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The Algerian Civil War, 1990-1998
... Approximately 40,000 people either have left the country or have been internally displaced. A large percentage of Algerians also participated in the conflict: the Algerian armed forces numbered approximately 130,000 in the mid-1990s, and at their height armed insurgent groups may have had as many as 40,000 members (Stone 1997;Martinez 2000). These figures, of course, say nothing of the effects that death, migration, or participation in the conflict have had on the social networks of the victims, immigrants, or participants. ...
... Armed insurgency against the Algerian government began in earnest following the military coup that deposed President Chadli Bendjedid on January 11, 1992. The previous three years had seen demonstrations and riots leading to the first multiparty elections in Algerian history; a significant victory by the FIS, an umbrella organization of Islamist groups that opposed the government; further demonstrations against government interference with the elections results and, following these, the institution of 106 | ALGERIA (1992-PRESENT) Martinez 2000Martinez , 2004Stone 1997. martial law; and a final round of elections, which the FIS seemed poised to win. ...
... As the conflict continued, new groups formed, bringing new goals and new tactics to the conflict. The insurgents can be grouped according to their political orientation, following Martinez (2000): groups that sought to force the government to reinstate the political process through which the FIS had been gaining power prior to the military coup, and revolutionary groups emphasizing jihad, which sought the complete overthrow of the state. To these may be added a third category: local groups acting in the context of civil war whose principal purpose was to take advantage of the economic opportunities created by the war. ...
... Conversely, tacitly encouraging or instigating non-state physical violence is often in irregular wars a way for the government to claim its own indispensability as a bulwark against chaos Goodhand et Sedra 2007) in spite of the public objective of total pacification. During the Algerian civil war in the 1990s and until today, the Algerian government has in many localities a live and let live stance towards the GIA, or today Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (Martinez 2000;Kalyvas 1999). Similar observation have been made concerning selective collaboration between official governments and rebel administrations in the context of other civil war orders (Staniland 2012a). ...
... Blood follows blood just as action begets equal and opposite reaction. All-out war rapidly becomes the 'new game in town' to which interests adapt, social identities adjust (Keen 2012(Keen , 2005(Keen , 2006Martinez 2000). The actors 'become what they are' to paraphrase Nietzsche (Nietzsche 2007(Nietzsche , 2008: they unwittingly create a situation that their interests adapt to and that retrospectively appears as tailored for them, be it as a successful 'warlord' rather than as a president in suite and tie. ...
In this article we question practices of violence unfolding in the context of irregular wars between insurgents and incumbents. We have chosen to focus on these wars because they raise the most questions from the point of view of their underlying strategies. The nature of the social game being played is subject to debate because at least one of the sides produces less bureaucratic rationalizations We consider the above-mentioned practices, not from the point of the materialities of these practices, but from the point of view of their strategies, implying a focus on their relation to intentionality, motive and effects. This article calls for a 'critical war studies' able to account for strategic thinking from a practice-theoretical perspective. Illustrating our demonstration by drawing on examples of contemporary irregular wars, we produce a critique of standard understandings of strategy building further on Vasquez 'steps to war' approach, but centrally based on Bourdieu's notion of 'practical reason' and Foucault's concept of 'anonymous strategies', expressions that we in both cases appropriate and make ours. Since the term 'strategy' is used both in military contexts and in social sciences, we highlight how the more heterodox understandings of strategy in critical sociology (under which we include Bourdieu ad Foucault) can be applied to the domain from which the notion of emerged: war. Reversely, we show how war and armed conflict shed light on understandings of strategy developed in political sociology. This paper is structured in three parts: the first shows how practice-theories can shed critical light on strategy understood as military praxeology. The second deals with the critique of strategy as analyzed in mainstream rational choice inspired social science studies of war and political violence. The third tries to reconstruct novel strategic understandings of both armed conflict and political violence based on Foucault's notion of 'anonymous strategies' and Bourdieu's notion of 'practical reason'. Ultimately 'practical reasons' and the 'anonymous forces of escalation' do most of the work when trying understand the military strategies. They give the necessary critical and sociological edge to an international practice approach interested in armed conflict. Our objective in this article is therefore to show that although strategic thinking has certainly something to bring to the understanding of contemporary wars, it needs to open up to new traditions. It equally needs to emancipate from the strategic practitioners themselves shall it be able to provide for a fine-grained approach to practices and processes of reciprocal violence. 2
... Fearful that the opposition movement would renege on its commitment to a democratic regime and establish an Islamist state, the military canceled election results and took up arms against the Islamists. In addition, the FIS failed to establish coalitions with other opposition parties (Roberts, 1994a;Martinez, 2000). Conversely, opposition groups in Chile were able to overcome divisions and polarization that had brought the country to the brink of civil war in the early 1970s. ...
... In Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), the dominant opposition party, was marred by internal divisions and tensions between radical and moderate elements (Roberts, 1994;Ciment, 1997;Quandt, 1998;Kalyvas, 1999). In addition, the FIS failed to establish coalitions with other opposition parties (Roberts, 1994;Martinez, 2000). ...
This dissertation investigates how political instability is related to the probability of civil war. According to the literature in comparative politics, regime breakdown is caused by critical events such as economic decline, defeat in interstate war, death of a leader in office, or changes is the international balance of power. Drawing on Powell (2004, 2006), I conceptualize such critical events as shifts in the domestic distribution of power that can lead to a bargaining breakdown and, in consequence, military conflict. Following a shock to government capabilities, current leaders and the opposition are bargaining for a share of authority. The government has incentives to grant concessions to other groups within the state, yet such promises are not credible given that the leadership may regain its strength. Similarly, opposition groups lack the ability to make credible commitments as they expect to be more powerful in the future. Both the government and opposition groups could benefit from striking bargains, but cannot credibly commit because of incentives to renege on agreements in the future. Unable to commit, both actors may use force to achieve their preferred outcome. The dissertation then shifts the focus to solutions to such commitment problems. I expect that (1) the institutional structure of government and opposition groups and (2) the distance between groups have important consequences on the range of feasible agreements during this bargaining process. The arguments are tested in a statistical study of all countries for the 1960-2004 time period and in a small-sample analysis of democratization processes in Algeria and Chile. Findings show that critical events increase the probability of civil war as hypothesized and empirical evidence also provides strong support for the proposed solutions to the commitment problem.
... In France too, the violence against French citizens that was a by-product of the Algerian civil conflict had also focused the attention of the government on the challenge posed by radical Islamism. As French nationals began to be the targets of the radical Algerian Islamic Groups (GIA) fighting against the Algerian military regime -both in Algeria and, later, in France itself -the French government had to use new methods to deal with the regional implications of the civil conflict (Willis, 1996;Martinez, 2000;Volpi, 2003). Yet these punctual observations and tactical adaptations by governments and regional organizations did not lead to a sustained effort at rethinking national and regional strategies in transnational terms -let alone to a serious attempt at implementing dependable collaborative policies. ...
... In this framework, radical Islamists like any other radical protest movement use direct action tactically and strategically in order to meet their objectives at the national level -namely, to capture state power in their own country. The recent Algerian civil conflict probably provides the clearest illustration of this scenario in recent years (Willis, 1996;Martinez, 2000;Volpi, 2003). Undoubtedly, there was also an international dimension to the Algerian civil conflict. ...
This account maps out the key discourses and policies that shape the response of regional political actors to the ‘new terrorism’ associated with radical Islamist groups after 9/11. It details the dominant representations of international security before and after 9/11 in relation to an elusive notion of security community in the Mediterranean. In particular it stresses the dilemmas of securitization at the regional level in a context where the state system remains the dominant frame of reference for conceiving and organizing cooperation. Finally it highlights how the discourse on the ‘new terrorism’ creates a superficial agreement between states north and south of the Mediterranean but largely fails to recognize the different security dilemmas experienced by each state and does not meaningfully capture the dynamics of national and global jihadism.
... As oil revenues began to dry up, however, the 'monolithic, authoritarian, clientelist system' began to crumble and a reformist wing developed within the FLN which sought a strategy of economic and political liberalization (Korany and Amrani, 1998: 19). Frustration with the failure of the government to improve economic conditions resulted in country-wide violent demonstrations in 1988 (Martinez, 2000). The alliance between the military and bureaucratic wings of the FLN – which had been the critical alliance in the regime – crumbled as the two factions turned against each other (Binder, 1998). ...
... (Korany and Amrani, 1998: 23) The main distinguishing characteristic of the phase which was to follow was the implementation of an increasingly liberal system of rule via a new constitution which guaranteed, among other things, a multiparty democracy including basic freedoms of association, expression, and organization. Civil society emerged with incredible vigor and a multitude of associational groups were formed to give expression to the longsuppressed populist demands of feminists, Berberists, union workers, students, journalists , farmers, and most prominently, Islamists (Martinez, 2000). In just a couple of months, thousands of new civic associations were created; in fact, analysts estimated that 7,350 associations emerged in this period (Korany and Amrani, 1998). ...
The protests associated with the 2011 Arab Spring represent a serious and sustained challenge to autocratic rule in the Middle East. Under what conditions will Arab protest movements translate into a full-fledged ‘fourth wave’ of democratization? We argue that questions about the commitment of Islamic political opposition to democracy beyond a country’s first free election may hinder Middle Eastern democratization. We extend Przeworski’s canonical model of political liberalization as described in Democracy and the Market (1991) and find that transition to democracy is only possible under two conditions. First, uncertainty regarding the preferences of key elite actors is a necessary condition for democratic transition. Second, the repressive capacity of the state must lie above a minimum threshold. Given these conditions, democracy can occur when two types of political actors meet – regime liberalizers who prefer democracy to a narrowed dictatorship, and civil society elite who honor democratic principles. While a series of influential studies have argued that authoritarian elites block democratic transition because of their fear of the economic redistributive preferences of the median voter, this study suggests that regime liberalizers in the Middle East suspect political openings could become a vehicle for Islamists to seize power through free elections only to deny the median voter another chance to express their will.
... 34 Undaunted by the MB"s defeat at Hama"s radical Islamists rebelled in Libya and Algeria during the 1990"s only to see their movements crushed. 35 Reviewing the failed Syrian rebellion Abu Musab al-Suri argued that the Brothers were weakened by little popular support, by their dependence on external patrons and by a counterproductive military policy of direct confrontation against regime forces. 36 Having supported the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) in the early 1990"s Suri and Abu Qutada al-Filistini co-editors of the Al-Ansar newsletter in London withdrew their support condemning the GIA"s takfiri deviation from the "correct" jihadist path. ...
The essay presents this jihadi ideological evolution in four parts. Firstly, it provides an overview of jihadism"s three major adversaries the near (Muslim apostate), far (Western and other non-Muslim civilizations) and sectarian (Shi"ite and other heterodox Muslims) enemies. Secondly, the paper examines why jihadi groups prioritized attacks against the near enemy during the Cold War only to see most Islamist insurgencies beaten back by Muslim apostate regimes. Thirdly, the paper analyses how these failures invited debate within the jihadist movement leading to a refocus on fighting the non-Muslim far enemy. Fourthly, having failed to weaken near and far enemies, the paper argues that the global jihadi movement has radicalized further by resorting to conspiratorial and eschatological arguments that link near, far and sectarian enemies.
... In Algeria, after the 11 January 1992 military coup, one of modern history's most bloody and brutal civil wars took place, which put a sudden halt to the democratic process started a few years before. The army and the party (FLN) ruled over civil society during the conflict against Islamic terrorism, recapturing all the instruments of authority and the bureaucratic centres of power (Martinez, 2000). In an effort to end the crisis, the military regime promised a return to the electoral process and to the civilian political institutions. ...
The institution of the Ombudsman is aimed at defending values such as human rights and the respect for the rule of law against any form of abuse or arbitrariness. Many academic studies have been devoted to the Ombudsman in its different developments around the world, but not to the Maghreb area. This article wants to shed light on the characteristics of the Ombudsman in Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia. The comparative exam of the different North African Ombudsmen will point out how the institution was able to survive only in states where a transition to democracy was truly in place.
... The Algerian Civil War [2] pitted the Algerian government against various Islamist groups from 1991 to 2002. The prevailing climate of fear had the effect of diminishing freedom of expression. ...
Gardien du Temple is an interactive installation where the concealment or revelation of poems and images is achieved through diminished reality, a new approach to augmented reality using a projector-camera system. By capturing the environment with a camera and canceling parts of the scene by reprojecting inverted images, Gardien du Temple questions the control of our perception, of what is present or not. It reveals new perspectives for installations and performing arts aiming at erasing parts of the physical space.
... 106). Scholars, policy makers, and journalists have understandably paid a great deal of attention to this brutality (Addi 1998;Kalyvas 1999;Martinez 2000). Relatively less notice, however, has been taken of the increased civil rights restrictions that markedly characterized the Algerian government's consolidation of authority toward the conclusion of and shortly after the civil war. ...
Despite a robust literature on general forms of state repression, the determinants of religious repression remain unclear. This article argues that a regime’s experience with religious conflict will lead it to be more repressive of religious groups within its territory for three primary reasons. Religious conflict increases the behavioral threat posed by religious groups, lowers the cost of repressing these communities, and evokes vivid memories of past religious violence that underscore the role of the state in taming religion to maintain social order. New, cross-national data on religious conflict and repression from 1990 to 2009 show that religious conflict has a significant and positive effect on the level of religious repression for the time period under investigation, expanding the types and severity of government restrictions on religion in a country. Our findings point to the importance of studying the causes and nature of negative sanctions against religious communities, specifically.
... Each is driven by an ethic to defend the faith's purity, avenge its shame and propel its expansion. Nelly Lahoud argues the movement's individualism implies varying interpretations over the scope of jihad, takfir and communal association [24]. Though revered by today's jihadists, Muhammad's successors were repeatedly challenged by Kharajite revolts. ...
... Mbembe (2001) suggests a broad criminalization of elites, as well as the emergence of autonomous and very violent war machines, in post-structural-adjustment central and western Africa. The armed bands in the Algerian civil war of the 1990s mutated, as the economy around them was deregulated, into armed entrepreneurs involved in illicit trade (Martinez 2000). The expansion of narcotrafico in central America is a wellknown story. ...
Neoliberalism is generally understood as a system of ideas circulated by a network of right-wing intellectuals, or as an economic system mutation resulting from crises of profitability in capitalism. Both interpretations prioritize the global North. We propose an approach to neoliberalism that prioritizes the experience of the global South, and sees neoliberalism gaining its main political strength as a development strategy displacing those hegemonic before the 1970s. From Southern perspectives, a distinct set of issues about neoliberalism becomes central: the formative role of the state, including the military; the expansion of world commodity trade, including minerals; agriculture, informality, and the transformation of rural society. Thinkers from the global South who have foregrounded these issues need close attention from the North and exemplify a new architecture of knowledge in critical social science.
... However, due to official bans, Islamist parties are relatively recent phenomena in numerous countries such as Algeria and Morocco. In the first case, the FIS was banned resulting in a civil war that lasted throughout the 1990s (Martinez 2000). Religious parties remain banned from participation, although some parties with religious leanings have managed to circumvent this ban in the past decade. ...
Abstract will be provided by author.
... As Luis Martinez indicated, the dramatic political transformation that occurred at the heart of the Algerian political system at the start of 1992 ensured that revolutionary politics became routine politics for most of the players involved in this struggle for state power. 10 Although the military proved to be more resilient than their political opponents had predicted in this ruthless confrontation, they also showed that they knew no better than the other players how to diffuse the political, ideological, social and economic conflicts that had undermined the democratic transition. In effect, rather than trying to solve these problems, the military decided to work around them by setting up a complex system of divide et impera in the polity. ...
This account proposes an analytical framework to understand recent developments in Algerian politics, such as the 2004 presidential election, in the context of the rise of pseudo-democratic regimes throughout the Muslim world. It suggests that through the tactical adaptation of the powers-that-be to the demands of electoral democracy, the substantive value and the legitimacy of democracy as a concept and a practical system of governance is being eroded. The key tactics employed by the regime to entrench this pseudo-democratic model include the informal pre-selection of the candidates, the stage-management of the election campaign and the televised media, and poll fixing and electoral demobilization. This domestic evolution of pseudo-democratic politics occurs in a propitious international context where the combination of economic (oil) and security (terrorism) concerns favours trends towards short-term domestic stability at the expense of long-term democratic transformation.
... See the interview with Mahfoud Bennoune in Karima Bennoune (2002). For a detailed history of the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s, see Martinez (2000). 20. ...
This article reflects on the convergence of revolutionary anti-capitalism and moral fundamentalism in the contemporary Islamic revival. It is concerned more generally with the recurrent appeal to fundamental value — of a sexual, genealogical or economic kind — in the history of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist movements. Exploring the tradition of Islamist philosophies of finance, the article suggests that Islamic political theology is unique in its ability to separate absolute law from territory (pace Schmitt). Transgressing the boundaries of nation-state postcolonialism, it thereby relocates absolute value, and hence absolute prohibition, in the realm of the sexual and the divine.
... 109 Following its ban, the group increasingly lost its initiative power. 110 The calls of the FIS leaders to its followers to protest the cancellation of the first democratic elections ever held in Algeria soon deteriorated into chaotic street violence, and seriously diminished their credibility as a peaceful group. 111 Ultimately, the FIS 'failed to signal credibly that it would not subvert the institutions once it won, thus opening the path for a military coup' . ...
What explains the breakout of violence following the repression of moderate
Islamist groups in some Muslim countries? Part of the answer can lie in the
political organization style of those groups, which can constrain or expand
their long-term strategy choices in unpredicted ways. Using examples from
Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, and Turkey, this study suggests that organizing as a
political party can initially restrict the means of action otherwise available
to a moderate Islamist movement, while the loose framework of a political front
reduces its organizational costs and lends remarkable flexibility to attract a
wider range of followers. Later, paradoxically, the political party framework
can enable limited access of an Islamist group into the political system
otherwise completely inaccessible earlier, and help to enhance its power, while
political fronts are exposed to attacks from both incumbent regimes and radical
Islamists groups alike.
... In the growing conflict of the early 1990s they were a crucial source of recruits for the extremely violent urban wing of the Islamist rising in Algeria. As Luis Martinez (2000) argues, an old tradition of entrepreneurship through violence could be re-deployed in the new conditions. With obvious differences of religion and culture, something similar may account for the remarkably high level of masculine violence that has persisted in neoliberal South Africa, since the end of Apartheid (Reid & Walker, 2005;Waetjen, 2004). ...
... This led to a decline in the nation's already low food supply, with the result that by the late 1980s approximately two-thirds of the country's food had to be imported, though the country could easily have been self-sufficient (Keenan 2008: 165). However, not only did the scramble for land distort the potential of Algerian agriculture, but the shortages of food and other basic necessities also made the flourishing of the black market possible-with parts of the elite drawing a profit from it ( Martinez 2000, Keenan 2008. Thus, the political unrest that erupted in Algeria was shaped by structural deficiencies in the Algerian economy "that the corruption, nepotism, and blundering of Algeria's military leaders did much to create" (Cordesman 2002: 133). ...
Algeria’s intrastate war in the 1990s, during which militant Islamists and the state fought fiercely against each other, still raises questions concerning the decisive factors leading to its onset and escalation. This paper uses the resource curse approach and the rentier state theory to understand the impact resource wealth could have had on the outbreak of this violent conflict, then goes one step further, adopting a context‐sensitive approach. This approach attempts to juxtapose those conditions directly linked to the resource sector with the general conflict‐fueling conditions diagnosed in Algeria. It takes into account conditions both within the country and in the international context. The application of a context matrix allows us to examine the interplay of resource‐related factors and other conflict driving forces, such as socioeconomic, demographic and ideological changes. Such an approach not only broadens the general understanding of the resource‐violence link but also enhances our understanding of the eruption of violence in Algeria.
What role does religion play in understanding the outbreak of civil war? The purpose of this study is to offer an alternative understanding which conceptualises religion as discourse, religious identity as sacred narrative, and religious nationalism as a conflict over the power to shape interpretations of political legitimacy. A rationalist explanation for the role of religion in the outbreak of the Algerian civil war provides an empirical motivation for the argument. By conceptualising religion largely in rational-material terms, I contend that rationalists fail to appreciate religion’s unique attraction – the belief that the ultimate seat of political authority exists beyond the state and in some transcendent reality. As an alternative, I conceptualise religion as a discursive institution, explaining how the contest to shape a faith’s sacred narrative can result in physical violence. This exercise is a first step in a broader research agenda addressing how a robust theory of religious identity can enhance scholars’ understanding of peace and conflict.
This article explores issues of identity, exile, and performance in 1962 (1998) and Babel Taxi (2004), two foundational plays by the Algerian-born author Mohamed Kacimi. 1962 is an autobiographical play written during Algeria’s “black decade” about the effects of Algeria’s independence on two particular characters, while Babel Taxi allegorically retells the legend of the Tower of Babel in modern-day Iraq at the start of the Iraq War. In these plays, the characters’ pasts and memories are full of gaps (trous). The article argues that the characters’ attempts to fill in these trous with performance illuminate their experience of exile as a permanent psychological state. This endeavor not only applies to Arabic-speaking, Islamic characters, but also to those from Argentina, Israel, France, China, India, and beyond. Further, both plays highlight the transformative power of performance. However, whereas the characters in 1962 use performance to elevate their personal narratives of the past and resist the domination of official History, the resurrection of biblical legend through performance in Babel Taxi ends in violence and disunity. Performing the past can facilitate connection and offer solace from the confusion of exile, but it can just as easily sow discord in the present.
A critical examination of the fundamental role played by languages in Assia Djebar's body of work and in contemporary Algeria. This chapter analyzes Assia Djebar's conception of language from her early novels, to later texts such as Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade and Algerian White. While trying to briefly locate her in world literature, it argues that language plays a fictional role in her writings. My main argument is that there is a striking evolution between her early conception and use of the French language, considered in its mimetic aspect, and her later consideration on language as elaborated in Algerian White.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/quagmire-in-civil-war/78AB0026045D94567605E372AA76BBCA
Our understanding of civil war is shot through with the spectre of quagmire, a situation that traps belligerents, compounding and entrenching war's dangers. Despite the subject's importance, its causes are obscure. A pervasive “folk” notion that quagmire is intrinsic to certain countries or wars has foreclosed inquiry, and scholarship has failed to identify quagmire as an object of study in its own right. Schulhofer-Wohl provides the first treatment of quagmire in civil war. In a rigorous but accessible analysis, he explains how quagmire can emerge from domestic-international interactions and strategic choices. To support the argument, Schulhofer-Wohl draws upon field research on Lebanon's 16-year civil war, structured comparisons with civil wars in Chad and Yemen, and rigorous statistical analyses of all civil wars worldwide fought between 1944 and 2006. The results make clear that the “folk” notion misdiagnoses quagmire and demand that we revisit policies that rest upon it. Schulhofer-Wohl demonstrates that quagmire is made, not found.
The strong political position armed forces enjoy in authoritarian states and the high priority military elites assign to foreign affairs would lead one to believe that in North Africa – a region made up of authoritarian states with the sole, recent, and partial exception of Tunisia – generals had the political standing to exert a major influence on foreign policy decisions. This would not be a correct assumption because in this region the armed forces’ political influence is actually highly variable. Of the five states analysed in this article (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia) the military is the dominant political institution only in Algeria and Egypt. In the other three countries, the army plays a marginal political role and, by extension, possesses modest foreign policy influence. Moreover, the political clout of these armies is not constant. Since the Arab Spring the political influence of Egyptian generals has considerably increased, that of their Tunisian colleagues has marginally risen, while the status of Libya’s military leaders has diminished.
It is widely accepted that military regimes break down faster than any other form of autocracy. To account for this instability, scholars have claimed that military professionalism, particularly the concern for maintaining hierarchy and cohesion, will lead the military to seek extrication sooner rather than later. Others have argued that under-institutionalization results from the limited goals set by moderator-type military interventions. However, none of these accounts help us understand the substantial variation in the duration and stability of the South American military juntas of the 1960s through the 1980s that were established by highly professionalized militaries, pursuing long-term foundational goals. Building on the new institutional turn in comparative authoritarianism, this chapter shows that the ‘standard model’ of the South American military junta that continues to inform today’s thinking about the characteristic weaknesses of military rule, achieved different levels of institutionalization across the region. More institutionalized regimes like the Brazilian or Chilean junta were better equipped to deal with the challenges of authoritarian power-sharing and control and therefore lasted significantly longer than less institutionalized regimes like the Argentinean or Peruvian junta. We argue, however, that the current literature on authoritarian institutions has difficulties accounting for this variation because it suffers from excessive voluntarism. Comparing the cases of Chile and Peru, we show instead that the institutional ‘choices’ of military rulers are not as free, that they are, in fact, constrained by historical legacies like the founding conditions of military professionalism and the military’s prior relation to party politics.
In a seaside Algerian town, a cherished local theater was about to be demolished to make way for a touristic boardwalk. In response the community of actors gathered at the theater in what, from one perspective, appeared to be a street protest. Yet if we approach the apparent protest in terms of the unfolding material encounters between bodies, backhoes, and buildings, we begin to see alternative performances of vigil, visitation, and mourning that were under way that day. Through these encounters, the theater was “unmade” as it was awaiting demolition. As material and affective charges surge and recede in the street, the emergent experience of ruination comes to inform the development and deployment of theory. [materiality and affect, place making, ruination, luminosity, slow ethnography, performance and performativity, Algeria]
This paper seeks to answer a simple question: When do regional powers get involved in civil wars? Some civil wars see a significant involvement of regional actors, while others show a remarkable level of isolation. What explains this difference? This research answers this question by looking at two case studies: the Algerian civil war (1991–2002) and the Syrian civil war (2011–up to date). The paper identifies and develops five factors of regional involvement. These are: capabilities, regional dynamics, country’s relevance, regional security issues/containment and domestic–external links. civil wars are today one of the most prominent and deadly forms of conflict, and this paper contributes to understanding the important but understudied issue of regional involvement.
The literature on democratic transitions considers the participation of new parties in the first pluralist election in a postauthoritarian context (founding election) as something to be taken for granted. As such, it is never questioned. Specialists in democratic transitions ignore the research on ‘‘new parties,’’ which is, nonetheless, essential to the understanding of the particular characteristics of a post-authoritarian situation. Using an original qualitative study on Algeria, this article proposes to bring to light the political, organizational, and legal conditions of new political parties’ participation or nonparticipation in a founding election. In particular, this research allows us to grasp the dilemmas and difficulties faced by leaders of new parties and the types of support on which they rely to engage for the first time in an electoral competition. The analytical framework stemming from this ‘‘case study’’ is applicable to other national case studies.
The fourth term official announcement of the Algerian President provoked in February 2014 a microscale protest movement called “Barakat” (Enough!) in Algiers. The state repression of the pacific protesters triggered a political mobilization among the Algerians living in France, particularly in Paris. Through an Algiers–Paris round-trip analysis, this article sheds light on the political involvement of the Algerian protesters in Paris. It explores the new Algerian diaspora process experience in the Arab civil uprising context, post-2011, and its protean outlines and contributions to reshape (or not) the frontiers of nation, citizenship, political participation, and public debate.
“The truth is that we have simultaneously too much state and too little state,” writes Brazilian political theorist Joao Guilherme Merquior in describing his homeland but capturing the dilemma facing reformers in many developing countries.1 As the Egyptian and Mexican cases show, state withdrawal requires state intervention. While withdrawing the state from some activities, reformers must redeploy other state institutions to enlist the private sector’s backing and cushion the popular classes, a daunting challenge that requires strong interventionist capabilities and windfalls of revenue, both of which are increasingly scarce in a world economy where development aid is declining and the reigning discourse of neoliberalism is patently anti-statist.
The coming of the “Third Wave of democratization” to Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s coincided with the dramatic increase of armed conflicts on the continent. The purpose of this study is to revisit the connection between democratization and occurrence of armed conflicts, and to address specifically the following questions: To what extent has Africa been democratized since the end of the Cold War? To what extent did the democratization process contribute to the occurrence of armed conflicts on the continent? And under what conditions can a democratization process lead to an armed conflict? This study finds that the democratization since the end of the Cold War has been limited in depth in Africa, and could not be considered the major factor that led to the increase of armed conflicts on the continent. Nevertheless, in the context of democratization, an armed conflict could break out under the following conditions: overlapping social cleavages, incomplete democratization, mobilization of armed groups (or militia), and intense power struggle among political leaders or groups.
This article examines the influence that rebel and state leaders have on civil war outcomes, arguing that incentives to avoid punishment influence their strategic decision making during war. Leaders in civil war face punishment from two sources: internal audiences and opponents. I hypothesize that leaders who bear responsibility for involvement in the war have a higher expectation of punishment from both sources following unfavorable war performance, and thus, have incentives to continue the fight in the hope of turning the tide and avoiding the negative consequences of defeat. These incentives, in turn, make leaders who bear responsibility more likely to fight to an extreme outcome and less likely to make concessions to end the war. These propositions are tested on an original data set identifying all rebel and state leaders in all civil conflict dyads ongoing between 1980 and 2011. Results support the hypothesized relationships between leader responsibility and war outcomes.
Die vorliegende Arbeit zielt darauf ab, zwei Forschungslücken in der Literatur über Bürgerkriege zu schließen. Erstens, die Analyse der Strukturen nicht-staatlicher bewaffneter Gruppen. Zweitens, die Untersuchung der Politik von Milizen, als Form nicht-staatlicher Gruppen, denen in gegenwärtigen Bürgerkriegen eine zunehmende Bedeutung zukommt. Diese beiden Bereiche werden mit Hilfe einer historisch vergleichenden Analyse am Beispiel von zwei Milizen, die im sudanesischen und libanesischen Bürgerkrieg kämpften, untersucht. Die "Popular Defense Forces", 1989 von der Regierung des Sudan mobilisiert, wurden zum Sammelbecken für undisziplinierte und teilautonome militärische Einheiten, die schwerste Kriegsverbrechen begingen. Die "Lebanese Forces", eine maronitisch-nationalistische Miliz, wurde von einer Koalition konservativer christlicher Parteien gegründet. Nach dem Zusammenbruch des Staates 1975-6 wurde diese Miliz zu einer autonomen politischen Einheit mit einem territorial abgegrenzten Kanton im Osten von Beirut. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die Prozesse und Strategien, die diesen Milizen die Etablierung von Herrschaft ermöglichte. Die beiden Gruppen entwickelten sich zu Organisationen, die die zu verteidigenden Gebiete beherrschten und mit staatlichen Geldgebern verbündet waren, aber auch in Konkurrenz zu ihnen standen. Diese Arbeit identifiziert drei Mechanismen, die die Entwicklungen von Milizen im Laufe ihrer Zeit bestimmen. Der Erste erklärt die Formierung von Milizen als ein Bricolage von politischen und nicht-politischen Antworten auf Unsicherheit. Der Zweite erklärt, wie sich Milizen in hybride Organisationen, von zentraler Mobilisierungseinheit und lokal eingebettete Organisationen, entwickeln. Der Dritte führt die Kontrolle des Zentrums über die lokalen Organisationen auf die Macht über Ressourcen zurück. Die Arbeit schließt mit dem Entwurf eines alternativen analytischen Modells für die Untersuchung von Bürgerkriegen.
Un certain nombre d’etudes ont porte sur differents aspects de l’engagement et du desengagement des groupes clandestins, exclusifs et stigmatises. Pourtant la recherche s’est concentree sur les processus de recrutement et de radicalisation plus que sur le desengagement des organisations radicales. Dans ce texte, l’on s’appuie sur une approche en termes de carriere afin de proposer un modele theorique du processus de desengagement des organisations radicales qui articule les niveaux micro (dispositions, socialisation), meso (faconnage organisationnel) et macro (contexte politique, repression et opportunites). La litterature opere souvent une distinction analytique entre ces trois niveaux d’analyse pour definir des series de facteurs de l’engagement ou du desengagement, sans pourtant offrir une explication convaincante de la maniere dont ils se combinent et se codeterminent dans le temps. Ici, nous faisons plutot le choix de nous concentrer sur deux series de facteurs centraux pour determiner leur influence sur le processus de desengagement individuel : les effets complexes du faconnage organisationnel et les effets ambivalents de la repression et de la criminalisation des activites radicales.
The article begins by discussing various criteria considered by different authors as indicators of the onset of a civil war, such as the number of combat deaths and the duration of the war. It then examines whether the Hamas-Fatah conflict can be considered a civil war, before assessing the impact of this conflict on the Palestinians and exploring its implications for the wider Arab-Israeli conflict. The article further investigates the reverberations of this conflict at the regional level and appraises its future course in terms of optimistic versus pessimistic views.
This article examines the construction of state and regime in Algeria through performance and narrative. It is ethnographically centred around a series of events surrounding the demolition, relocation, and reconstitution of a local theatre. I argue that even as Algerians position themselves discursively outside the political regime and deny that they can impact its decisions, they also find pragmatic ways of working with it in order to shape their own futures. I show how narratives of regime omnipotence and citizen impotence simultaneously haunt and fuel various creative means for engaging with the state.
A key finding in the terrorism literature is that dictatorships experience less terrorism than democracies. However, we have few explanations for why some dictatorships experience substantial threats from terrorism while others do not. A growing body of work on authoritarian politics focuses on political institutions in these regimes to explain a broad range of political outcomes. Building on this literature, we argue that opposition political party activity increases the collective action capacity of regime opponents and that elected legislatures can channel this mobilized capacity into support for the government. However, when active opposition parties operate in the absence of legislatures, political opponents increasingly turn to terrorism. We find evidence that terrorist groups are most likely to emerge in dictatorships with opposition political parties but no elected legislature. These regimes also experience the highest volume of subsequent attacks.
Purpose
– The issue of democracy and development interrelationship is very complex and debatable. There does not seem to exist any automatic relationship between them and the purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationships of democracy with civil society and development based on Islamic World View.
Design/methodology/approach
– A theoretical approach has been developed to examine how stable democracies and sustainable human development can be attained only with a balanced combination of the involvement of state and society to ensure socially most desired goods and services based on the theory of choice. The empirical evidence is used to show how the democracy can be promoted in terms of creating proper conditions that can empower the people to form civil society to press for democratization, using self‐expression values compatible to shura.
Findings
– The paper concludes that democracy must be homegrown and cannot be implanted by external forces by “Iraqi‐style invasion”.
Originality/value
– An original study on the interrelationship between state and civil society in the Arab world, within the context of Islam.
Since the Algerian war for independence against the French in the 1950s, the roles of Algerian women have been shifting over the past five decades. During the war for independence, women found themselves in positions of power, where their military assistance was necessary to win the war. However, once independence was gained in 1962, women were once again forced into the predetermined roles of wives and mothers. Over the next four decades, the situation in Algeria began to improve as the educational and work opportunities for women increased. After a setback in the 1990s, during Algeria's civil war, Algerian women have continued to make advances in society and are embracing the liberties that accompany a modernizing state. This study examines the development of women's societal positions in Algeria and the different roles that women have played during important events in Algeria's history. Through the application of feminist theory and through the use of film, this study assesses the obstacles that Algerian women have faced in their efforts to gain liberation and respect.
The article combines two strands of political process theory ( opportunity and threat) in a changing authoritarian context. Through the use of protest event, archival, and secondary sources on El Salvador between 1962 and 1981, the study examines the outbreak and forms of two protest waves that are generated by the temporal sequencing of political opportunity and threat environments. The specific opportunities of institutional access and competitive elections motivate regime challengers to form durable civic organizations. This newly available organizational infrastructure can be used to sustain reformist contention in the near term as well as be radicalized to launch more disruptive and violent protest campaigns when opportunities recede and the political environment transitions to one characterized by mounting threats (state-attributed economic problems, erosion of rights, and state repression).
Since the extremist Islamist terrorist group al Qaida began targeting U.S. interests in the 1990s, counterterrorism operations against the group predominately consisted of kinetic operations to capture or kill senior leaders of the group. While operations like the 1 May 2011 raid that resulted in the death of Usama bin Laden, the al Qaida leader, have a role in U.S. counterterrorism operations, kinetic operations against terrorist group members only address the symptom of the problem vice the root cause. During the 2000s, al Qaida expanded to incorporate regional violent extremist Islamist groups outside the heart of the Middle East. Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), remains a regional threat in North West Africa as it maintains its regional goals. The regional targets and motivations provide U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) a unique opportunity to eliminate the elements that provide AQIM a veneer of legitimacy. This paper will discuss AFRICOM's mission to collaborate and cooperate with the interagency to shape the Phase 0 environment to prevent the rise and growth of violent extremist Islamist groups. Challenges faced by AFRICOM and the interagency will be examined with recommendations how to overcome them via the "3D" concept.of development, defense, and diplomacy.
The perspective of the Malians who have been caught up near the Sahara Desert regarding the Saharan front of the war on terror where the US has become visible and rumor-worthy is presented. Also discussed is on how Islam has affected community associations, small non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social networks. It has also been shown that recent shifts on the local, regional and global scale has been connected to longer-term processes. A larger context would be required to consider more recent events which includes the longer-term social struggles, the competition over natural resources and the changes in the foreign investment in Malian economic development. Lastly, analysis can be drawn within the wider implications for the larger Saharan and Sahel region.
This paper explains why international migrants, who face numerous security and cultural threats in their host societies, are almost never implicated in civil war violence. This is quite different from situations of internal migration, which often set off violence that escalates to civil war proportions. The paper first lays out the stark contrast between the political implications of external and internal migration based on data adapted from the Minorities at Risk (MAR) dataset. It then explores the reasons for the low incidence of civil war violence for international migrants through an examination of three cases: Bahrain, which has a large expatriate community without political rights that has been politically quiescent; Estonia, where some 30 percent of the population are disaffected Russian-speakers linked to post-World War II migrations from other republics of the Soviet Union; and Pakistan, where the immigrant Muhajirs are a partial exception to the general pattern outlined in this paper. It concludes with a general statement of the relationship between immigration and rebellion, where the level of grievances is less consequential than the conditions that make insurgency pay off.
While security risks to energy infrastructure and supply are frequently cited as a source of concern in the public debate on Europe's energy relationships with North Africa, few academic publications have addressed the issue to date. This article focuses on two potential threats to energy security in the North African context: first, intenational disruption of energy supplies by governments; second, attacks by non-state actors on energy infrastructure. Based on an analysis of North African security and energy geopolitics, the article provides an assessment of these threats as they have materialized with regard to existing energy industries, particularly oil and gas. The article then seeks to apply the findings to renewable energy schemes that are currently being discussed and developed, gauging the likelihood and impact of such threats materializing in respect to various technologies, and differentiating between different states of the region. Finally, the article provides recommendations for policy and further research needs for a successful common European-North African energy future.
Political Islam has emerged as an unambiguous threat to liberal and Western-leaning regimes throughout the world. Public discourse has focused on the Islamic nature of this challenge, emphasizing the cultural characteristics of the threat. In contrast, this thesis argues that Political Islam is essentially a political challenge. Further, states can and do dictate the political space available to Islamists. In order to illustrate this argument, Indonesia and Algeria serve as case studies. These two culturally, economically and ethnically diverse nations share a predominance of Muslim adherents. Each nation has struggled with Political Islam. Yet, the consequences of state policy have profoundly differed. Recent innovations in political science theory are employed to provide a uniform structure of comparison between the two case studies. The thesis concludes that states make a choice whether to play offense or defense against their political opposition. When states choose the offensive, using targeted, preemptive repression to subsume the political space, they are successful. When states choose the defensive, using indiscriminate, reactive repression to foreclose political space, they are failures. This thesis implies that states, far from being hapless victims of fervently religious movements, can exercise a broad array of policy options to compete with Political Islam. Thesis advisor(s): Seyyed Vali Nasr. Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-93). System requirements: Adobe Acrobat reader.
This article is a repsonse to Thandika Mkandawire's article on violence against the African peasantry in Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 40, no. 2 (2002). In this article, Mkandawire takes exception to suggestions by the author concerning the antecedents of the 1990s civil war in Liberia, describing his views as 'essentialist' and 'poorly veiled racist'. The author argues that these tags are inaccurate. He suggests that the method he has used to analyse the violence of the Liberian civil war could be usefully applied to any violent situation in any part of the world. Accordingly, he first considers Mkandawire's suggestion as to why particular forms of violence occur in African wars, explaining why it is generally unsatisfactory, after which he considers an alternative method for examining the question of large-scale violence in Africa. Bibliogr., notes. (Rejoinder by Mkandawire, p. 477-483.) [ASC Leiden abstract]
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