Sixty 'Glorious' Years After Independence, Can Algeria Withstand the Challenges Ahead?
In my latest analysis for DAWN MENA, I explore what Algeria’s history can tell us about its future.
Young Algerians accompanied by an iconic historical phrase, spotted at a Hirak protest in Algiers, May 2019.
Study contemporary Algeria for long enough, and you begin to notice certain patterns repeating themselves wherever you look. Among the people, the same segments of the population reenact the same clashes over the same questions of identity or culture, stoking the same unresolved resentments. At the top of the state, meanwhile, leaders make the same short-sighted errors, or are caught off-guard by the same external forces, provoking the same kind of crisis. While the details vary each time, the fundamental dynamics persist and recur.
The reason is that Algeria is not a democracy, driven by the endless meandering of public opinion, nor a centralized dictatorship, steered by the whims of a solitary tyrant. Instead, contemporary Algeria is a system—a place best understood through the interactions of persistent forces and interests that tend to supersede individual actions. To be sure, a few figures manage to leave their mark, but they’re rarely the primary drivers of events. For this reason, the only hope of unraveling the country’s workings is to seek a nuanced understanding of the forces and interests at work.
I outlined many of these dynamics in my book, The Algerian Dream, but have tried to boil them down even further in a new piece published this week in DAWN MENA’s Democracy in Exile journal, explicitly outlining the ways in which collective failures at the summit of the Algerian state continue to hinder the country in realizing its potential. I also explore what that situation might mean as Algeria—which last month marked 60 years of independence—enters a new phase of its contemporary history, one fraught with major challenges, from climate change to demographic shifts to energy transition.
If you want to better understand Algeria today, but don’t have time to read my full book, I recommend this piece.
Read it now at DAWN MENA:
