This chapter examines the 1984 Algerian Family Code and 2005 amendments governing marriage, divorce, marital property, child custody and guardianship, and parentage. Both the original Code and the amendments faced substantial challenges in their enactment and were drawn out over decades. Algerian women’s groups have had to advocate for reforms in a difficult context involving an entrenched state bureaucracy, military dominance, a decade long civil war between security forces and armed Islamist groups, discrimination against the Amazigh, and major natural disasters. The Code perpetuates inequality and discrimination against women, including limited access by women to divorce, the persistence of polygamy and unilateral divorce at will by the husband. 2005 amendments to the Code were only enacted by Presidential ordinance after legislative deadlock; women’s groups note that the reforms reflect concessions to the Islamists, by maintaining the mandatory presence of the male marital guardian (wali) for women at marriage.

How can the political meaning of the family and its relationship with the state be redefined in the liberal era? This chapter explores three answers that rearticulate the standing of the family within the liberal commonweal and redraw the balance between family and state. The responses differ in their narration of the interest that the liberal state has in the institution of the family, depicting the latter as an agency of the state, an organ of the state, or an apolitical space that marks the state’s limits and dependence on prepolitical conditions. The three approaches are presented as concurrent trends representing discrepant versions of liberalism as a political theory.