The Suspended Disaster

Bassam Haddad, coeditor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East:
Algeria is a country that has too often been proclaimed exceptional or illegible to outside observers. This book offers a fascinating account of grassroots politics in contemporary Algeria leading up to the 2019 Hirak. The study centers the voices of a wide variety of actors to reveal how Algerians have conceived of and lived within political crisis. At the same time, it offers bold theoretical tools to show how dissent is not only articulated by political opponents but also managed by the state. The notion of “governance by catastrophization” challenges dominant narratives and will be valuable for a wide range of scholars who study postcolonial politics in the Global South. This pathbreaking book is among the most exciting works on Algeria published in recent decades.