Identity in Algerian Politics

Algeria is a country haunted by history. During Algeria’s civil conflict of the 1990s, commentators, journalists, academics and politicians were quick to cast the former French colony in the role of victim, a nation suffering the revenge of its own bloody history. Over time, violence had encoded itself into the Algerian psyche, inscribed and reinscribed itself into the Algerian polity. For many, it is the endured and learned violence of French colonialism that matters most; for others, it is the crucible of the war of independence. Indeed, according to the most authoritative field-based study produced at the height of the conflict, Algeria has become a country beset by a deeply violent culture inherited from, at least, the heydays of the Barbary pirates and Ottoman rule (Luis Martinez, La guerre civile en Algérie, 1990–1998, Paris: Karthala, 1998). It hypothesized that only a historically informed understanding of the ideational conditions of the conflict (‘un imaginaire de la guerre’) could explain the outbreak of violence in the early 1990s. Such are the clichés, caricatures and rote narratives that now dominate representations of Algeria’s recent and not-so-recent history that James McDougall has criticized (‘Savage Wars? Codes of Violence in Algeria, 1830s–1990s’, Third World Quarterly 26 [2005]: 117–31). To clarify my initial claim, Algeria is not so much haunted by history as it is haunted by historicization

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