Situated roughly 160 kilometres east of Red Deer in central Alberta, Alliance is a small village tucked close to the Battle River valley. The village sits approximately 2.5 kilometres north of the Battle River itself and just 2 kilometres east of Veterans Memorial Highway (Highway 36), with access provided by Highway 602. The name of the Battle River traces back to a history of confrontations between Cree and Blackfoot peoples who once roamed this part of the plains long before European settlement took hold.
The community began to take shape in early 1916 when the Canadian Northern Railway extended a line through the area, and it was formally established as a village in 1918. The name Alliance was chosen by early resident Tom Edwards, who named the community after his hometown of Alliance, Ohio, in the United States. The first church service held in the young settlement took place in a pool hall, with congregants seated on pool tables. Through the following decades, Alliance functioned largely as a farming hub, and its population reflected the broader agricultural shifts of rural Alberta, declining as machinery replaced manual labour between the 1940s and 1950s. Community improvements in the 1950s included the laying of approximately one mile of pavement and the construction of a seed cleaning plant. According to the 2021 Census conducted by Statistics Canada, Alliance had a population of 166 residents living in 90 of its 100 private dwellings, a modest increase from 159 residents recorded in 2016. The village covers a land area of 0.62 square kilometres, giving it a population density of approximately 267 people per square kilometre.