[LCM Events] TODAY: 4/1 MIT Emile Bustani Middle East Seminar, Hugh Roberts

[Heidi Erickson]

Please join us today, Tuesday, April 1 at 4:30-6pm for the Bustani Middle East Seminar in MIT Building E51, Room 057 (70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge)


The Ides of April: the presidential succession crisis and the dilemmas of the Algerian oligarchy
Hugh Roberts
Edward Keller Professor of North African and Middle Eastern History


Bio
Dr. Hugh Roberts is the Edward Keller Professor of North African and Middle Eastern History at Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, USA and a specialist on North African history and politics. He took up his post at Tufts in January 2012. Between 1976 and 1997 he lectured in the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and the Department of History at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. From 1997 to 2002 he was a Senior Research Fellow of the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has also worked outside academia, as an independent scholar and consultant on North African affairs and as Director of the International Crisis Group’s North Africa Project, based in Cairo, from 2002 to 2007 and again from February to July 2011. His book, The Battlefield: Algeria 1988-2002. Studies in a broken polity, was published by Verso in 2003. His new books, Berber Government: the Kabyle polity in pre-colonial Algeria, and Algérie-Kabylie: Études et interventions de Hugh Roberts (in French) are to be published in 2014.


Abstract
The Algerian presidential election now scheduled for April 17 is surrounded with uncertainty. It remains to be seen whether President Bouteflika will seek a fourth term or not. If he does, it is doubtful that he will manage to serve out the full five years. If not, it is for now quite unclear who his successor will be. This uncertainty is linked to the question of whether the army commanders will be able to act as the substantive electoral college, as they have always done in the past, or whether there will be, for the first time, a genuinely contested election in which Algerian voters constitute an effective electorate. This in turn is linked to the question of whether Algeria will at last break with the Egyptian model it has broadly followed since 1962, by having a civilian president who has no military or revolutionary past with which to claim entitlement to the highest political office and, if so, whether the presidency will retain its considerable prerogatives in these circumstances. What is certain, however, is that Algeria has entered a very tense period, since the presidential succession – whether consummated in April or simply postponed till Bouteflika’s definitive exit at some later point – is already dominating the horizon and determining the strategies of all Algeria’s political actors. This is because it is a key part, but only one part, of a much wider leadership succession, which is affecting the regular army, the intelligence services and several of the main political parties as well as the presidency. How the Algerian oligarchy as a whole will agree to try – or try to agree - to manage this general succession in its collective leadership is now at issue in current maneuvers. At stake in the medium and longer term are its own cohesion and aptitude for coherent rule, its capacity to tap new sources of legitimacy and also, in that connection, its willingness and ability to conceive and introduce reforms in the state-society relationship.

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Direct questions to hae at mit.edu<mailto:hae at mit.edu>
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