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.
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.
The first full account for a generation of the war against French colonialism in Algeria, setting out the long-term causes of the war from the French occupation of Algeria in 1830 onwards.
The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and Subjectivity analyzes representations of the Algerian War in French-language comics published since 1982. Throughout this ...book, Howell investigates the ways in which marginalized memory communities resist, rewrite, and/or repair institutionalized history in popular culture. This is achieved by applying Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory to postcolonial comics, by exploring comics as a multimodal medium uniquely positioned to engage with the complexity of postcolonial memory, history and subjectivity, and by problematizing current teaching practices in secondary education.
Algeria sits at the crossroads of the Atlantic, European, Arab, and African worlds. Yet, unlike the wars in Korea and Vietnam, Algeria's fight for independence has rarely been viewed as an ...international conflict. Even forty years later, it is remembered as the scene of a national drama thatculminated with Charles de Gaulle's decision to grant Algerians their independence despite assassination attempts, mutinies, and settler insurrection.Yet, as Matthew Connelly demonstrates, the war the Algerians fought occupied a world stage, one in which the U.S. and the USSR, Israel and Egypt, Great Britain, Germany, and China all played key roles. Recognizing the futility of confronting France in a purely military struggle, the Front deLiberation Nationale instead sought to exploit the Cold War competition and regional rivalries, the spread of mass communications and emigrant communities, and the proliferation of international and non-governmental organizations. By harnessing the forces of nascent globalization they divided Franceinternally and isolated it from the world community. And, by winning rights and recognition as Algeria's legitimate rulers without actually liberating the national territory, they rewrote the rules of international relations.Based on research spanning three continents and including, for the first time, the rebels' own archives, this study offers a landmark reevaluation of one of the great anti-colonial struggles as well as a model of the new international history. It will appeal to historians of post-colonial studies,twentieth-century diplomacy, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
The massacre of Algerian demonstrators by the Paris police on the night of 17 October 1961 is one of the most contested events in contemporary French history. This book provides a multi-layered ...investigation of the repression through a critical examination of newly opened archives, oral sources, the press and contemporary political movements and debates. The roots of violence are traced back to counter-insurgency techniques developed by the French military in North Africa and introduced into Paris to crush the independence movement among Algerian migrant workers. The study shows how and why this event was rapidly expunged from public visibility in France, but was kept alive by immigrant and militant minorities, to resurface in a dramatic form after the 1980s. Through this case-study the authors explore both the dynamics of state terror as well as the complex memorial processes by which these events continue to inform and shape post-colonial society.
Algerian Diary Davis, Gerald; Fenton, Tom
2016, 2016-03-30, 2016-03-01
eBook
Frank Kearns was the go-to guy at CBS News for danger- ous stories in Africa and the Middle East in the 1950s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s. By his own account, he was nearly killed 114 times. He took ...stories that nobody else wanted to cover and was challenged to get them on the air when nobody cared about this part of the world. But his stories were warning shots for conflicts that play out in the headlines today.
In 1957, Senator John Kennedy described America’s view of the Algerian war for independence as the Eisenhower Administration’s “head in the sand policy.” So CBS News decided to find out what was really happening there and to determine where Algeria’s war for independence fit into the game plan for the Cold War. They sent Frank Kearns to find out.
Kearns took with him cameraman Yousef (“Joe”) Masraff and 400 pounds of gear, some of which they shed, and they hiked with FLN escorts from Tunisia, across a wide “no-man’s land,” and into the Aures Mountains of eastern Algeria, where the war was bloodiest. They carried no passports or visas. They dressed as Algerians. They refused to bear weapons. And they knew that if captured, they would be executed and left in unmarked graves. But their job as journalists was to seek the truth whatever it might turn out to be.
This is Frank Kearns’s diary.
The French Army's war in Algeria has always aroused passions. This book does not whitewash the atrocities committed by both sides; rather it focuses on the conflict itself, a perspective assisted by ...the French republic's official admission in 1999 that what happened in Algeria was indeed a war.
