The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism by Jennifer Johnson (review)

Jennifer Johnson's The Battle for Algeria provides a painstakingly researched and richly descriptive analysis of the strategic importance of medicine, human rights, and humanitarianism for Algerian nationalists' evolving and expanding political agencies, and the internationalization of their struggle during the war for independence. In showing how nationalist movements harnessed the humanitarian and human rights logics engendered by international organizations, treaties and conventions in the post-World War II period, Johnson traces the complex ways such logics were used to ascribe political as well as moral legitimacy to nationalists' fight for sovereignty. In so doing, Johnson then shows how nationalists, and the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in particular, were ultimately successful in establishing themselves as a viable and legitimate alternative to French colonial administration. More than this, Johnson illuminates how nationalists' tactical humanitarianism, and the medical care and human rights attention provided to combatants and impoverished Algerians by the health-services division of the National Liberation Army (ALN), the FLN's armed wing, were intended to stand in striking contrast to the inhumanity inherent to France's administration of Algeria, and the neglect, displacement, and torture of its peoples.

The Introduction provides a nuanced summary of the actors, movements, and events central to the war for independence, and France's efforts to maintain Algeria as the geographic extension of sovereign France in North Africa. Johnson then discusses the research precedent and notes its limitations. By foregrounding nationalists' struggles on Algerian terms, Johnson argues her work helps remedy African historiographers' overall neglect of Algerian agency, voice and history, which overemphasize western and non-Algerian interpretations of the conflict and its aftermaths. She also notes how her book challenges those accounts that fail to trace the interconnections forged by nationalists with global actors and entities as part of the push for independence.

Chapter One details the history of France's colonial capture and administration of Algeria, and its pursuit of an Algérie Française that benefitted the state and settler communities at the economic, social and also health-related expense of native Algerians. Beyond delineating the tensions that gave rise to anti-colonialism and the war for independence, Johnson also tracks the rise worldwide of anticolonial movements in the first half of the 20^th century, the post-war fracturing of French imperialism in Indochina, and the ways that global governance, and health and humanitarian governance in particular, reflected predominantly Eurocentric aspirations and concerns. Johnson affirms how post-war charters and conventions, such as those of the United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), provided universal templates that could be harnessed by colonized non-state actors' to guide their diplomatic, humanitarian and military negotiations with sovereign powers. Chapter Two shifts to discuss France's social and medical "pacification" of Algeria in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Special attention is paid to the Sections Administratives Spécialisées' (SAS) infrastructural and medical projects in the 1950s, conceived as a means to win "hearts and minds" (41) and forge stable political relations between the state and Algerians. Importantly, Johnson confirms how the SAS's health-care programs and French military counterinsurgency operations shared a common end goal in their efforts to hold Algerians fast to the state.

Chapters Three, Four, and Five chronicle the FLN's use of medicine, humanitarianism, and human rights as means of resistance and autonomy, and explore the political usefulness and limits of the health, human rights and humanitarian agendas formulated by the ICRC and the United Nations, and which were enshrined in the Geneva Convention. The author provides a concise history of the development of the Algerian Health-Services Division and the Algerian Red Crescent (ARC). Johnson details how nationalists' pursuit of decolonization, and their efforts to establish the FLN as a humane and politically legitimate entity, relied heavily on their careful efforts to mimic the logics espoused by the ICRC, and thereby win its recognition and support. By providing the health...