
Breadcrumb
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Despite being blasted with water cannon tear gas, the protestors have displayed an unyielding commitment to nonviolence | ![]() |
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Police officers use water cannon on protesters as they demonstrate against interim president Abdelkader Bensaleh in Algiers, Algeria on 9 April, 2019 [Anadolu] |
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The regime used the narrative of glorious violence as justification for its actions | ![]() |
James McDougall, historian at the Univeristy of Oxford explains that these memories of violence are not organic, but are rather systematically inscribed into Algerian social memory by the state, as it seeks to identify an essential Algerian "authenticity",
"The 'authenticist' vision offers a history of sacralised struggle in which the recourse to violence is not a legitimate, if tragic, strategy… but [rather] the only means of struggle, the heroic continuation of a perennial historic mission in defence of the community's "essential self," rooted in the memory of martyred ancestors and promised to the fulfilment of a utopian destiny."
Read more: Revolution and repression on the streets of Algeria
Following 132 years of French settler-colonial rule, including seven years of revolutionary struggle leading to independence, the nascent Algerian state sought ways to develop a coherent "structuring principle" around which to build an authentic Algerian national identity.
It found one in the revolutionary struggle of the independence war, and proceeded to engrave it into the social memory of the nation through education, culture, place-naming, monuments and the writing of history itself.
During the mass protests of 1988, trade union marches sparked a mass movement that led to the state's first open parliamentary elections, a subsequent military coup, and eventually a civil war that claimed the lives of 200,000 civilians.
This violent period, while directly traumatising for an entire generation, was used to reinscribe the notion of violence as an essential component of Algerian-ness. The regime used the narrative of glorious violence as justification for its actions (sometimes legitimate, sometimes repressive) in the ensuing turbulent period, and as part of its celebration of the reconciliation and 19-year state of emergency that followed.
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This new thinking challenges the sclerotic notion of an Algerian social memory beholden to the glorified violence of the independence generation | ![]() |
This reification of violence, of course, is not the sole prerogative of the Algerian state, but is rather a characteristic of all modern nation states.
However, it held particular salience in the Algerian context where two major experiences of war created a ready audience clamouring to decolonise the French-imposed historiography, establish national unity and develop a meaningful common heritage to deal with lingering war-related traumas.
While it is certainly true that the contemporary movement's incessant avowal to resist all provocations to violence is a hard lesson learned from the Arab Spring as the most effective means towards democratisation, it also operates as more than just a strategy.
For the protesters, radical non-violence is also a challenge to the state's hegemony over historical memory - a historical memory built around the independence generation and the glories of violent resistance. Yacine echoed this observation,
"The first lesson we have learned from the 22 February [movement] is that when we are peaceful, united and dignified, we change ourselves as well."
While the political objective to remove the ruling class in its entirety is clear - "Système dégage!" ("Out with the system!") - a more proufound revolution is taking hold. This new thinking challenges the sclerotic notion of an Algerian social memory beholden to the glorified violence of the independence generation, and of violent resistance as the sole, authentic, means for contesting power.
Through the radical nonviolence of the movement, protestors are re-appropriating and updating the old revolutionary maxim, "Un seul héros; le peuple", "One hero; the people."