Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: As Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s health has evidently deteriorated since April 2013, thus creating a power vacuum at the level of the Presidency of the Republic, the decisive question of who (really) governs Algeria arises. A hegemonic narrative claims that the advent of Bouteflika IV in 2014 and the subsequent retirement of the infamous General Mohamed Mediene reflect the “loss of leadership of the DRS,” the Algerian political police. On the contrary, this article demonstrates that the hegemonic narrative stems from a storytelling process whose rationality unfolds as follows: projecting the simulacrum of the disintegration of the DRS to avoid shouldering the responsibility for the fourth presidential term; buying time in order to shape the post-Bouteflika period. Deploying pseudopolitics, the establishment of the “deep state” succeeds in imposing its narrative order to make invisible the institutional regime that the secret police forged over a quarter century.
Source: Politique africaine
Author: Roberto Beneduce
Language: French
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2563579349