James McDougall

Savage wars? Codes of violence in Algeria, 1830s – 1990s

Political violence in Algeria has often been accounted for only by recourse to caricatures of a society supposedly ‘intensely violent’ by nature, or else rationalised as the product of a peculiar political culture and national historical experience. Departing from both approaches, this article suggests that different occurrences of both state and non-state violence must be understood as particular, distinct moments in both the recomposition and breakdown of inherently conflictual social relations. While Algerian history (including colonial history) provides many examples of the non-violent negotiation of social and political tensions, the social production and experience of violence have been written into dominant historiographies and public culture in complex ways. These complexities of the successive ways in which different moments of violence have been encoded belie both theories of the inescapable reproduction of cyclical violence as a pattern of political behaviour, and less sophisticated, but enduring, clichés of ‘Algerian savagery’.

Myth and Counter-Myth: "The Berber" As National Signifier in Algerian Historiographies

North African history has often been narrated in academic and political discourses through recurrent series of binary oppositions, of which the couple “Arab/Berber” is perhaps the most central. Routinely deployed as an explanatory principle of the sociological reality of Maghribi societies, and persistently invoked in the discourses of Maghribi politics, this device has been fundamental to practices of categorization and representation both among North Africans themselves and by outside observers.1 In Algeria, in particular, it has provided the idiom for some of the most bitterly fought social conflicts of the past half-century. My article is not intended as another restatement of this scheme. Instead, it explores the changing configuration of positions in a struggle to impose a culturally legitimate definition of reality. This struggle, I argue, is itself the underlying reality (or at least a productive fundamental problematic for embarking on analysis) of more visible conflicts that have periodically broken out in, and which continue to trouble, Algeria. It goes without saying that this question, as well as being acidly emotive in current politics, is steeped in a dense weight of history frequently experienced by

DREAM OF EXILE, PROMISE OF HOME: LANGUAGE, EDUCATION, AND ARABISM IN ALGERIA

In Algeria as in many other cases, experiences of exile and diaspora played a major role in the creation of nationalist politics in the 20th century; exile has also been a recurring literary figure in expressions of Algerian cultural politics since independence. This article examines a range of literary sources to consider the politics of language and culture in Algeria since the 1940s. It shows how identification with Arabism has enabled Algerians to articulate claims to community, solidarity, and sovereignty, first in a conception of national “salvation” against the colonial state and then as both a state-sponsored project of political legitimacy and an indication of the limits of that project. A sense of these limits can be gained by a brief consideration of the complexity of the countrys sociolinguistic landscape and the often unorthodox creativity of its literary self-expression since independence.

Locating social analysis in the Maghrib

As an introduction to this special issue, this essay surveys problems of scale and perspective in historical and social scientific scholarship on the Maghrib. It locates the studies collected in this volume in the longer perspective of trends in scholarship on the region, identifies some analytical challenges shared across disciplines, and suggests some ways of addressing the difficulties of articulating different (local, regional, national, and global) levels of analysis.

Crisis and Recovery Narratives in Maghrebi Histories of the Ottoman Period (ca. 1870–1970)

he Ottoman Empire’s westernmost provinces, the regencies of Tunis and Algiers, have frequently been detached from mainstream narratives of Ottoman history. If the extension of the empire into North Africa is routinely included in narratives of the rise of Ottoman power, these provinces seem to fade into obscurity after the “golden age” of the corsair frontier in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Correspondingly, North Africa rarely features in discussions of the often- fraught relationship between Ottoman and Arab histories in later nineteenth- and twentieth- century Middle Eastern historiography. The early development and longevity of a stable local dynasty in Tunis from the beginning of the eighteenth century and, conversely, the relative local instability of the “frontier” regime in Algiers from the mid- seventeenth century followed by its early loss to European invasion (in 1830, at the same time as the independence of Greece and well before the formal and permanent loss of any other Muslim “protected domain”) have served in each case to foreground North Africa’s significant autonomy from Istanbul, emphasizing the merely “nominal” sovereignty exercised over it from the Ottoman center from well before the nineteenth century. Thus Ottoman history seems peripheral to the major dynamics of Maghrebi history, just as the Maghreb seems a periphery of the Ottoman world. At the same time, of course, the most salient experiences of the late Ottoman period that have so deeply shaped perceptions of the Ottoman past and its inherited legacy in the contemporary Mashriq were never shared by the Maghreb. With the partial (though important) exception of the reoccupation of Tripolitania from 1837 to 1911, North Africa saw no late- Ottoman modernizing tanzimat (reforming) state, no Young Turk revolution, and no “second constitutional period” in the prelude to the First World War. North Africans’ experiences of the hardships of 1914 – 18 were frequently severe, but they unfolded in a completely different context to those of the remaining Arab provinces of the empire: North Africans were very distant from seferberlik, the Arab revolt, and Hashemite dynastic designs for an Arab state. 1 The meaning of the “Ottoman legacy” has therefore necessarily been shaped quite differently in the Maghreb, and the usual preoccupations attending discussions of the question do not apply here in the same way as they do for the “core” ex- provinces of the Arab East.

The Fetishism of Identity: Empire, Nation and the Politics of Subjectivity in Algeria

In the mid-1970s, Ernest Gellner wondered why greater numbers of socialist pilgrims, seeking the ideal revolutionary state, did not make for Algeria, despite the country’s anticolonial heroism, developmental ambition and resonant vision for the unfettered sovereignty and dignity of what could then still optimistically be termed the Third World. After all, the eminent anticommunist observed, ‘the promised land must be somewhere’. He found the answer in the apparently paradoxical centrality of Islam to the Algerian project of liberation.2 In more recent years, a far more real and acutely bitter paradox saw Algerians themselves fleeing their country, desperate to escape the violence and poverty into which everyday life there had descended — and, for many, the atrocious forms since taken both by the political articulation of ‘Islam’, and by its manipulation and repression. The queue of visa applicants winding down the hill from the consular entrance at the French embassy in Algiers is depressingly long and slow moving. An Algerian journalist, living in France, remarked on the anniversary of independence in 2002: ‘Forty years ago, Algerians did not want to have anything to do with France, and now, those who manage to get a visa to live there consider themselves more than lucky.’3 For Algerians, as for many in formerly revolutionary Africa and Asia, the ‘promised land’, in a savage twist of history, has tended to become the ex-colonial metropole.4

Rule of Experts? Governing Modernisation in Late Colonial French Africa

African and Middle Eastern territories and societies were often the testing grounds for European ideas about modernity, progress and rationality; at the same time the proponents of these ideas worked assiduously to deny Asian and African societies any possibility of autonomous agency in the production of modernity itself. This chapter takes up this theme for the post-1940 French imperial state in Algeria and Morocco, where the war years and post-war reinvention and reassertion of empire set the stage for political and strategic calculations that would prove disastrously mistaken as the crises of decolonisation escalated. Looking in particular at the publications and private papers of Robert Montagne (1893–1954), the chapter asks how a leading intellectual close to the centres of the late colonial state organised information and produced ideas about African society and politics, ideas which informed and reflected on late-colonial policymaking. Montagne was a well-known sociologist and Maghribi affairs expert who also served as a naval officer, educator of colonial administrators and political advisor. A professor at the College de France from 1948 until his death, throughout his career he remained an assiduous and well-connected student of social change in Africa and the Middle East. This chapter uses his case to show how dramatic processes of change in late-colonial societies could be strikingly misjudged by prominent experts who sought simultaneously to analyse and to govern ‘modernisation’ through avowedly (and self-constitutively) modern forms of knowledge which were much more fragile, and much less powerful, in understanding, let alone directing, social change than has sometimes been supposed.

A World No Longer Shared: Losing the Droit de Cité in Nineteenth-Century Algiers

The rupture of modernity in the nineteenth century, the ‘disembedding and recombination’ of social space and the new production of local place and global order that it occasioned, are perhaps nowhere more visible than in its most classic location, as expressed by Baudelaire and Benjamin, the city. The ‘city’, that is, both political and physical, the cite of the Enlightenment philosophes that had also belonged to a deep Mediterranean genealogy of political thought, back through the ‘umrān of Ibn Khaldun to the polis of Aristotle: the functional and ideological centre of governance, civility, law and learning, the local hub of far-flung patterns of production and exchange, the space in which public affairs could be transacted by those who recognised each other as equals.

Modernity in 'Antique Lands': Perspectives from the Western Mediterranean

The critiques of modernity advanced since at least the 1980s have seldom focused on North Africa/the Maghrib, where Europe and non-Europe impinge so closely on each other. Nor have they often allowed us to recover an historical account of the making of modernity as a global condition, beyond the largely dichotomous or bifurcating categories introduced by modern relations of power and unequal exchange themselves. As an introduction to this collection of articles, this essay sketches what I call a “tectonic” approach to modernity as an historical process, with the aim of recapturing the dynamics by which, between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, differently located people and places came to occupy divergent positions both in socioeconomic and political structures and in narratives of “modern” history.

Reclaiming the Republic

to which Chabal rightly devotes much attention—rushed to his defense. It should be noted also that Jacques Julliard, an epitome of the Second Left—so a ‘liberal’ in Chabal’s terms—now also writes for Marianne. All this suggests that re-inventing itself under the umbrella of ‘souverainisme’, neo-Republicanism is not in any way on the run despite what (I think) Chabal suggests. In the first part of his book Chabal remarks that ‘for all its strength neo-republicanism has flourished without a party political base...No one today, even on the extreme far right, would make ‘Republicanism’ their primary political identity’ (p. 780). Since those words were written, the main party of the French right, Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP, has in fact adopted a new name: they now call themselves Les Republicains. Sarkozy’s personal evolution shows how much ground the ‘liberals’ have lost. When he first stood for President in 2007 Sarkozy, quite apart from his laissez-faire economic ideas, had adopted a number of interesting and positions on such issues as institutional representation for Muslims which put him very much at odds with dominant neo-Republican thinking. All that is now in the past. Neo-Republicanism in its new guise of souverainisme seems to hold the floor.