The first generation of free Algerians grew up under an increasingly corrupt military dictatorship. After gaining independence from France in 1962, leaders spoke of democracy but ruled with a one-party state. British historian Evans and journalist Phillips draw a complex, engrossing portrait of a nation afflicted with many contemporary problems: terrorism, economic inequality, a stalled transition to democracy and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. The result is a fractured society with a complicated and bitter relationship with the Western powers-and an increasing tendency to export terrorism to France, America, and beyond.Fifty years after winning a bloody independence struggle, Algeria remains disturbingly unstable and impoverished. Looking back at the pre-colonial and colonial periods, they place Algeria’s complex present into historical context, demonstrating how successive governments have manipulated the past for their own ends. Evans and Phillips trace the complex roots of this alienation, arguing that Algeria’s predicament-political instability, pressing economic and social problems, bad governance, a disenfranchised youth-is emblematic of an arc of insecurity stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. Unemployed, frustrated by the corrupt military regime, and excluded by the West, the post-independence generation needed new heroes, and some found them in Osama bin Laden and the rising Islamist movement. In this lucid and gripping account, Martin Evans and John Phillips explore Algeria’s recent and very bloody history, demonstrating how the high hopes of independence turned into anger as young Algerians grew increasingly alienated. By the 1990s, however, its revolutionary political model had collapsed, degenerating into a savage conflict between the military and Islamist guerillas that killed some 200,000 citizens.
How Algeria became a breeding ground for instability, violence, and Islamic terrorismĪfter liberating itself from French colonial rule in one of the twentieth century’s most brutal wars of independence, Algeria became a standard-bearer for the non-aligned movement.
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