James McDougall, A History of Algeria (New Texts Out Now)

James McDougall, A History of Algeria (New Texts Out Now)

James McDougall, A History of Algeria (New Texts Out Now)

By : James McDougall

James McDougall, A History of Algeria (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

James McDougall (JM): Cambridge University Press asked me for it as part of their ongoing series of general country histories across the region, and I was obviously delighted to be asked, since it is great company to be in (Ilan Pappé on Palestine, Charles Tripp on Iraq, Susan Miller on Morocco. . .).

But beyond that, there was really a need for a new treatment of modern Algerian history, especially one incorporating serious attention to social and cultural life, covering the whole period from the Ottomans to the present, and bringing in the new scholarship that has been done in the past two decades. Much of what was out there previously, especially in English, was great twenty-five years ago, but really reflected much older literatures that have long been in need of updating.

J:  What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

Despite everything the country and its people have been through, there is a story here about persistence, adaptability, and assertiveness that has not often been well understood by outsiders.

JM: The book has two, connected, arguments to make. One is about Algerian society, and it is that more attention should be paid to the very deep-rooted, long-running structural factors of social life and culture in Algeria. I think that these have shaped a quite remarkable resilience of Algerian society, and provided the deep texture of Algerian cultures, over the past five hundred years. Despite everything the country and its people have been through, there is a story here about persistence, adaptability, and assertiveness that has not often been well understood by outsiders.

The second is about the state and politics, and it is that although the state in Algeria, from the Ottomans through the French to the post-independence period, has often been harsh, unaccountable, extractive, and punitive. it has also rarely been all powerful. The country’s rulers have rarely been able to achieve quite what they have wanted in the ways they imagined.

Together, these two arguments suggest that while Algeria has certainly been shaped by a series of violent ruptures and an often very turbulent political history, there are important continuities here too, without which we cannot really understand either the state or society. And while perhaps there has often been a tendency to see Algerians as victims or as heroes, I have tried to show, through local and individual examples of much broader patterns, how Algeria is above all a real place where real people live, not just an icon or a metaphor for some tragic story.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

JM: Like for my first book, this one is based heavily on archival research, especially for the long colonial period (1830-1962), as well as on interviews and fieldwork for more recent questions, which built on work I began to do for my first book. It also necessarily synthesizes a lot of literature across a long time period, and here I am drawing heavily on different disciplines—sociology, political science, anthropology, literature, journalism—as well as covering lots of areas of history like military, institutional, legal and economic history, some of which were newer to me. Part of the argument is based on the approach I developed to the history of nationalism and the colonial situation in my first book, which was a kind of post-nationalist history of Algerian nationalism. But my earlier work was all focused on quite small groups of people in specific circumstances, and mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, so the real departure here is in trying to write in a grand sweep over five hundred years in a way that still lets real people, and their voices and experiences, come through to the reader.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

JM: Obviously it is mainly aimed at students and scholars, and I hope it will allow people to include Algeria more fully in teaching at the college level. That would be good, I think, both for courses in Middle Eastern and African history and in teaching French history, which now pays the colonial empire and Algeria in particular much more attention than it used to. I hope students will get a fuller and more subtle appreciation of Algeria from this than they may have usually gotten from reading, say, just about the war of independence or about the violence of the 1990s. And it would be great if a wider readership could learn something from it too. I am hoping that there might be translations into French and Arabic, which would give the book a much wider impact of course: I did not write it with any idea of telling Algerians about their history, it was really written by an outsider for other outsiders, but if it can play any role in expanding conversations about Algerian history in Algeria and the wider region too, that would be great. Some parts of the book will be controversial, but that is why arguments are worth making. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

JM: I have been involved in a project to write a multi-authored History of the Maghrib, with Julia Clancy-Smith and several other colleagues, covering the region from Libya to Morocco and from Antiquity to the present, which is now, finally, finished. I am currently completing another book that I have been working on for a long time, called Empire in Fragments: Lives and Afterlives of Colonialism in France and Africa. It is about the everyday life and legacies of French colonialism in Africa, combining case studies of what colonial situations meant in practice all across North and West Africa, from Tunis to Morocco and from Senegal down to Gabon, with a study of what the empire has been made to mean in France since decolonization, and up to the present. Like A History of Algeria, it is probably going to be longer than I thought it would be, but I hope it will not take me another ten years to finish. 

J: What projects would you love to see new researchers doing in your areas of specialism?

JM: I would love to see more new work on how the Algerian revolution was enacted and experienced, and how it has been remembered, in specific localities, especially in rural Algeria. In general, it would be great to see more work on the intersection between social history, culture, and landscape in North Africa, bringing environmental and ecological history more into conversation with society and culture—not at all in a determinist way, but to dig deeper into some of the continuities and ruptures I talk about in the book, and how memory and especially trauma, if that is the right word, relate to space and place. There could be great urban history case studies for work like that. I have also increasingly been working on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and I would love to see a good cultural-political history of the Mediterranean at the time of the Congress of Vienna, to look at how commonalities around the Mediterranean are quite suddenly reshaped in a radically unequal power imbalance in the wake of the French revolutionary wars. One of the things I talk about in the book (and in a recent article) is how, in only a few months in 1815, the British go from working in recognized, existing terms of diplomacy with North African states to imposing ultimatums and backing them up with bombardment. It is a really dramatic shift and one that I do not think is properly appreciated. At the other end of the chronology and in places I have only just started trying to work on, there is amazingly little in English on a lot of the colonial period and decolonization in francophone West Africa–Cameroon and Gabon especially. (If anyone wants to do a PhD on any of this, call me!)

Excerpt from the Introduction:

Beni Saf is a fishing port on the steep cliffs of the Algerian coastline that climbs north-eastwards from the Moroccan border: a collage of multicoloured, cubed houses – blue, ochre and yellow – superimposed upon each other against a green hillside above the bay. The local deposits of iron ore that for a century provided employment in mining have been exhausted since the mid-1980s, and the port’s famous sardines are becoming rarer and more expensive, but in midsummer the town attracts families and groups of friends who rent houses and spend their short holidays by the sea. A little under a hundred kilometres to the west, at Marsa Ben Mehidi, are beaches where conservative families take their vacations, where women in loose clothes and headscarves swim during the day and take in concerts by rap artists on the boardwalk by night. At a similar distance further east, the coast turns a corner and comes in sight of the long, red Mujurjo mountain that towers over the city of Oran, and the dizzying sheer walls of Santa Cruz, the sixteenth-century Spanish fortress that stands on the peak of the mountain above the sea. Here, the Thursday evening weekend road from Les Andalouses to Aïn al-Turk, where men wear shorts, girls bathe in bikinis and young couples hold hands, is packed with cars moving along the uninterrupted chain of grills, barbeques and hotels. One of them sports its name, ‘Beach House’, the English words spelled out in Arabic script, juxtaposed to the respectable designation aparthotel familial. Further east, beyond the lively sprawl of Oran and its rapidly rising apartment and office towers, the twisting road along the corniche reaches the village of Kristel, perched in an inlet on the face of the cliffs running down to the sea. The village’s fruit and vegetable gardens, watered from a spring permanently surrounded by children, are said to have supplied Phoenician trading vessels in antiquity, when the site was first inhabited. Above the gardens, a building carries the inscription École communale 1897. Above the school, on a promontory of rock over the road, a whitewashed stone cube surmounted by a dome marks the resting place of a wali, a Muslim saint. At Kristel the road turns inland before passing by the immense pipeline terminal at Arzew, the site of the world’s first liquefied natural gas plant and the country’s main crude oil port, where at night the gas flares light up the sky in a bright amber arc. A little further east is the city of Mostaghanem, with its busy street market under the trees and the colonial architecture of the bustling, traffic-packed town centre. On a wall by the railway station, someone has painted a laconic slogan: tahya firansavissa (‘Long live France – visa!’), the first two words in Arabic script, the last in an approximate French. The quiet, crumbling pre-colonial city overlooks the Mediterranean from its cliffs that rise on either side of a ravine filled with trees and birdsong, its empty, narrow streets of coloured houses sprinkled with satellite dishes, and its old mosques from which the call to prayer at noon rises like a sudden cloud of sound.

The landscape is striking; the way people live in it, mark it and move through it, build upon it, name it and make a living from it displays both the diversity of contemporary life and the depth of historical time against which contemporary life is played out. Algeria’s modern history has not generally been approached through descriptions of a beautiful and fascinating country, or a diverse and creative society going about its daily life. The history of Algeria, since the Ottoman period – three centuries of history hardly known outside specialist circles and still sometimes thought of in antiquated stereotypes of piracy, ‘white slavery’ and despotism – through 132 years of French colonial occupation (1830–1962) and seven years of ‘savage’ colonial war (the war of independence, 1954–1962), up to the more recent terrors of Islamist and state violence since 1992, has often been written about only in terms of upheaval, rupture, violence and trauma. That these have existed in over-abundance in Algeria is not to be doubted, and the pages that follow will seek to account for them in their place. But the history of Algeria as a series of familiar clichés – heroism and horror, triumph and tragedy, anger and agony – is only part of what has made this country what it is, and does not begin to account adequately for the ways Algerians themselves have lived their lives, understood their country and their place in the world, have made, and continually make day by day, their own futures with the materials their past has given them.

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New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.