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.

Auteur

Jacob Mundy

Contenu

Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Conflict Science, Conflict Management, Antipolitics chapter abstractAt 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. 1Civil War: A Name for a War Without a Name chapter abstract 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. 2Greed and Grievance: Political and Economic Agendas in Civil War-Theirs and Ours chapter abstract 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. 3Identity, Religion, and Terrorism: The Islamization of Violence chapter abstract 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. 4Counterterrorism: Out of Sedan Comes Austerlitz chapter abstract 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. 5Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect: United by Our Absence of Knowledge of What to Do chapter abstract 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. 6Truth, Reconciliation, and Transitional Justice: History Will Judge chapter abstract 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 cre…