Gardé·es à vue. Domination(s) et reconfigurations des rapports entre manifestant·es et policier·es pendant le hirak (2019-2021)
Abstract
Since the beginning of the protest movement in Algeria, several thousand citizens have been confronted with repression. In an authoritarian regime shaken by a large-scale social movement, the hirak participants’ experience of repression provides an insight into the workings of the coercive apparatus and the interactions that unfold between the forces of law and order and activists. We have chosen here to study the relationships of violence and negotiation between police and demonstrators, focusing on police custody: thus, twenty-two accounts of hirak participants repressed in the city of Oran between 2019 and 2021 have been collected to analyze state violence and its effects on paths of engagement through a relational approach to repression. The practices of the forces of law and order towards demonstrators can take different forms depending on their sociological characteristics: gender, social class, age, marital status, level of education, etc. This article seeks to understand the lived experiences, shared representations of the security apparatus and biographical consequences of confrontation with repressive violence by citizens first involved in the hirak movement. This study begins by showing the specific features of repression of women’s bodies and the vulnerability of minority groups. We show that law enforcement agencies use information relating to private life to put pressure on marginalized categories such as single women or sexual minorities. In these cases, police custody is used to intimidate and discourage by threatening and exposing, literally and figuratively, hirakists. But some people have more capacity for action and reaction, and the resources to resist censorship and pressure from the forces of law and order. Indeed, seasoned activists and young men are more accustomed to confronting the police. This habituation helps to trivialize the situation and the violence it implies, thereby reducing the cost of repression. This research sheds light on activists’ repertoires of action within police stations, and the struggles that emerge between protesters and the police over symbols disputed by both sides. In addition, the class allegiances of those arrested give rise to what appears to be a class struggle between activists and police officers, with those arrested often coming from the upper middle classes. However, these two parties do not constitute two homogenous, enemy blocs. Those in police custody sometimes witness internal conflicts and competition between the various bodies that make up the police force. Those in police custody may also form relationships of solidarity and empathy with police officers, based on shared dispositions (such as gender). The space-time of police custody is thus traversed by a set of contradictory relationships between violence, resistance, and solidarity. The contrasting emotions aroused by the violence of arrests and interrogations have consequences for the dynamics of engagement and disengagement, sometimes even for other spheres of life, and can constitute a veritable biographical bifurcation. While some demonstrators have ended their involvement in the movement following a repressive experience, the little hindsight we have does not allow us to conclude that their disengagement is definitive. In an increasingly authoritarian and repressive context marked by strong demobilization and a withdrawal of protests from the public arena, the people we met are turning to other modes of action, notably charitable ones, thus reorienting their commitments informally through mutual aid and solidarity networks.
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