After liberating itself from French colonial rule in one of the twentieth century's most brutal wars of independence, Algeria became a standard-bearer for the non-aligned movement. By the 1990s, however, its revolutionary political model had collapsed, degenerating into a savage conflict between the military and Islamist guerillas that killed some 200,000 citizens. In this lucid and gripping account, Martin Evans and John Phillips explore Algeria's recent and very bloody history, demonstrating how the high hopes of independence turned into anger as young Algerians grew increasingly alienated. Unemployed, frustrated by the corrupt military regime, and excluded by the West, the post-independence generation needed new heroes, and some found them in Osama bin Laden and the rising Islamist movement. Evans and Phillips trace the complex roots of this alienation, arguing that Algeria's predicament-political instability, pressing economic and social problems, bad governance, a disenfranchised youth-is emblematic of an arc of insecurity stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. Looking back at the pre-colonial and colonial periods, they place Algeria's complex present into historical context, demonstrating how successive governments have manipulated the past for their own ends. The result is a fractured society with a complicated and bitter relationship with the Western powers-and an increasing tendency to export terrorism to France, America, and beyond.

Thoroughly sharp and honest treatment of a brutal conflict.The Algerian War (1954-1962) was a savage colonial war, killing an estimated one million Muslim Algerians and expelling the same number of European settlers from their homes. It was to cause the fall of six French prime minsters and the collapse of the Fourth Repbulic. It came close to bringing down de Gaulle and - twice - to plunging France into civil war.The story told here contains heroism and tragedy, and poses issues of enduring relevance beyond the confines of either geography or time. Horne writes with the extreme intelligence and perspicacity that are his trademarks.

Covering a period of five hundred years, from the arrival of the Ottomans to the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, James McDougall presents an expansive new account of the modern history of Africa's largest country. Drawing on substantial new scholarship and over a decade of research, McDougall places Algerian society at the centre of the story, tracing the continuities and the resilience of Algeria's people and their cultures through the dramatic changes and crises that have marked the country. Whether examining the emergence of the Ottoman viceroyalty in the early modern Mediterranean, the 130 years of French colonial rule and the revolutionary war of independence, the Third World nation-building of the 1960s and 1970s, or the terrible violence of the 1990s, this book will appeal to a wide variety of readers in African and Middle Eastern history and politics, as well as those concerned with the wider affairs of the Mediterranean.

"A fascinating interpretation of Algeria's past and present agonies, set against the broader backdrop of the rise and fall of 'Third Worldism.' Essential to anyone following Middle East politics and the extrapolation of the old 'North-South' struggle into the 'New World Disorder.'"—Graham E. Fuller, RAND, coauthor of A Sense of Siege: The Geopolitics of Islam and the West

The history of Algerian Jews has thus far been viewed from the perspective of communities on the northern coast, who became, to some extent, beneficiaries of colonialism. But to the south, in the Sahara, Jews faced a harsher colonial treatment. In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, Sarah Abrevaya Stein asks why the Jews of Algeria’s south were marginalized by French authorities, how they negotiated the sometimes brutal results, and what the reverberations have been in the postcolonial era. Drawing on materials from thirty archives across six countries, Stein tells the story of colonial imposition on a desert community that had lived and traveled in the Sahara for centuries. She paints an intriguing historical picture—of an ancient community, trans-Saharan commerce, desert labor camps during World War II, anthropologist spies, battles over oil, and the struggle for Algerian sovereignty. Writing colonialism and decolonization into Jewish history and Jews into the French Saharan one, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria is a fascinating exploration not of Jewish exceptionalism but of colonial power and its religious and cultural differentiations, which have indelibly shaped the modern world.

In 1962 when Algeria finally obtained its independence from France after an eight-year guerilla war, it immediately embarked upon a second revolution aimed at destroying the colonial economic and social order. While the nationalist leaders struggled for power in the first hours of independence, peasants seized French farms and workers the factories, thus setting Algeria on the road toward a new socialist order. This book is a study of the Algerian socialist revolution, of those who made it and those who gained by it. The primary focus is on political behavior, on those aspects of the struggle among Algerian leader which vitally affected the character of the new order. The authors find that even though Algeria acquired all the trappings of a socialist state and economy, politics remained almost exclusively a question of personal relations, alliances, and rivalries among a small group of leaders--what the authors call, borrowing a concept from the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, the politics of assabiya. Algeria's first President, Ahmed Ben Bella, tried to integrate the new and old political groups into a modern political system, but he failed. His overthrow by the army opened a second phase in the process of building stable political institutions and of overcoming the tradition of "palace conspiracies and rebellions of feudal lords." The authors trace in details this cyclical process during the first six years of Alergian independence. The work benefits from a wealth of first-hand information gathered during the authors' three-year stay in the country. The resulting picture is that of a new nation embarked upon a socialist "revolution" which owes little to Soviet or Chinese influences or, in some respects, even to the intentions of its leaders. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

Algeria Cuts discusses the figure of woman, both under colonial rule in Algeria and within the postcolonial independent nation-state. It is an interdisciplinary project that spans fine art, film, colonial and legal policy, manifestos, prose fiction, and theoretical and philosophical texts concerning the relationship between France and Algeria. Khanna investigates gendered representation, identification, and justice, and in the process, calls into question the ways in which conventional disciplinary frameworks foreclose certain avenues of reflection while foregrounding others. Algeria Cuts seeks to understand Algeria and Algerian women as a philosophical site that facilitates an understanding of justice and the pursuit of feminism.