.
Now, please join me back in. Thank you very much for coming.
I really appreciate it. Thank you.