Cover of Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence by Jacob Mundy
Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence
Conflict Science, Conflict Management, Antipolitics
Jacob Mundy

BUY THIS BOOK

September 2015
280 pages.
from $27.95

Cloth ISBN: 9780804788496
Paper ISBN: 9780804795821
Digital ISBN: 9780804795838
(20% off e-book after you add to Shopping Cart.
Rental options also available.)

Request Review/Desk/Examination Copy

CITE THIS BOOK

DescriptionDesc.
Reviews
Excerpts and More

The massacres that spread across Algeria in 1997 and 1998 shocked the world, both in their horror and in the international community's failure to respond. In the years following, the violence of 1990s Algeria has become a central case study in new theories of civil conflict and terrorism after the Cold War. Such "lessons of Algeria" now contribute to a diverse array of international efforts to manage conflict—from development and counterterrorism to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine and transitional justice.

With this book, Jacob Mundy raises a critical lens to these lessons and practices and sheds light on an increasingly antipolitical scientific vision of armed conflict. Traditional questions of power and history that once guided conflict management have been displaced by neoliberal assumptions and methodological formalism. In questioning the presumed lessons of 1990s Algeria, Mundy shows that the problem is not simply that these understandings—these imaginative geographies—of Algerian violence can be disputed. He shows that today's leading strategies of conflict management are underwritten by, and so attempt to reproduce, their own flawed logic. Ultimately, what these policies and practices lead to is not a world made safe from war, but rather a world made safe for war.

About the author

Jacob Mundy is Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. He is coauthor of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution (2010).

"Jacob Mundy's Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence is a scathing critique of the internal pathologies of Neoliberal conflict management. With great finesse, Mundy dissects the often-contradictory scaffolding scholars and policymakers built to frame, explain, and define the Algerian Civil War. A must-read for scholars of conflict studies, this book fills a major void in scholarship on post-independence Algeria, and will surely be a valuable resource to political scientists and historians working on the Middle East and North Africa, post Arab Spring."

—Robert P. Parks, Founding Director, Centre d'Études Maghrébines en Algérie

"Jacob Mundy's uncompromising, pugnacious book takes all the complexities of the Algerian conflict in the 1990s and makes from them an excoriating critique of prevailing assumptions in studies of 'new wars,' civil wars and counterinsurgency. As meticulously detailed as it is sweeping in judgment, this should be essential reading as an antidote to the anti-political, ahistorical tendencies of 'conflict science.'"

—James McDougall, University of Oxford

"Jacob Mundy has written a disturbing book in every sense of the word. His work unsettles the conflict paradigms of the post-Cold War world and will influence our study of civil war, terrorism, and mass atrocities for a long time to come."

—David Campbell, University of Queensland, author of National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia