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Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity ed. by Kamran Scott Aghaie and Afshin Marashi (review)

Hachemaoui’s political ethnography takes him into the “reinventing of tradition” needed for successful candidates at election time. His illustrative case was a local commoner from a business family who patiently forged the right connections over the years to buy a difa (reception) from a key zawiya in Adrar conveying the necessary baraka (blessing) to win the elections. Hachemaoui also notes how another zawiya was able to alter a social housing project in Timimoun in ways that obliged the people of lower former slave castes to remain attached to the reinvented traditions and discipline of their zawiya. During the revolution and ever since, the Algiers authorities remained allied with the local aristocracy. In this sense, as with the “limited pluralism” (pluiralisme limité) that Hachemaoui accepts as defining an authoritarian regime (p. 18), Algeria remains “authoritarian,” but such fuzzy terms may obscure the lively politics he communicates to us so vividly. Indeed the author insists that he sheds light on how politics are fabricated, on “what is playing under the shadow of authoritarianism” (qui se joue à l’ombre de l’autoritarisme) rather than on abstract binaries such as democracy-authoritarianism or on oil rentier theories (p. 183). He lets the political professionals articulate the underlying codes that would survive any formal political transitions. But there is a static quality about these codes. The underpinnings of clientelism are economic resources, principally Algeria’s oil revenues. As the fiscal situation improved, from 1999 to 2013, the tribes and zawaya flourished and they may survive hard times ahead but with different uses and abuses of the abstract identities. Would electoral outcomes matter so much, serving as covers for ill-gotten gains, if business prospects seriously deteriorated and patronage resources dried up as in 1985? Might prolonged depression and austerity since the decline of oil prices in mid-2014 strip those flexible and adaptable gears of clientelistic combines, giving way again to mafioso predators and ideological nihilists?