The Shari’a is largely irrelevant to most important issues of policy and administration in the economy and in government. Its historical and symbolic locus is on family and sexuality: patriarchal rights, segregation of the sexes, enforced female modesty.
Europe has so far failed to build a comprehensive relationship with countries across the Mediterranean. This is a missed opportunity that adversely affects the state of security and democracy for all parties.
A 36-year old Algerian lecturer from the post-independence generation explains what Gillo Pontecorvo’s film means to him.
Cinematic representations of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation frequently invoke The Battle of Algiers as a point of reference. This reflects a long history of Palestinian identification with the Algerian independence movement and more specifically with Pontecorvo’s film.
In light of the crisis currently unfolding in Tunisia - particularly the increasingly strident and incendiary rhetoric of the main political poles - the echoes and parallels with Algeria's own democratic moment two decades ago are stark, and could yield crucial lessons.
From now on, we will remain alert and aware.
The lack of an organised and representative opposition, whether Islamist or not, serves to disadvantage the state; it cannot respond effectively to society's needs.
The notion that this episode heralds a real shift in Maghreb-western dynamics is increasingly hard to dismiss.
What the Islamist terrorist threat has become is an incoherent pretext to intervene militarily on the part of the west. The only principled position to adopt therefore is the rejection of both, for the self-determination and sovereignty of the peoples.
A decade ago, western leaders' excessive reaction and inflated rhetoric served to amplify rather than diminish the power of Islamist groups. The same danger now overhangs Mali, Algeria and beyond.
The present crisis raises a number of crucial questions, for France, Mali, the EU and our globalised world.
In the latest edition of Textures du temps, a historian’s eye is brought to bear on the discourse prevailing in recent British media coverage of the intervention of Algerian forces in the hostage crisis of In Amenas - the neo-orientalist concepts typically invoked when the subject of Algeria’s his
