Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T15:22:50.045Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - The persistence of violence and the process of re-equilibration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2010

Miriam R. Lowi
Affiliation:
The College of New Jersey
Get access

Summary

In the ten years of civil war that followed the military coup, more than 100,000 Algerians died and several thousand remain unaccounted for. During this period, there were four different presidents and eight prime ministers. An International Monetary Fund (IMF)-backed structural adjustment program, furthering efforts at economic liberalization, was also implemented.

In its early stages, the violence pitted the state against members and supporters of the FIS, and then an array of Islamist groups. It went through at least three different phases. In the first phase (1992–4), the violence took the form of urban civil war, characterized by targetted killings by insurgents and fierce repression of Islamists in and around Algiers. The second phase (1994–8) witnessed the collapse of the state's monopoly over violence and its almost total loss of control over the domestic political economy; this combined with the “privatization” of violence in the hands of not only Islamist insurgents, but government-backed militia forces as well. Mass terror, generalized insecurity, and a high death toll characterized this period.

Writing in the winter of 1995, Hugh Roberts, one of the more astute analysts of Algerian affairs, described the situation thus:

The Algerian state is weaker than at any moment in its history since 1962. It has lost such legitimacy as the old one-party system procured for it until 1988 … [i]t is still unable to offer most of its citizens the prospect of substantial relief from economic distress, and cannot even guarantee elementary security for their lives and property, since the Algerian army has clearly long since lost its monopoly of the use of physical force and has been failing quite spectacularly in its elementary duty of restoring order.[…]

Type
Chapter
Information
Oil Wealth and the Poverty of Politics
Algeria Compared
, pp. 126 - 144
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×