EU/ Algeria relations. Islam(s) and politics: post-traumatic states in Algeria. The zawiya of Sidi Marouf is discreetly set back from the road behind a screen of trees, and its high exterior walls present a sober and unadorned façade (a zawiya is a Sufi centre combining a mosque with teaching institution, students' and pilgrims' accommodation, and charitable activity; often - though not in this case - it is centred on the tomb of a founding saint.)
Algeria and the Arab uprisings. The Dog That Didn't Bark - By James Traub. What's wrong with Algeria?
Over the last year, the fever that is the Arab Spring has overtaken one country after another. Monarchies like Morocco or Jordan have been able to focus popular discontent on the government rather than the head of state; oil sheikdoms like Qatar or Kuwait have bought social peace. But no autocratic republic, no matter how brutal, has been able to resist the storm -- except Algeria. Here is a country where strikes and demonstrations were routine long before 2011, where newspapers openly mocked an enfeebled leader, where security forces and pro-regime thugs confronted rioters amid the first stirrings of the Arab Spring. A year ago, Algeria might well have been voted most likely to overthrow its ruler. Very few Americans visit Algeria, or study it, or know much about it.
Algeria was, like Tunisia and Morocco, a French colony.
Another Take on 'The Malian Crisis as Seen from Algeria' "The Malian crisis seen from Algeria," by Thomas Serres (19 April 2012) presents an analysis of Algerian perceptions of the upheaval in northern Mali.
This analysis is insufficient in explaining Algerian behavior in response to the rebellion in northern Mali or to the March coup d’etat and misidentifies Algerian priorities in relation to the "Sahelo-Saharan Space" and Algeria’s relationships with extra-regional actors in the west. Additionally, its underlying assumptions about Algerian foreign policy in the Sahel and the west do not match with observations of Algerian behavior in the past or at the present time. Serres’s analysis also highlights some of the problems facing those seeking to analyze Algeria’s foreign policy and the relationship between its internal politics and external behavior.
This post does not cover all parts of Serres’s analysis. Flawed Assumptions This assumption is more accurate than the other two but has less relevance in general than one might think.
Hostage-taking in Algeria 'nothing new' Algeria - curators... The Pattern of the Past in North Africa - Past Events 2012 - Events - Middle East Centre. Speaker: Dr James McDougall, Trinity College, University of Oxford Thursday 2 February 2012, 18.30 - 20.00, CLM 7.02, Clement House South Asia, China, Europe, North America, sub-Saharan Africa: most major world regions have histories that can be clearly characterised.
The Maghrib, despite being perhaps historically the first region to be provided with a model of historical development (by Ibn Khaldun), remains to a large degree unidentifiable with its own distinctive 'pattern of the past'. This may be changing as scholarship focuses more on global, cross-regional, and interactive histories in which North Africa, as a 'hinge' at the edge of three continents, can easily and productively be placed. But does this approach risk misconstruing North Africa's own particularities? This lecture is open to all and registration is not required. Speaker Dr James McDougall| is Laithwaite Fellow and tutor in modern history at Trinity College.
Location CLM 7.02, Clement House, LSE. Knowledge and Power in Algeria: An Interview with Daho Djerbal on the Twentieth Anniversary of NAQD. It is still very possible to work on Algeria without ever passing through the Contrôle Passeport in Algiers.
For a host of reasons—archival, bureaucratic, historical and, perhaps, psychological—Algeria remains on the margins of its own historiography. Arriving in September, I expected to get many questions from scholars who have worked here in the past, pertaining to the current conditions of research, the upcoming legislative elections, and the finally-completed metro (thirty years in the making). Instead, the one question I was most consistently asked by friends and colleagues was: Do you know Daho Djerbal? Unlike the scholars who are hesitant to come (some of them also of Algerian origin), Daho very adamantly refuses to leave. Power is a strange thing in Algeria, and it is not expressed in ways that are immediately evident. Thus if knowledge and power are intertwined, their relationship is often obscure in Algeria. Algerian History at the Fac He then went even farther.
Algeria's Rebellion by Installments. In mid-February, with autocratic rulers deposed in Tunisia and Egypt, and another tottering in Libya, the National Coordination for Change and Democracy took to the streets in the capital of Algeria.
The organization, which was created on January 21, following a series of riots in several cities across the country, is led by the Rally for Democracy and Culture (RCD), an opposition party whose narrow constituency includes mainly Berber-speaking people in Algiers and the nearby Kabylia region. The Coordination includes other small political parties, as well as the National League for the Defense of Human Rights, the National Association of Families of Missing Persons (those who “disappeared” during the internal war of the 1990s), an association of the unemployed and many other groups. The formal end of the state of emergency does not necessarily mean the end of arbitrary state control and curtailment of liberties, however. Historical Challenges From 1988 to 2011 More Than Food.