
Hugh RobertsTufts University | Tufts · Department of History
Hugh Roberts
Doctor of Philosophy
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65
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Introduction
Hugh Roberts teaches North African and Middle Eastern History in the Department of History, Tufts University. He conducts research in the political, social, intellectual and religious history of the region but primarily North Africa and especially Algeria. His most recent book is Berber Government: the Kabyle polity in pre-colonial Algeria (I.B. Tauris 2014; p/b 2017) and his most recent articles are 'Algeria: the negotiations that aren't' in I. William Zartman (ed.) Arab Spring: Negotiations in the shadow of the intifadat (U. of Georgia Press 2015) and 'The Hijackers', London Review of Books, 16 July 2015.
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (65)
Reflections on the 60th anniversary of the Agreement that ended the Algerian war of independence.
The segmentarity theory, in the adapted versions employed by Bourdieu and Favret as well as in Gellner’s original model, insists on kinship as the factor constitutive of the community in the society of pre-colonial Greater Kabylia. However, examination of the ‘arsh in Kabylia and of the variety – and the logics underpinning this variety – of the fo...
In this article, written on 12 November 2019 but published by Jadaliyya only a week later, I anticipated the hirāk’s failure to prevent the presidential ‘election’ scheduled for 12 December and challenged the widespread view that a revolution was under way in Algeria. In doing so I pointed out that the political positions of the hirāk had changed v...
In this interview (August 2019) I give my view of the character of factional conflict within the regime in Algeria and how and why this contributes to the regime’s inability to allow genuine political parties and a parliament with real powers of decision. The discussion then moves to the Berberist/Amazigh identity movement and the role of the Kabyl...
This short article, written three weeks before President Bouteflika fell, drew attention to the fact that it would be extremely difficult for the army commanders to legitimate the succession of a new president, because of the way in which so-called ‘presidential elections’ in Algeria fall far short of genuine elections. (This argument drew on the a...
While Algeria’s rulers bear much of the responsibility for the lack of democratic reform after the advent of formal party-political pluralism in 1989, the political forces notionally engaged in constitutional opposition have their share. This judgment applies in particular to the Front des Forces Socialistes (FFS). Finally legalised in 1989, the FF...
Providing a perspective on Syria’s history since independence, this article takes issue with Jean-Pierre Filiu’s book, 'From Deep State to Islamic State', and reviews three other recent books on Syria and ISIS, combining this discussion with a radical critique of Western policy.
A review of Laurie Brand's interesting analysis of the evolution of official national narratives in Egypt since 1952 and Algeria since 1962.
Le reformisme politique ne peut se prevaloir d’aucune réussite dans l’histoire de l’Algérie moderne. Par consequent, les élites technocratiques paraissent incapables de se passer des recettes étrangères et de penser la reforme en fonction des réalités nationales, tandis que les reflexes des Algérien(ne)s enclin(e)s à contester la statu quo restent...
An appreciative review which considers the scope of Aitel's book and the main concerns and perspectives that orient her analysis.
Cette article critique la thèse de Luis Martinez selon laquelle ce qui s’est passé en Algérie pendant les années 1990 était une guerre civile. Mon article examine en détail l’argument de Martinez sur ce point et le réfute. En même temps je considère d’autres concepts-clés de l’argument de Martinez, à savoir ‘imaginaire de la guerre’ et ‘bandit poli...
This Foreword discusses the persistence of the colonial-era Kabyle myth in the post-colonial era in Algeria and the continuing importance of Patricia Lorcin's magisterial study and the example it sets to other researchers in Algerian studies.
A review article that discusses the logic of the coup in Egypt in 2013 and places this in the context of a critical analysis of the 'Arab Spring'.
The massive wave of protests that have engulfed Algeria and the recent unrest in Tunisia are both premised on a fundamental political deficit-the absence of credible political institutions capable of ensuring adequate representation of the society and so keeping the executive branch of the state under the kind of critical observation and pressure n...
Seul un dialogue direct entre les parties, sans médiateur ni restriction, permettrait d’aborder tous les thèmes en jeu et d’atteindre une solution.
This is the original English version of the article that was published in French in 2009.
The main argument is that only a direct dialogue between the parties to the Western Sahara conflict, without a mediator or any restriction, could allow the issues at stake to be fully addressed and a solution found.
El proceso oficialmente conocido como elecciones presidenciales en Argelia es en realidad un ejercicio de legitimación materializado a través de la movilización de las lealtades del electorado. Las elecciones no se celebran para determinar cuál es el candidato elegido por la ciudadanía, sino más bien para garantizar el respaldo del pueblo a una dec...
The proceedings that are officially known as presidential elections in Algeria are exercises in legitimation achieved through the mobilization of allegiance. They are held not to establish the People’s choice but to secure popular assent to a choice that has already been made by the ruling oligarchy and, through this, legitimation of the oligarchy...
This is a chapter in an edited volume on the 'Perspectives from the Engelsberg Seminar of 2006. My chapter offers a vigorous critique of identity politics and shows how many forms of identity politics, including those which lead to major political problems, are actively connived at by governments. The argument is developed in discussions not only o...
Books reviewed:
Matthew Connelly. A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 400 pp. Bibliography, Index. $55.00 (cloth), $26.00 (paper).
A major element of the argument of this paper is that the outlook and behaviour of Islamist movements in the region are not adequately explained by reference merely to American (or, more broadly, Western) actions and policies, and that the phenomenon of Islamist activism in both its non-violent as well as its violent variants is the product of the...
The singular opacity widely regarded as characteristic of Algerian politics is to be explained not only by particular features of the latter but also by the blindness which has afflicted academic perspectives on Algeria as a result of a general refusal to take account of Algeria’s own political traditions, notably those of the countryside and the m...
The debate on the question of human rights in Algeria is liable to go nowhere if it is disconnected from the broader and more fundamental question of constitutional rule. A constitution is, in principle, the fundamental law of a state, and a state that is subject to unconstitutional rule cannot be the guarantor of rights. The precondition of securi...
While there were many differences between Ernest Gellner and Pierre Bourdieu, they also had much in common. One has only to look at recent social science research by specialists on the Maghrib to realise how influential these two thinkers have been over the last forty years. However, this paper does not set out to provide an appraisal of their resp...
The appalling political breakdown which has occurred in Algeria is almost universally identified with the descent into violence since 1992, itself widely attributed, directly or indirectly, to the rise of the Islamist movement since 1989. In explicit opposition to this view, this paper argues that the breakdown of the Algerian polity occurred well...
The author of this critique presents Kamel Chachoua’s work here, (Kabyle Islam, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose,2001), devoted to the early 20th century theologian, Ibnou Zakri’s thought and to the role of religious institutions in Kabylie. Roberts shares here to a large extent the critique made by Chachoua of « the Kabyle myth » tending to present Ka...
An important element of Ernest Gellner’s defence of his segmentarity theory of Berber politics was his claim that this theory can trace its origins to the work of the nineteenth-century French ethnologist Émile Masqueray, whose study of the Berbers of Algeria was cited by Durkheim to illustrate his concept of ‘segmental social organization’. The im...
The European Union's position on Algeria with regard to the promotion of democratic principles and respect for human rights has been a pretension rather than an unrealistic ambition. Insofar as it has amounted to a policy, its objectives have not been to promote democratic principles in Algeria, but something else. The particular character of Europ...
Algerian films about the national liberation war generally conform to the rule that war films are implicitly or explicitly propagandist in nature. But the most celebrated film about the Algerian War, Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, is a striking exception. Not only does it depict both sides of the war with objectivity and detachment, and both i...
The question "Where is Algeria going?" has been a hardy perennial of academic and political discussion of Algerian affairs ever since the late President Mohammed Boudiaf first raised it in 1964. Since we are today considering this question again, it is worth reflecting that many if not most of the answers given to it over the last 36 years—and espe...
The purpose of this working paper is to explore one of the political premises of the current violence in Algeria, namely the character of the identity politics which has developed in the Berberophone Kabylia region of the country, which was the theater of the most sustained riots in Algeria's history. A secondary, theoretical, purpose is to demonst...
Books reviewed in this article:
Luis Martinez, La guerre civile en Algérie
William B. Quandt, Between ballots and bullets: Algeria’s transition from authoritarianism
Michael Willis, The Islamist challenge in Algeria: a political history
Western perceptions of what has been happening in Algeria need to be substantially revised. The elections which have been held since 1995 can certainly be defended on at least two grounds: First, they have permitted an at least formal return to constitutional legitimacy and, second, they have enabled representative and consultative institutions of...
The crisis of the Algerian state since the riots of October 1988 has entailed a massive expansion of the terrain on which political battle has been joined. Prior to the riots, political conflicts in Algeria were contained by the institutional framework of the FLN‐state and essentially confined to the factions within the regime. The promulgation of...
Book review of Nicole Grimaud: 'La Tunisie a la recherche de sa securite'
This article examines the nature of the continuing conflict within Algeria. The author considers in detail and rejects the main elements of the official French position on the conflict. He suggests that an accurate analysis of its component factors and of recent attempts at moves towards a resolution indicates that a valid, internally achieved solu...
Connaissant aujourd’hui le coût immense de cette démarche, et les faiblesses à long terme de l’édifice politique qui en est issu, l’historien peut être tenté d’évaluer négativement le pari audacieux des hommes du 1er Novembre, de le considérer comme condamné par l’Histoire. Mais la sagesse rétrospective est toujours facile et, le plus souvent, illu...
Confronted with the startlingly rapid expansion of the Algerian Islamist movement between 1989 and 1991, many Western observers of Algeria tended to perceive the movement as engaged in a revolutionary challenge to the Algerian state, and to depict the opposition between the Islamists and the nation-state as all but total. The frequent invocation of...
Summary Since 1981, the Algerian government of President Chadli Bendjedid has been carrying out a major and multi-faceted programme of economic restructuring and liberalisation, swinging away from the rigorously socialist approach of the Boumediene government in the 1970s. This article examines the relationship between this reorientation of policy...
This paper brings up to date our knowledge concerning agricultural and agriculture-related cooperatives in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It provides an outline history of the development of the movement and of the organisation which coordinates it. In particular, it examines some characteristics of the membership and functioning of the local coo...
In this, the second of two papers on the Jordanian Co-operative Movement, a detailed description is provided of the coordinating organization, the Jordanian Co-operative Organization (JCO) together with a discussion of some of its problems and prospects. The formal organization is described together with some aspects of the informal organization. S...
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MAJOR ‘KABYLE QUESTION’ IN Contemporary Algerian politics was made manifest in the spectacular events of the spring of 1980. In an earlier article I suggested that the reason why most observers did not anticipate this development was because of their failure, on the one hand, to appreciate the specificity of the Kabyle case – t...
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE INHABITANTS OF GREATER Kabylia and their Arabic-speaking compatriots constitutes one of the fundamental issues of contemporary Algerian politics. This relationship has been neither accurately conceived nor adequately taken into account in the existing literature on modern Algeria. The growth of popular Berberism in Kaby...
Questions
Question (1)
In my Stats Overview, where the four figures (Total Research Interest, Citations, Recommendations and Reads) are presented in one single line, the correct figure for total reads - 3278 - is given.
But where these four totals are presented in a sort of box, with two on the top line (Total Research Interest; Citations) and two on the line below (Recommendations, Reads), the total given for Reads is 0.
What has happened?
WILL YOU PLEASE PUT THIS RIGHT WITHOUT DELAY.