Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence: Conflict Science, Conflict Management and Antipolitics by Jacob Mundy (review)

In the introduction to this fascinating and complex analysis, Jacob Mundy lays out a framework for reconsidering our understanding of the violence that plagued Algeria during the 1990s, the décennie noire. It is an at times dense essay, one in which his anger over the flawed approach of largely unnamed policymakers and specialists to what he refers to as “late warfare,” of which Algeria’s experience is an example, simmers beneath the surface. Mundy distinguishes this type of violence from earlier conflicts by virtue of its occurrence outside a Cold War framework. As a result, he claims, it is portrayed by analysts as free from the role of external actors that characterized conflicts from 1945 to 1989.

This tendency to overlook or ignore the broader context goes hand in hand, in his analysis, with what he calls the “antipolitics” of conflict science, “a scientific and managerial attitude in which questions of power, space, and history are absent or highly circumscribed” (p. 165). Experts and policy-makers, seduced by the conquest of the social sciences by numbers-driven (economistic) rather than context-sensitive approaches, adopt policies that ignore or reject the role of the political in the outbreak and prosecution of violence. Particularly notable are examples of antipolitics in cases involving what is labeled as terrorism, which “is now understood as an apolitical and ahistorical form of violence practiced by implacable and irredeemable humans” (p. 10). To counter what is categorized as terrorism, a context-oblivious “conflict science” prescribes the same treatments across countries and regions. The result is that “the solutions of conflict management actually help make the problem that conflict science claims to find” (p. 10). Mundy’s rejection of such portrayals and approaches leads him to call for “imaginative geographies” of conflict: a re-centering of the global or external political and economic forces that drive the forces producing conflict.

Among the many issues that Mundy raises in this book is the politics of naming conflicts. He argues that episodes of violence are often called genocides so as to legitimate foreign intervention, whereas the application of the term “civil war” tends to reduce its likelihood. Mundy then details and criticizes the various attempts to classify the Algerian violence, whether it was by civil society actors or Western leaders raising the specter of civil war or Algerian government voices rejecting this label. (It is worth noting here that while he makes extensive use of French-language sources, both indigenous and external, there is no mention of the Arabic press; indeed, the bibliography lists no Arabic-language sources.)

He then moves on to challenge not the labels, but the narrative of the violence — including that written by experts — that became the accepted history. Here he makes a careful and convincing case for rejecting the stylized version that traces the war’s beginnings to the January 1992 overturned election results. For, as he reminds us, not only had violence been growing in the country well before the coup against Chadli Bendjedid, but also the worst of the violence did not begin until 1994. He further provides an able critique of the sources and uses of statistics in classifying if or when a conflict is considered a civil war.

Mundy continues his discussion with an attack on analyses that treat civil wars as “development problems,” and instead calls for an ethnographic approach to understand the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts that drive the collapse of order and the outbreak of violence. This is, in fact, one of the few places in the book where the author seems to prescribe a clear antidote to the antipolitics he is preaching against. He then moves on to present (and reject) the commonly accepted explanation of authoritarian breakdown in Algeria, which attributes much of the immediate responsibility to the decline in hydrocarbon prices. However, here he seems to oversimplify the narrative or approach he...