State-society relations regarding cultural heritage have always been sensitive and complex domains for Algerian non-state actors to navigate. After the painful anti-colonial struggle, establishing the new nation state's cultural identity was one of the key challenges of the postcolonial era. The construction of a national cultural identity was both a physical and psychological task, given the destruction of cultural institutions during the war of independence and the suppression of Arab-Muslim culture under colonialism. In the initial years after independence, the Soviet-inspired nationalist model of cultural policy promoted Arab-Muslim cultural identity as a unifying force for the nation (Kessab, 2014). The rewriting of Algerian history in line with a new nationalist perspective was seen as an important tool with which to tackle the previous injustices of colonialism and denial of cultural identity (Scheele, 2009: 32). So vital was this process that the newly formed Algerian state was reluctant to allow any independent actors, potentially divisive forces, to intervene. As Lahouari Addi writes, the populist project needed Algeria to be united: ‘une famille nationale unie parla mémoire des ancetreset des martyrs’ (Bozzo, 2011: 376). In this context, Arabization became a ‘matter of cultural decolonization and social equity’ (Berger, 2002: 2) in that it was to open up education, political life and full access to basic social services to the predominantly Arabophone population which had, under colonization, been denied such rights by linguistic barriers, as well as by forms of segregation that were administrative or cultural. The accompanying cultural and historical ‘rewriting has entailed what most Algerians see as the fully legitimate necessity of eradicating French colonial discourse, ideological structures, and imperialist constructions aimed at destroying the collective memory of Algerians’ (Gafaiti, 2002: 28).

However, during the 1980s, resentment over the denial of the ‘ethnic and linguistic differences and other expressions of a multicultural community’ (Gafaiti, 2002: 28), in particular among Algeria's significant Berber population, was exacerbated by general frustration over the lack of opportunities, jobs and social welfare. This fed into different riots across Algeria in the 1980s, from Constantine to Kabylia – culminating in the October riots of 1988 – and fuelled the desire to promote wider, more inclusive cultural heritage, identity and linguistic policies. With the subsequent constitutional and legal reforms of 1990, which opened up the associational sphere in Algeria, thousands of independent organizations were established across the country.