The civil violence in 1990s Algeria remains one of the least understood conflicts of the contemporary period. The estimated number of dead and disappeared range anywhere from 70,000 to 200,000, victims of both a protracted Islamist insurgency and heavy-handed military counterinsurgency tactics, with the distinction between the two highly blurred and internally fragmented. The violence, including a set of gruesome village massacres in 1997 and 1998, was largely kept out of public scrutiny by a distrustful Algerian state that ultimately embraced a postconflict amnesic politics of national reconciliation. Such lack of transparency contributed to widespread speculation, fueled by a number of published revelations by military defectors, over the identity of the perpetrators of the massacres and other incidents of violence. Numerous academic studies have documented the history of the conflict, charting its emergence from the 1988 democratic liberalization of the single-party National Liberation Front state, and the subsequent canceling of the first round of 1992 parliamentary elections apparently won by the Islamic Salvation Front. Such inquiries have alternately proffered ideological, economic, and cultural explanations for the violence; none have managed to satisfactorily account for the extreme brutalization of the civilian population or its sudden subsiding at the end of the decade despite the continued existence of the insurgency, particularly in the Sahara. While Jacob Mundy does not seek to provide a definitive solution to this puzzle, his Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence does offer a stinging critique of the various efforts by international observers and scholars to slot the violence into the emerging explanatory frames of post–Cold War conflict. In so doing, he calls into question the field of conflict science as an antipolitical effort of neoliberal crisis management which all too often contributes to the very warfare it ostensibly seeks to explain and defuse.
As Mundy recounts, the post–Cold War framework initially applied to the Algerian conflict was that of “civil war.” Such a characterization was at least at first denied by both the Algerian state and the Islamic Salvation Front—though both cautioned that the conflict risked becoming a veritable civil war if the other side had its way—and was belied by the failure of the insurgent factions to gain popular support or control territory. Nonetheless, increasingly hegemonic economistic approaches to warfare began to portray the violence as a civil contest over resources, including agricultural land, the revenues of petroleum production, and control of various informal markets. Understood as such, the conflict was framed as a problem of political economic development, as a deficit of democracy and the failure of the state to provide sufficient employment in order to mitigate rampant class inequality and the prevailing attitude of hogra (contempt) expressed by elites towards rural and urban masses. Ironically, as Mundy shows, “efforts to manage Algeria's crisis through economic interventions seemed to have little effect” (p. 62), with the violence increasing despite improving state finances, increased profitability of hydrocarbon production, and the further privatization of the public sector as called for by international donors.
After 11 September 2001, as Mundy details, the conflict of the 1990s was reread through the lens of terrorism. Rather than the violence being the effect of inherent human greed, as economistic explanations maintained, it came to be attributed to the irrationality and nihilism of Islamic extremism characterized as an inhumane scourge that needed to be eliminated by any means necessary. Under this rubric, the Algerian state's authoritarian character switched from being part of the problem to part of the solution, and its eradicator policies became a model for future counterterrorist efforts. Such “Islamization” and “terrorization” of the conflict, as Mundy terms this new understanding, dovetailed with the Algerian military's self-interested characterization of the drama and required ignoring the messiness and uncertainty of any particular incident of violence in order to aggregate them as commensurable acts of terror. For Mundy, this reductive operation was a “testament to the historiographic powers of the spectacle of 9/11 over the imagination” (p. 100) of a new managerial class of “terrorism experts” who sought less to understand the violence than to contain it. In the end, Mundy treats the field of counterterrorism as self-serving, calling into existence its putative object of analysis: “that terrorism constitutes an actual threat to the security of powerful states is possible only because counterterrorism has made it so” (p. 110).
Further, Mundy shows how alongside these post–Cold War conflict management frames seeking to “developmentalize” and “terrorize” the Algerian drama developed hesitant efforts to “humanitarianize” it as an object of international scrutiny and possible intervention. In the wake of the Rwanda and Bosnian atrocities, the UN developed the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, summoning preemptive action by international actors as a means to prevent genocide. While the label of “genocide” encapsulated the Algerian case no better than that of “civil war” or “terrorism,” the 1997–98 village massacres brought great pressure on the Algerian state to open the sites to international fact-finding missions. But the unwillingness to confront the Algerian state ultimately spelled the failure of such antipolitical, humanitarian framing, one which could not escape the politics of its own interventionist doctrine. Likewise for similar demands that Algeria submit itself to a South Africa–like postconflict truth commission, touted by peacebuilding experts as the only insurance against the return of conflict. That the Algerian state under President Abdelaziz Bouteflika (ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Butafliqa) opted for general amnesties and compensation rather than the “morality play” of public testimony, forgiveness, and reconciliation defied the prevailing assumption that Algeria was a victim of its own cultural and historical tendencies to violence. In so doing, Algeria further set itself apart from the emerging set of postconflict international norms described by Mundy as the work of “techno-managerial experts of contemporary peacebuilding whose strategies render postconflict (read pliable) nation-states into a more geopolitically intelligible form. Truth commissions help terraform the neoliberal peace” (p. 155).
Provocations such as these suggest that Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence is likely less concerned with the Algerian conflict as such than with the emergent set of international norms and policies of conflict and postconflict management which Mundy repeatedly characterizes as apolitical and neoliberal. In this sense, the book builds on the theoretical propositions of Paul Amar, James Ferguson, David Harvey, and, especially, Timothy Mitchell. That these managerial regimes failed to successfully encapsulate and contain the Algerian violence speaks as much to the specificities of the Algerian conflict as to the powerful, unruly nature of violence itself. Drawing on Elaine Scarry's phenomenological approach, Mundy treats violence as agentive and productive, as having “the power to make and unmake worlds” (p. 27), to call into being various categories and enactments of identity. “The power of violence in 1990s Algeria was not its putative ability to tap into a hidden reservoir of Hobbesian malice latent in the minds of Algerians but its ability to make so many see such reservoirs as necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for the ongoing horrors” (p. 150). While certainly suggestive, even compelling, such a constructivist formulation does risk undercutting the book's more narrow empirical exposition.
That said, Imaginative Geographies of Violence provides a wealth of historical information about the Algerian conflict and its various imaginaries. The synoptic figure on page 90 that parsimoniously encapsulates the assorted theories of the agents and logics behind the village massacres is itself well worth the price of the book. But, insofar as the book's main targets of critique are normative international relations theories of war, the intended audience is not primarily an area studies one. In the former field, at least, it will surely generate healthy debate.
