The Jihadist Movement and Hirak in Algeria
of the chaos and disappointments that followed to establish itself in several countries affected by these movements , including Syria .
In this respect , this is the object of Beverley Milton-Edwards ’ 8 warning against jihadist efforts to recuperate popular movements , especially where authoritarian regimes had resorted to repression , but also to the stigmatization of all alternative forms of Islam ( moderate Islam ). Thus , Charles Lister 9 explains that these movements , such as al-Nosra linked to Al Qaeda or the EI , benefited on the one hand from the fallout of the repression exerted by the Syrian regime on the population , which in the absence of any other alternative joined the hardest movements , and on the other hand , from the withdrawal of the Syrian state from several localities that have become safe havens for armed groups . In the Tunisian case , Michaël Ayari and Jean-François Daguzan 10 explain that it is the security vacuum , resulting from the fall of the Ben Ali regime in a context of the return of Tunisian jihadists from abroad and the release of several thousand radical Islamist prisoners , that has allowed the emergence of the jihadist movement in this country . For his part , Rasmus Bosserup 11 believes that in Egypt , the jihadist movement is the result of the terrible repression exercised by the regime of Al-Sissi , after its coup d ’ état in early July 2013 against the peaceful protests of the Muslim Brotherhood , particularly after the death of one thousand of them in Heliopolis and the generalization of the ban on any type of protest against the Egyptian regime in a context where jihadist groups , although weakened , still had an effective presence . The repression of Al-Sissi had , once again , left no other choice to his opponents , especially Islamists , than to join the armed movement and to contribute , by reinforcing it , to the rise after 2013 of terrorist acts in Egypt . Thus , in all these cases , the national contexts constituted , thanks to all these repercussions of government action , contingent opportunities for reactivating jihadism .
In this context , the protest movement in Algeria could only generate fear , especially since the country remained traumatized by the appalling terrorist violence of radical Islamism in the dark decade of the 1990s . For all that , the protest movement itself , the reaction of the authorities , and the state of AQIM in Algeria do not allow for the same analysis .
8 B . Milton-Edwards , “ Revolt and revolution : the place of Islamism ,” Critical Studies on Terrorism , Vol . 5 , No . 2 .( 2012 )
9 C . Lister Charles , The Syrian Jihad : Al-Qaeda , the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency , Oxford , Oxford University Press , 2015 .
11 R . Bosserup et V . Collombier , 2018 , “ Militarization and Militi-ization ,” MENARA Working Papers ( 2018 ), No . 17 .
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