The motivation for this panel arises out the debates in the 1990s about the nature of the violence then gripping Algeria and the role of history in it. Indeed, a major monograph on the Algerian “civil war” suggested that the only way to account for the violence of the 1990s was to understand the power of a particularly Algerian narrative of a heroic, rebellious male archetype that has been instantiated in the Ottoman corsair, the anti-colonial Qaid, and the FLN mujahid. Such gross caricatures of Algeria’s past were rightly criticized yet a historically informed understanding of warfare of the 1990s remains outstanding. To look for answers to the enigmas of Algeria’s recent violence in the enigma’s of its past violence is to raise the question, Why Algeria? Algeria, after, seems to have an extraordinary relationship to modern warfare in so far as it has served as a laboratory for some of its most important innovations. It is thus the purpose of this panel to work through these issues towards a better understanding the reasons for Algeria’s historical and geopolitical peculiarity vis-à-vis modern warfare. Hopefully these interventions will also lead us to a recovery of Algerian agency. This would not only mean recovering Algerians’ individual agencies — past, present, and future — from deterministic accounts of the overbearing role of violence Algeria’s history. It would also mean looking at many forms of warfare developed in the laboratory of Algeria as a kind of Algerian way of war that has gone largely undetected or been misidentified in its manifestations in other theaters of mass violence.