Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violenceexplores the relationship between the human rights movement emerging after 1945 and the increasing violence of decolonization. Based on material ...previously inaccessible in the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Human Rights Commission, this comparative study uses the Mau Mau War (1952-1956) and the Algerian War (1954-1962) to examine the policies of two major imperial powers, Britain and France. Historian Fabian Klose considers the significance of declared states of emergency, counterinsurgency strategy, and the significance of humanitarian international law in both conflicts. Klose's findings from these previously confidential archives reveal the escalating violence and oppressive tactics used by the British and French military during these anticolonial conflicts in North and East Africa, where Western powers that promoted human rights in other areas of the world were opposed to the growing global acceptance of freedom, equality, self-determination, and other postwar ideals. Practices such as collective punishment, torture, and extrajudicial killings did lasting damage to international human rights efforts until the end of decolonization. Clearly argued and meticulously researched,Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violencedemonstrates the mutually impacting histories of international human rights and decolonization, expanding our understanding of political violence in human rights discourse.
This book explores the memory of the war of independence in France as viewed by the former European settlers (pieds-noirs) and the harkis, those Algerians who worked for the French security forces. ...It examines how the memorial dynamics of the two groups are related both to each other and to other memories of the war.
Between 1954 and 1962, Algerian women played a major role in the struggle to end French rule in one of the most violent wars of decolonisation of the 20th century. This book presents an in-depth ...exploration of what happened to these women after independence in 1962.
InThe Battle for AlgeriaJennifer Johnson reinterprets one of the most violent wars of decolonization: the Algerian War (1954-1962). Johnson argues that the conflict was about who-France or the ...National Liberation Front (FLN)-would exercise sovereignty of Algeria. The fight between the two sides was not simply a military affair; it also involved diverse and competing claims about who was positioned to better care for the Algerian people's health and welfare. Johnson focuses on French and Algerian efforts to engage one another off the physical battlefield and highlights the social dimensions of the FLN's winning strategy, which targeted the local and international arenas. Relying on Algerian sources, which make clear the centrality of health and humanitarianism to the nationalists' war effort, Johnson shows how the FLN leadership constructed national health care institutions that provided critical care for the population and functioned as a protostate. Moreover, Johnson demonstrates how the FLN's representatives used postwar rhetoric about rights and national self-determination to legitimize their claims, which led to international recognition of Algerian sovereignty.
By examining the local context of the war as well as its international dimensions, Johnson deprovincializes North Africa and proposes a new way to analyze how newly independent countries and nationalist movements engage with the international order. The Algerian case exposed the hypocrisy of selectively applying universal discourse and provided a blueprint for claim-making that nonstate actors and anticolonial leaders throughout the Third World emulated. Consequently,The Battle for Algeriaexplains the FLN's broad appeal and offers new directions for studying nationalism, decolonization, human rights, public health movements, and concepts of sovereignty.
Hoarding Memory looks at the ways the stories of the
Algerian War (1954-62) have proliferated among the former French
citizens of Algeria. By engaging hoarding as a model, Amy L.
Hubbell demonstrates ...the simultaneously productive and destructive
nature of clinging to memory. These memories present massive
amounts of material, akin to the stored objects in a hoarder's
house. Through analysis of fiction, autobiography, art, and history
that extensively use collecting, layering, and repetition to
address painful war memories, Hubbell shows trauma can be hidden
within its own representation. Hoarding Memory dedicates
chapters to specific authors and artists who use this hoarding
technique: Marie Cardinal, Leïla Sebbar, and Benjamin Stora in
writing and Nicole Guiraud and Patrick Altes in art. All were born
in Algeria during colonial French rule but in vastly different
contexts; each suffered personal or inherited trauma from racism,
physical or psychological abuse, terrorist or other violent acts of
war, and exile in France. Zineb Sedira's artwork is also included
as an example of traumatic memory inherited from her parents.
Ultimately this book shows how traumatic experience can be conveyed
in a seemingly open account that is compounded and compacted by the
volume of words, images, and other memorial debris that testify to
the pain.
An illuminating and provocative account of Germany's role as sanctuary for Algerian nationalists during their fight for independence from France between 1954 and 1962. The book explores key issues ...such as the impact of external sanctuaries on French counterinsurgency efforts; the part played by security and intelligence services in efforts to eliminate these sanctuaries; the Algerian War's influence on West German foreign and security policy; and finally, the emergence of West German civic engagement in support of Algeria's independence struggle, which served to shape the newly independent country's perception of its role and place in international society. Mathilde von Bulow sheds new light on the impact of FLN activities, the role of anti-colonial movements and insurgencies in the developing world in shaping the dynamics of the Cold War as well as the manner in which the Algerian War was fought and won.
Torture and the Twilight of Empirelooks at the intimate relationship between torture and colonial domination through a close examination of the French army's coercive tactics during the Algerian war ...from 1954 to 1962. By tracing the psychological, cultural, and political meanings of torture at the end of the French empire, Marnia Lazreg also sheds new light on the United States and its recourse to torture in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This book is nothing less than an anatomy of torture--its methods, justifications, functions, and consequences. Drawing extensively from archives, confessions by former torturers, interviews with former soldiers, and war diaries, as well as writings by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others, Lazreg argues that occupying nations justify their systematic use of torture as a regrettable but necessary means of saving Western civilization from those who challenge their rule. She shows how torture was central toguerre révolutionnaire, a French theory of modern warfare that called for total war against the subject population and which informed a pacification strategy founded on brutal psychological techniques borrowed from totalitarian movements. Lazreg seeks to understand torture's impact on the Algerian population--especially women--and also on the French troops who became their torturers. She explores the roles Christianity and Islam played in rationalizing these acts, and the ways in which torture became not only routine but even acceptable.
Written by a preeminent historical sociologist,Torture and the Twilight of Empireholds particularly disturbing lessons for us today as we carry out the War on Terror.
The aftermath of Algeria's revolutionary war for independence coincided with the sexual revolution in France, and in this book Todd Shepard argues that these two movements are inextricably linked.? ...Sex, France, and Arab Men is a history of how and why—from the upheavals of French Algeria in 1962 through the 1970s—highly sexualized claims about Arabs were omnipresent in important public French discussions, both those that dealt with sex and those that spoke of Arabs. Shepard explores how the so-called sexual revolution took shape in a France profoundly influenced by the ongoing effects of the Algerian revolution. Shepard's analysis of both events alongside one another provides a frame that renders visible the ways that the fight for sexual liberation, usually explained as an American and European invention, developed out of the worldwide anticolonial movement of the mid-twentieth century.
