Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence

Conflict Science, Conflict Management, Antipolitics

Jacob Mundy

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804795838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Menschenrechte

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.

Terrorists or saviors of the republic? A civilian militia stands guard in front of a mosque. Photograph (anonymous) courtesy of the El Watan archive, Algiers.

1

CIVIL WAR

A Name for a War Without a Name

AFTER FOURTEEN MONTHS of intense fighting, the conflict in Syria became a civil war on June 12, 2012. A spate of large-scale civilian massacres had been reported in the international media. It was widely suggested that these massacres heralded a significant transformation in the conflict. Hervé Ladsous, the head of UN peacekeeping, admitted that, in light of these new mass atrocities, civil war had become the best term for what was going on in Syria. Some international reactions to Ladsous’s admission treated it as an official UN declaration.¹ Others saw it as too little, too late. “If you can’t call it a civil war, then there are no words to describe it,” France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, contended.² Almost as interesting as the response to Ladsous’s admission was the caution exercised vis-à-vis the term civil war in the weeks and months prior to his admission. Though thousands of Syrians died in the first year of the conflict, it was often—and inexplicably—a qualified civil war, as if the term contained powers that, once uttered, could not be contained.³

A curious feature of this debate was its insistence that there would be consequences if Syria were allowed to drift into civil war. These alleged consequences were contradictory and vague. Civil war either beckoned or warded off foreign intervention. The latter view tended to equate civil war with chaos, to see it as a war in which the scale, intensity, and incoherence of the violence would soon become unmanageable by the international community unless dealt with promptly.⁴ Then there were those who held the opposite belief: that the more serious the Syrian conflict became, the more seriously it should be addressed.⁵ The term civil war itself holds little currency in international law. Unlike genocide, there is no international convention that obliges outside states to act in the face of a civil war. International humanitarian law is largely indifferent to whether or not armed hostilities are called a war, civil or otherwise. Nor are civil wars necessarily illegal. A state is fully within its rights to use lawful military force to defend itself against an internal rebellion so long as it adheres to humanitarian and human rights norms. The international toolkit for managing Syria’s violence, whether or not it is a civil war, would remain essentially the same: diplomacy, sanctions, threats of military intervention, and then intervention itself. That final option, UN authorized military force, pivots on whether or not the UN Security Council chooses to designate a situation a threat to international peace and security, as was done in Libya in 2011 out of fear of mass atrocities, if not “genocide.” Civil war has nothing to do with it.

Or does it? It is difficult to deny that there is a politics of naming civil wars. As one prominent argument suggests, the terms civil war and genocide now operate in tandem. These terms obscure the reality of mass violence because of the political dispositions of central actors in the international community. Conflicts are assigned the monikers genocide and civil war because of global relations of power, not because of the actual facts on the ground. Genocide is used to simplify conflicts and so to morally justify intervention. Civil war is used to complicate our understanding of mass violence and so to delegitimize outside action. The challenge is therefore to derive new policies based on understandings of conflict that are free of the obfuscating influence of geopolitics.⁶ Another argument sees a politics of naming civil wars in the simple denial of such wars. If internal and external actors refuse to recognize mass violence as a civil war, they are doing so for political reasons, not scientific ones. The task of the social scientist is to ignore such politicizations of civil war and explore its true nature.⁷

Algeria in the 1990s appears to validate much of this debate. The term civil war was used quickly and frequently by external observers to describe the violence. As one might expect, the international response to this violence exhibited a clear reticence to get involved. The moment at which intervention was seriously being discussed was also the moment when the violence was at its worst, drawing comparisons with other inventions and other situations labeled genocide. Domestically, there was a tendency, particularly among the regime, to deny the situation’s status as a civil war. Other Algerians embraced the term. Social scientists were likewise divided. Whereas area and country specialists were reluctant to call the conflict a civil war, generalists saw 1990s Algeria as paradigmatic. But, as noted earlier, there was little consensus within post–Cold War social science as to the basic definition of a civil war. There were also strong assertions that the wars of today are radically different from the wars of yesterday.

Science cannot save civil war from politics because science is entirely complicit. The problem is indeed not just “a violence whose proper name goes astray.”⁸ No war is naturally a civil war. If something is made, it is likely made for a reason. As much as there is a politics of denying a civil war, there is also a politics of affirming it. This goes beyond the simple politics of problematizing calls for intervention by construing violence as a civil war. The deeper politics of naming civil wars is to be found not in the conflicts themselves but in the post–Cold War geopolitical context that framed a wide array of conflicts as civil wars. What is being produced is a strange construct whose functions include the advancement of a particular global vision of politics by depoliticizing civil wars.

This antipolitical reimagining of civil wars occurs in two steps. First, the object itself has to be made if it is to be understandable and manageable. Contrary to Cold War understandings of civil wars as always-already embedded within geopolitics (and managed as such), civil wars are now rendered as discrete and isolated. An examination of scientific and political treatments of Algeria’s violence as a civil war—affirmation and denial, formalization and problematization—denaturalizes the concept in such a way as to elucidate the broader conditions of its possibility. The wars of today and yesterday are indeed different, but for reasons that have little to do with their intrinsic characteristics. The second step in the depoliticization of civil wars—analyzed in the following chapter—follows from the first. Increasingly subjected to the logic and tools of contemporary economic analysis, civil wars have become economic phenomena managed as problems of development rather than politics.

A WAR THAT REFUSES TO SPEAK ITS NAME?

Civil war talk permeated the Algerian conflict from the very start. President Chadli Bendjedid justified the military crackdown against the October 1988 protests as the only alternative to “chaos and, subsequently, civil war.”⁹ The general strike called for by the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS, or Islamic Salvation Front) in May 1991 was likewise seen as something that could lead to civil war.¹⁰ “It appears that the powerful FIS is not willing—or perhaps ready—to accept responsibility for setting Algeria on the road to civil war,” one reporter speculated at the end of the strike.¹¹ Following the termination of the electoral process in January 1992, fears of a civil war became more pronounced. A US radio report saw “the specter of civil war in Algeria looming ever larger.”¹² Hocine Aït Ahmed, a leader in the war against the French and head of the Front des Forces Socialistes (FFS, or Socialist Forces Front) party, quickly called on both the authorities and the FIS to “prevent civil war.”¹³ During this period, various views of what would cause a civil war in Algeria were expressed. “If the FIS came to power, there would be a civil war. [. . .] A civil war!” one government functionary told a British journalist.¹⁴ Algerian lawyer and human rights campaigner Abdennour Ali-Yahia made a similar suggestion before President Bendjedid’s resignation on January 11, 1992. If the FIS did not respect the 1989 constitution, Ali-Yahia warned, “it’s civil war, the army will move in.”¹⁵ After Bendjedid’s resignation, Ali-Yahia added, “All the ingredients of a civil war are there.”¹⁶ Algerian author Rachid Mimouni likewise saw the potential for danger, but still placed hope in his country’s civil society and its commitment to nonviolence. “I think that civil war is not a real possibility.”¹⁷ Other voices were more panicked. “Algeria on the brink of civil war,” warned the paper L’Événement the day after Bendjedid’s resignation. It added, “When shall we witness the militias? Yugoslavia is at our door.”¹⁸

Throughout the conflict, Algerian officials vehemently rejected the label civil war. Shortly after coming to power in 1992, Algeria’s interim head of state Mohamed Boudiaf insisted that the military’s actions had saved the country from “civil war” and “foreign intervention.”¹⁹ After Boudiaf’s assassination on June 29 and despite escalating acts of violence (such as the Algiers airport bombing on August 26, 1992), Algeria’s first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, still insisted that the public would not accept a civil war.²⁰ Even as the violence intensified in the following years, officials continued to reject the term. “There is no civil war in Algeria as some people claim,” insisted Interior Minister Salim Saadi at the end of 1993. He instead favored the language of crisis.²¹ In late 1994, Prime Minister Mokdad Sifi likewise spoke of “crisis” and “terrorism,” insisting that “there is no civil war in our country.”²² Declaring victory over terrorism in early 1997, Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia chastised the foreign media for “calling terrorism in Algeria political violence and a violence by all sides, and from seeing terrorism in Algeria as a civil war.”²³ Algeria’s then ambassador to the United Nations, Abdallah Baali, likewise asserted, “We do not have a situation of civil war in Algeria,” one that would warrant foreign intervention.²⁴ Algeria’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ahmed Benyamina, borrowed a turn of phrase from French philosopher André Glucksmann: “there is not a civil war in Algeria but a war against civilians.”²⁵ A change of tone seemingly occurred under President Bouteflika, who was elected in April 1999. Distancing himself from his predecessors, Bouteflika accused them of leading Algeria “...