Suchergebnisse

The role of the peasantry during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) has long been neglected by historians, in part because they have been viewed as a 'primitive' mass devoid of political consciousness. War in the Mountains: Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918-1958 challenges this conventional understanding by tracing the ability of the peasant community to sustain an autonomous political culture through family, clan, and village assemblies. 0The long-established system of indirect rule by which the colonial state controlled and policed the vast mountainous interior of Algeria began to break down after the 1920s. War in the Mountains explains how competing guerrilla forces and the French military sought to harness djemaas as part of a hearts-and-minds strategy. Djemaas formed a pole of opposition to the patron-client relations of the rural elites, with clandestine urban-rural networks emerging that prepared the way for armed resistance and a system of rebel governance. Contrary to accepted historical analysis suggesting that rural society was massively uprooted and dislocated, War in the Mountains remonstrates that the peasantry demonstrated a high level of social cohesion and resistance based on powerful family and kin networks

In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps

In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.

AbstractInterpretations of the origins of the Algerian war of independence have tended to emphasize either discontinuity—the radical dislocation of precolonial social and political structures following the French conquest—or the continuity of a culture of peasant resistance between 1871 and 1954. Little investigation has been carried out into the latter, or how, if at all, socio-political institutions enabled rural society to sustain an unbroken "tradition" of resistance over nearly a century of unprecedented crisis. Most debate has focused on the role of the tribe, a largely moribund institution, and this has obscured the importance of the village assembly, ordjemâa, a micro-level organization that historians have largely neglected. Thedjemâa, in both its official and covert forms, enabled village elders to regulate the internal affairs of the community, such as land disputes, as well as to present a unified face against external threats. This article shows how emerging nationalist movements starting in the 1920s penetrated isolated rural communities by adapting to the preexisting structure of thedjemâa, a tactic that was also followed after 1954 as independence fighters established a guerrilla support base among the mountain peasants. While Pierre Bourdieu and other scholars have emphasized the devastating impacts that economic individualism had on peasant communalism, this study employs thedjemâaas a case study of a "traditional" institution that proved flexible and enduring as rural society confronted settler land appropriations and a savage war of decolonization.

Les historiens ont étudié dans un certain détail la Fédération de France du Front de libération nationale (FLN), implantée dans l'univers majoritairement masculin des travailleurs immigrés, mais on ne sait presque rien du rôle des femmes algériennes, qui arrivèrent en nombre croissant au cours de la Guerre d'indépendance. Cet article s'appuie sur des archives internes jusqu'ici inconnues de la Section des femmes du FLN et sur des entretiens avec des acteurs clés de la période, pour enquêter sur les origines et l'organisation du réseau clandestin, qui s'étendait aux principaux centres urbains et industriels de la France métropolitaine. La Section milita pour la reconnaissance de l'égalité des femmes au sein du FLN, leur droit à l'alphabétisation, à l'emploi et à la participation politique, comme faisant partie intégrante de la création d'un ordre juste qui permettrait, une fois l'indépendance obtenue, de mobiliser tout le potentiel de la moitié négligée de la population. Cependant, ce programme révéla des différences générationnelles entre les jeunes militantes éduquées en France et les femmes mariées plus âgées, quant à la nature de l'émancipation ; il suscita également une opposition masculine, car il heurtait les normes socioculturelles profondément ancrées, relatives à la ségrégation des femmes et aux codes d'honneur. Ces tensions au sein de la Fédération de France du FLN, la section ouvrière politiquement la plus avancée du mouvement indépendantiste, révélaient déjà les contradictions d'un programme d'émancipation qui allaient mener à une marginalisation rapide, de nature conservatrice, des femmes dans le nouvel État indépendant.

The treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq focused worldwide media attention on the US practice of torture. Underlying such a practice was not only a self-serving debate in US political circles, academia and entertainment media on how a liberal democracy could justify such methods but also a history of counter-insurgency techniques which owed much to French warfare in Algeria. Yet while the lessons of the torturer have been assiduously learnt, what has been ignored is the recent open debate in France on the profound damage done by such institutionalised barbarity both to the victims and to the individuals and regimes that deploy it.