Post-independence Algeria, particularly since 1988, has tended to be read through two dominant narratives. These narratives are widely reproduced in the Algerian and international media, in formal and informal political discussion, and indeed its tropes have seeped into much of the academic literature. The first narrative is that of the authoritarian ‘system’ (a nebulous fusion of state and regime) versus the downtrodden ‘people’. The second narrative is that of the perpetual identity crisis, pitching Arabophones against Francophones, Berberophones against Arabophones, Islamists against secularists, and social and cultural conservatives (‘tradition’) against progressives (‘modernity’), in a zero-sum struggle to define the language and culture of Algeria. These two narratives intersect, with ‘the system’ depicted as imposing its version of Arabo-Islamic identity and, in doing so, steamrollering over both citizens promoting greater pluralism and more strident Islamist actors. These narratives are also gendered, and often expressed in generational terms, with ‘women’ and the ‘post-1988 generation’ placed squarely in the camp of political and cultural outsiders.

This is a black-and-white language of perpetrators versus victims and totalizing, mutually exclusive identities. It is a language which is underpinned by a selective, teleological reading of history. In official history, the legitimacy of the political system comes not through being democratically elected, but rather from being issued from ‘the revolutionary family’, those mujahidin who fought to free Algeria from the yoke of colonial rule. Those seeking to delegitimize ‘the system’ argue the opposite – those in power are false veterans, indeed agents of French colonialism, using Algeria's oil wealth to buy off opponents as their veneer of historical legitimacy slowly peels away. In this language of moral, religious and historical absolutes, ‘the other’ can never belong to the nation because they are traitors, apostates and fakes. Such a characterization of politics and culture in Algeria reinforces another key way in which Algeria has been understood – as locked in an inevitable and interminable cycle of violence, the violence of colonial conquest from 1830 onwards engendering the violence of the war of independence 1954–1962, which in turn gave birth to the violence of the 1990s. Taken together, these ways of reading Algeria are also paradoxical, with ‘the people’ presented as united, legitimate and morally righteous, while Algerian society is simultaneously depicted as collapsing under the weight of its internal identity fractures.