Popular Protests in the Mzab in Light of Intercommunity Conflicts and Ordinary Practices (Algeria)

Abstract

Abstract The Mzab region in the Algerian south has seen numerous clashes between the Mozabite and Arab communities. The most important of these were in 2013–2015. This article considers these clashes as an expression of the problematic of integrating the Saharan regions into the Algerian national fabric, and its interlocking with the end of a political cycle, which has tended to obscure the emergence of new generations of actors. It proposes that these intercommunal conflicts belong to the conjunction between these macro-level dimensions and much more everyday levels, which serve as the substrate not only of the realization of the clashes but also of their justification. The article documents how the ordinary, where the distance between the groups is marked in the everyday, is mobilized in the demands for a “just” state; and how, in the slow unfolding and production of clashes, the state becomes at once their invisibilized third term and their center.