The Brooklyn Rail

Algeria: A Historic and Ambivalent Movement

The popular uprising in Algiers on Friday, February 22 surprised most observers, starting with those who had rhapsodized over the regime’s stability since the emergence of the “Arab Spring,” or who had emphasized the passivity of a people traumatized by colonial violence, by authoritarian rule, by the civil war in the 1990s. But Algerian society was not cut off from international capitalism or from its regional environment.