“It is by Walking that we Learn to Make the Revolution!”: Motility at the Heart of the Algerian Popular Movement

Djelloul, Ghaliya [UCL]

It is by walking that we learn to make the revolution!" : This slogan resonates in Algeria since the uprising of the 22th of February 2019. It embraces two major ideas about the opening of the public space: (1) is not a delimitated phase, but an ongoing learning process, done by practicing; (2) it should not be seen as a linear movement, but rather as a continuous struggle, the steps of which are entangled between a back-and-forth dynamic. Beyond this spatial metaphor, this presentation aims to stress that “motility” (Kaufman, Jemelin, 2008) (i.e. potential mobility, and mobility in action) is at the heart of the political mobilization because it constitutes its very condition of possibility (the physical capacity of access, movement and appropriation of space) and its form of embodiment. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Algiers, from the outskirts to the heart of the city center in April 2019, I want to address two major issues: (1) Potential mobility: From digital to urban space, how temporalities frame and channel the collective emotions that are needed before the mobilization in order for it to occur, and after in order to produce a political discourse (through its representation as a political “event” that arouses attention) (Wagner-Pacifici, 2017); (2)Mobility in action: The roles and actions of agents of (im)mobility who try to contain or facilitate the movement of the demonstrators’ bodies. How do actors ranging from police and gendarme officers to “green armbands” and “orange vests” use urban morphology to weaken or empower citizens? How do the demonstrators negotiate and assert their presence in urban spaces, despite the push back of authorities, in order to transform them into public spaces? Drawing my analysis from these descriptions, I will conclude that the ongoing process of opening of the public space results of both an emotional and physical resistance to the “containment” or “enclosure” (Mbembe, 2016) policies in urban spaces, that constitute authoritarian ways of governing populations. This resistance is characterized by the “loosening” of urban space through “non-violence” as an ethos and a pathos (Butler, 2017), lowering barriers and multiplying the power of citizenship