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- Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence
Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence
Conflict Science, Conflict Management, Antipolitics
by Jacob Mundy
Published by: Stanford University Press
Series: Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures
280 pages, 152.00 x 229.00 mm
The massacres that spread across Algeria in 1997 and 1998 shocked the world, both in their horror and in the international community's failure to respond. In the years following, the violence of 1990s Algeria has become a central case study in new theories of civil conflict and terrorism after the Cold War. Such "lessons of Algeria" now contribute to a diverse array of international efforts to manage conflict—from development and counterterrorism to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine and transitional justice.
With this book, Jacob Mundy raises a critical lens to these lessons and practices and sheds light on an increasingly antipolitical scientific vision of armed conflict. Traditional questions of power and history that once guided conflict management have been displaced by neoliberal assumptions and methodological formalism. In questioning the presumed lessons of 1990s Algeria, Mundy shows that the problem is not simply that these understandings—these imaginative geographies—of Algerian violence can be disputed. He shows that today's leading strategies of conflict management are underwritten by, and so attempt to reproduce, their own flawed logic. Ultimately, what these policies and practices lead to is not a world made safe from war, but rather a world made safe for war.
At the end of the Cold War, a new kind of war emerged. It was to be found not on the battlefields of the new world order; rather, it emerged in the imaginations of those who sought to understand, and so manage, warfare in the new world order. At the same time, an armed conflict also emerged in Algeria. Slowly at first, this war soon became one of the bloodiest and most opaque of the 1990s. Yet the complexity and indeterminacies of Algeria's violence did not inhibit the new sciences and managerial strategies of conflict from appropriating lessons from Algeria. An examination of these appropriations of Algeria's violence reveals a tendency towards antipolitical accounts of conflict after the Cold War, as well as antipolitical managerial strategies aimed to prevent, interrupt, and otherwise control mass armed violence.
The Syrian civil war has proven difficult to understand and resolve. This is not new. With the end of the Cold War, the international community became aware that wars inside of states were the primary security challenge of the 1990s. What followed was an explosion in social science research on the causes and consequences of civil wars. At the heart of this research was the concept of civil war itself, and the way in which it deinternationalized a problem that had been treated throughout the Cold War as the opposite, as inherently geopolitical phenomena. This deinternationalization was thus a depoliticization. Understandings of Algeria's violence in the 1990s as a civil war ran into conceptual difficulties. These owed as much to the contested nature of the killing in Algeria as to the conceptual schema through which mass violence was scientifically tamed into an intelligible and manageable object: a civil war.
As the conflict sciences increasingly began to treat civil wars as entirely endogenous phenomena, so too have conflict prevention strategies begun to treat civil wars in ways that are indifferent to the actual politics and history of conflicts. This most clearly manifests in efforts to treat civil wars as problems of development rather than problems of global politics. Rebels, rather than states, were seen as the sole cause of civil wars. Their motives were treated as criminal rather than political. This antipolitical vision of civil wars manifests in efforts to understand their generic causal pathways as much as the effort to re-describe the grassroots politics of killing as "logics of violence." Attempts to conform the various and contested etiologies of Algeria's violence to these understandings had as much difficultly accounting for the killing as political and economic initiatives had in stopping the violence.
Terrorism eclipsed all other international security concerns in the wake of 9/11. Yet concerns about the relationship between core and immalleable identities had been a central debate in the conflict sciences at the end of the Cold War. It was suggested that the new terrains of conflict would be based on much more intractable notions of identity than negotiated politics. In the 1990s, Algeria was often viewed as a frontline state in the clash between secular and religious identities, between Islamic fundamentalism and modernity. Such accounts of Algeria's violence are woefully deficient. Algeria's violence became Islamic for reasons that have little to do with the identities and motives of the participants in the killing. The Islamization of Algeria should be understood in terms of the powers of violence to dictate the terms of its representation in the context of a post-Orientalist geopolitical order.
Counterterrorism has radically revised understandings of armed conflict and the means to manage it through prevention, interruption, and postconflict peacebuilding. Terrorism itself has been, and continues to be, treated as an apolitical phenomenon. Contributing to this antipolitical understanding of Islamic terrorism, Algeria's violence in the 1990s, particularly the large-scale massacres of 1997 and 1998, have contributed to the understandings of Islamist violence and terrorism as irrational, and thus irredeemable. Though Islamic insurgents were blamed for these massacres, their true agents—and the motives behind them—were intensely debated at the time. That debate remains fundamentally unresolved today, as the Algerian government's national reconciliation policies since 1999 have been premised on refusing to open any investigations into the past. What ended the international debate about the nature of the Algerian massacres were the events of 9/11, which occasioned a radically depoliticized revision of what had happened in 1990s Algeria.
The use of military force by NATO to protect civilians in Libya's 2011 civil war was considered a success at the time. That success was also attributed to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) project. The R2P project developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s to establish a framework that would allow for the legitimate use of armed forces for humanitarian purposes. The R2P project also established a framework of understanding of what kinds of conflicts warranted intervention—a framework built upon a history of mass atrocities and international interventions. Entirely absent from this history are Algeria's massacres of 1997 and 1998, as well as the intense international debate about how to stop the killing there. This absence allows the R2P project to claim to address the most difficult cases in international conflict management when, in fact, R2P evades much more difficult challenges.
With the global decline in armed conflict since the end of the Cold War, postconflict management has become a central task for international peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Central to such peacebuilding efforts are programs aimed at national reconciliation and transitional justice. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has become the standard by which countries are now judged. Indeed, Algeria has been criticized for refusing to create an official state history of the conflict or for allowing other Algerians to create it themselves. This denial of history, however, has to be considered in relation to the excess of history that was overdetermining Algeria's violence in the 1990s. These contradictory understandings of history as both causal and curative suggest that the problem is not simply Algeria's relation to its history but the failure of history to learn from Algeria.
Despite the failures of understanding and management documented in this study, the world is reportedly experiencing the most peaceful period in human existence. What might be understood as a challenge to this study's central thesis (i.e., conflict science and management are working) is in fact a paradox whose consequences, if not seriously engaged, could lead to a global crisis of unimagined proportions. Indeed, there is a history here. It is not just that social sciences utterly failed to predict the very crises they should have seen. It is that those sciences also failed to grasp their imbrication in the forces that led to the crisis. In the face of a global climate challenge, whose effects will undoubtedly manifest in terms of mass armed violence, there is ever more need for the conflict sciences to extirpate themselves from the geopolitical they serve but cannot see.
Jacob Mundy is Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. He is coauthor of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution (2010).
"Jacob Mundy's Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence is a scathing critique of the internal pathologies of neoliberal conflict management. With great finesse, Mundy dissects the often-contradictory scaffolding scholars and policymakers built to frame, explain, and define the Algerian Civil War. A must-read for scholars of conflict studies, this book fills a major void in scholarship on post-independence Algeria, and will surely be a valuable resource to political scientists and historians working on the Middle East and North Africa, post Arab Spring."—Robert P. Parks, Founding Director, Centre d'Études Maghrébines en Algérie
"Jacob Mundy's uncompromising, pugnacious book takes all the complexities of the Algerian conflict in the 1990s and makes from them an excoriating critique of prevailing assumptions in studies of 'new wars,' civil wars and counterinsurgency. As meticulously detailed as it is sweeping in judgment, this should be essential reading as an antidote to the anti-political, ahistorical tendencies of 'conflict science.'"—James McDougall, University of Oxford
"Jacob Mundy has written a disturbing book in every sense of the word. His work unsettles the conflict paradigms of the post-Cold War world and will influence our study of civil war, terrorism, and mass atrocities for a long time to come."—David Campbell, University of Queensland, author of National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia
"Mundy's Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence is surely one of the smartest books written on the Algerian Dark Decade (1992–1999), even though it is,strictly speaking, not a book about Algeria. The author's goal is indeed to useAlgeria as case study to critique mainstream 'conflict sciences' and management as these were refashioned after the Cold War. He implacably unveils the weaknesses
of their antipolitical frameworks."—Thomas Serres, European University Institute, from the Journal of North African Studies
"It is impossible in such a short review to do full justice to the many topics Mundy examines in this provocative and often damning account. From the discussion of counterterrorism, to the Responsibility to protect (R2p) that grew out of the United Nations intervention in Serbia, to the question of 'humanitarianization,' and truth and reconciliation commissions, Mundy uses the Algerian case to problematize the nature or construction of the violence itself, as well as the Western response (or lack thereof) to it."—Laurie A. Brand, Middle East Journal
" ... Imaginative Geographies of Violence provides a wealth of historical information about the Algerian conflict and its various imaginaries."—Paul A. Silverstein, International Journal of Middle East Studies
"Imaginative Geographies offers topical and methodological guidance to those currently engaged in the academic introspection invited and made necessary by the onset and development of the Arab Spring [This] book says much of interest and importance to conflict and security, and area studies, and deserves to be widely read."—J.N.C. Hill, Middle Eastern Studies
"Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence is a well-argued study about the weaknesses of contemporary efforts to manage violence, explaining that it reveals the "antipolitics" in the framing of understanding and managing conflict in Algeria during the 1990s...The book nicely problematizes foreign intervention and conflict management by looking at Algerian violence in the 1990s."––Ryan Shaffer, Terrorism & Political Violence
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