The alleged incommensurablility between logics at the level of the ‘macro’ and the ‘micro’ — a mimic of the agent-structure debate — is an important site of knowledge production for political and international theory. Here is a sketch of the problem: master narratives claim sovereignty over all processes of identity and action in armed conflict yet they are often incongruent with local reasons for participation in mass violence. Furthermore, such parallel or counter-logics at the micro-level are not easily detected or are inadvertently submerged. One of the faults of the macro-dependent theories, accordingly, is the elision or erasure of the micro-level. The incumbent/insurgent opposition — one of the many ontological divisions of labour that have become central to contemporary civil war theory — is one such structure. Not only we can see these structuring operations at work in a number of theoretical and comparative studies on civil war, but also we see them deployed during the international debates about whether or not to intervene into Algeria. After the armed conflict in Algeria took hold in 1992, it soon produced an escalating wave of civilian massacres, peaking from 1996 to 1998. Some of these massacres claimed hundreds of lives in a single episode and, in the second half of 1997, spurred more and more calls for international action. Yet from the beginning, commentators, analysts, academics and policymakers inscribed the Algerian civil war as a dyadic conflict pitting armed groups (insurgents) against a military regime (incumbents). This binary rendering was carried forth as the governing framework for an understanding of the massacres and, as such, became the schema that structured calls for intervention.