Citizenship in Algeria Today : Representations and Practices

This research project builds upon a previous project conducted within CRASC under the direction of the same principal investigator, entitled: Research on the Approach to and Practice of Citizenship: The Algerian Case (History, Culture and Society).

The initial project, which enabled us to engage with the issue, could not, of course, exhaust the problematic of citizenship in Algeria. New dimensions of the question therefore required further scholarly investigation.

The rationale advanced here is, in fact, consistent with that outlined in the previous project, where we noted:

“The issue of citizenship asserted itself forcefully within Algerian society during French colonisation, which brought about a profound alteration of the traditional communal bond (social, ethnic and religious ties). With the emergence of the national movement and subsequently the War of National Liberation, it became closely intertwined with the claim to nationality. Following independence in 1962, it merged with egalitarian and socialist aspirations, and later, with the wave of liberalisation that followed the events of October 1988, with the democratic credo.Subjected to the pressure of these successive elements (communal identitarianism, nationalism, egalitarianism and then liberalism), citizenship appears to have struggled to emerge with a clearly defined status. Yet it remains at the heart of the challenges facing contemporary Algeria, particularly regarding the relationship between the State and society as a whole, and their joint relationship to the surrounding world, whose processes of ‘globalisation’ increasingly shape our daily realities.”

For this reason, we considered it necessary to address these issues through a number of guiding questions, including the following:

What is citizenship, and how has Algerian society encountered it?Does citizenship exist in our context, and how does it manifest itself?What are its catalysts, its constraints, and its stakes?

In the first project, we presented an initial theoretical and historical framework and examined the role of the school (through the figure of the teacher) and civil society (through associative movements).

A research axis devoted to the variables of citizenship through the case of Algerians in France and their descendants could unfortunately not be completed (for health-related reasons concerning Anissa Bouayad). We hope that this remains only a postponement.

Through this second project, we propose to broaden the scope of the inquiry to other sectors of social life. We shall therefore examine the representations and enactments of citizenship through investigations into the media, political parties, religious discourse, the educational institution (curricula and textbooks), the question of ecology (increasingly addressed both by associative movements and by public authorities), and finally the perception and practice of the electoral act (among students, but also within society at large, taking selected localities as case studies).

Our approach will address both discourses on citizenship and ongoing social practices : public institutions and civil society, theoretical referents, relationships to civic responsibility and political engagement.

We thus propose to deepen this problematic of citizenship further, with a view to producing clarifying insights and, perhaps even more importantly, generating new lines of questioning.