ALGIERS — The side with the guns — the army command — dares not spill blood, five months into a popular uprising that chased out Algeria’s autocratic president. The side without — the protesters — remains mobilized, still coursing through the capital’s sun-blasted streets twice a week.

The street has stared down the army, and the army has blinked. So the epic standoff in Algeria — Africa’s largest country, the oil-rich neighbor of Libya, strategically situated on the rim of the Mediterranean Sea, gateway to the deep Sahara — continues.

That it does, even if Algeria is still far from the democracy the street wants, already signals an unusual victory, one making this unfolding and so far bloodless revolution perhaps unique in the Arab world, say the protesters and Algeria analysts.

“What we’ve lived in five months, the Arab world hasn’t seen in 40 years,” said a former government minister and ambassador, Abdelaziz Rahabi, who heads one of the numerous citizen groups that have sprung up since the uprising began and pushed out President Abdelaziz Bouteflika after 20 years in power.