When taking to the streets delivers the goods: the politics of getting by in post-civil war Algeria

How do protests become routine in an authoritarian state? I demonstrate how a shift in distributive politics following a civil war shaped social mobilisation in Algeria. The weaknesses of civil society and political opposition have been widely documented and attributed to the rentier state. And yet, daily occurrences of social protests have been a reality throughout the territory since the end of the civil war. These protests have largely been portrayed as a continuation of the rentier bargain, where goods are exchanged for social peace. Recurring social protests, and their toleration by rulers, are read as a form of authoritarian upgrading (Heydemann [2007]. Upgrading Authoritarianism in the Arab World. The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/10arabworld.pdf.). In contrast, building on scholarly calls for historicised and bottom-up analysis of rentier politics, I show how post-civil war Algeria reflects a new, more violent rentier order. Building on social narrative analysis of reports of 1605 protest events and 76 protest waves, I show how the post-civil war political reordering generated a slippage in the terms of state-society relations. The theoretical narrative on the rentier social bargain is to be contrasted with the experience of ordinary Algerians after the civil war: no peace without goods. Distributive politics have become vectors of violent governance and protest normalisation.