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.

In 1881, an insurrection broke out to the south of Oran province. While official correspondence and military memoirs regarded it as an outburst of religious fanaticism, we can find another proximate cause in the disastrous environmental events of the late-1870s, which conditioned social instability and multiple episodes of violence in the area. This chronology – of environmental disaster followed by insurrection against colonial authority – was an echo of an earlier episode. The disastrous decade of the 1860s, in which environmental crisis led to significant social upheaval and massive death tolls, directly contributed to the famous uprising of 1871. In each case, the colonial discourse found in official correspondence, newspapers, and memoirs of the period paid little attention to environment or climate, even though they found that nature played a large role. Indeed, colonial writers often claimed that “nature” had caused the rebellion: the “nature” of Algerians that manifested itself in such outbreaks of religiously-motivated, non-political, pre-modern violence. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between violence, modernity, and nature in late nineteenth-century Algeria. The discourse that presented Algerian contestations of colonial authority as a response to and a part of “nature(s),” I argue, served to legitimize ongoing violence against Algerians. Being trapped in the “past” (unable to overcome nature – theirs or the world’s), Algerians were not capable of being modern political actors, and therefore could only engage in illegitimate violence; war was reserved for communities with legitimate political aims. Algerian anti-French violence was thus “rebellion” or “insurrection” or “revolt,” but not war. By controlling the discourse of “nature,” French colonials controlled inclusion in modernity and thus legitimate political acts. Concepts of nature – environmental nature and Algerians’ nature – contributed to the definition of modern warfare by defining what was modern and what was war. Violence against Algerians was thus naturalized as part of Algerian life. By treating these insurrections as political acts arising from the combined challenges of colonial territoriality and environmental crisis, not the “ancestral violence” of Algerians who had failed to rise above their nature(s), we can see how the complex definitions of war, violence, and modernity in nineteenth-century Algeria had roots in environmental relationships and discourses.

In her monograph The Radiance of France (2009), Gabrielle Hecht refers to de Gaulle's withdrawal from NATO, his prolonged refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and a global network of uranium mines. To her work, I introduce two groups of sources (transcripts of radio broadcasts and defense journalism) dating from the decade after uranium was discovered in Algeria and, on these bases, I assert that Algeria served as Arab laboratory for information warfare. Preceding the 1960 atomic bomb test at Reganne, I’ve identified a French threat to test nuclear devices in North Africa. The French military community's official journal, the Revue de défense nationale (which resumed publication during July 1945) developed the “guerre totale” doctrine at the dawn of the atomic age, as France staged counter-insurgency operations in North Africa. The "total war" doctrine doctrine permitted a wide range of targets suitable for attack, a narrow range of non-combatants or civilians protected from attack-- and depended on technical solutions (mass production of weapons, scientific development of war technology, mobilization of all members of any given society). Second, uranium deposits had been found in Algeria during 1950, when local communities began to develop their understandings of "information warfare" with regard to NATO-based nuclear proliferation. According to Radio Peking, Kouchi Mohamed (editor in chief of l'Algerie nouvelle), stated “in the face of growing dangers of war, the Algerian people attached great importance to a new and mighty demonstration of the will of peoples to unite in a struggle to impose peace.” North Africans' organized resistance to nuclear programs lead to collaboration with other Arabs (Egyptians, Iraqis, and Lebanese). Similar statements appear in transcripts of World Federation of Democratic Youth meetings; delegates from the Maghreb to the Third Congress of the International Organization of Journalists also used “the struggle for peace” to describe proliferation. Such a struggle for "peace" was imbricated with the national independence movement. Such a discussion remains relevant. Etienne de Durand uses French counter-insurgency materials of the Cold War period to derive contemporary counter-insurgency positions, inspiring a similar gesture with regard to "psychological operations." In Ideas as Weapons: Influence and Perception in Modern Warfare (2009), USMC Colonel Thomas Hammes notes, "insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated a clear understanding of the importance of information warfare: captured documents, prisoner interrogation, and insurgent day-to-day operations indicate … they consider information warfare to be central to their strategy" (p. 27).