Political histories of the Algerian Revolution (1954-62), the most emblematic war of decolonization, have focused on the armed and diplomatic struggle led by nationalist elites, and especially on the chiefs of the National Liberation Front (FLN). Combining oral history and archival research, this paper provides a contrasting approach by examining the experiences and perspectives of ordinary Algerians who participated in the revolution. It draws chiefly on interviews that the author conducted with 30 women and men who lived through the struggle in Algiers. These included former rank and file militants, shantytown dwellers, domestic workers, street kids, and farmers. Algerians’ political engagement during the revolution did not always take the form of open, violent rebellion against French colonialism. Over almost eight years, their daily struggle to survive consisted in quotidian acts of resistance (both open and covert), noncompliance, evasion, and collaboration with the French. Faced with reports of torture, assassinations, and massacres by the French army, Algerians had good reason to disguise their support for the revolution. The (often violent) pressures that the FLN placed on the population for its support, as well as the penury in which most Algerians lived, weighed heavily on people’s political calculations as well. A greater number of Algerians than is sometimes acknowledged decided that collaboration with the French was their best option given their circumstances. Many others aimed to maintain autonomy from both the French and the FLN; this autonomy was key to survival in a rapidly changing situation that demanded flexibility of response. The paper opens with a discussion of what James C. Scott would call the ‘infrapolitics’ of the revolution: Algerians’ intentionally low-profile and quotidian ways of resisting French domination without risking the danger of open defiance. Since Algerians also had to deal with the hegemonic pretensions of the FLN, the paper also examines how Algerians navigated their relationship of power with an organization that sought to discipline them. This leads to a discussion of two groups that complicated, in different ways, the categories of resistance and collaboration during the Algerian Revolution: the ‘harkis’ (Algerians who worked for the French during the war), and the French citizens who fought with the FLN. The paper demonstrates that the lines between collaboration and resistance are rarely black and white, and how Algerians in a position of weakness took advantage of this grey area to work situations to their least disadvantage.

Italy invaded Ottoman Tripolitania, Fezzan, and Cyrenaica (today’s Libya) in the fall of 1911, initiating a brutal conquest that was met by about two decades of armed resistance. In neighboring Tunisia, outrage at this invasion merged with ongoing tensions with Italian settlers, who far outnumbered the French despite the country having been occupied by France since 1881. This paper explores how cultural and economic links between Tunisians and Tripolitanians were mobilized in response to Italian colonial aggression, catalyzing an unusual blend of political formations that crossed colonial boundaries. Among Tunisian intellectuals, renewed affinities with the Ottomans and the Arab Mashriq blended with a liberal reformism that began to challenge French rule and imagined a greater Maghribi state under Ottoman sovereignty. In Tripolitania, religious-political leaders such as Sulayman al-Baruni and Ahmed Sharif as-Senussi fostered pan-Islamic ideologies that envisioned a similar pan-Islamic future for the region. The little extant literature on this conflict has focused on these elite political currents, which themselves deserve further study. But going even further, this paper presents new research into what Tunisia-Tripolitania links looked like on the ground through the eyes of locals on both sides of the border, including smugglers, soldiers, and medical workers. To do so, I use the recently catalogued personal archives of Tunisian photojournalist Albert Samama-Chikly (1872-1934), providing access to the usually obscured perspective of the more rural and mobile populations along this frontier. Samama was one of the few reporters to document this conflict from behind Ottoman lines, at a time when the European media was mostly inclined to support what they saw as Libya’s liberation from Ottoman tyranny. But the French-educated Samama, born to a Jewish father and Italian mother, was also a confounding figure to the locals he met along the way. At times he won their trust, leading to passionate discussion of political affairs; at other times, he provoked accusations of espionage for imperial powers. Using Samama’s personal diaries and relevant articles from the popular press, this paper situates the political sympathies of locals along the Tunisia-Tripolitania frontier within the broader politics of Arab-Muslim reformism and imperial competition in the central Mediterranean.

By the end of WWI, North Africa was strongly afflicted. However, the Armistice signed in November 1918, did not marked the end of the fighting, as in many parts of the world. One of the most famous uprising in the Muslim Mediterranean world was the War of Independence led by Mustafa Kemal in the Ottoman Empire (1919-1922), allowing to request revision of the Treaty of Sèvres at the congress of Lausanne in 1923. However, less known fights took place in North Africa, especially in Morocco and in Cyrenaica. In fact, North Morocco was a place of rebellion during and after WWI, far to be pacified. The Rif War (1921-1926) has been considered as one of the most important anti-colonial struggles in the inter-war period. Nevertheless, the local dynamics just before this very strong war have been little examined. This paper will resituate the Rif War at the articulation with WWI and the local uprisings in Northern Morocco, especially in the Spanish zone, a legally neutral zone that enjoyed de facto no real control. This contribution aims at analyse the pre-Rif War period from a local and a translocal perspective. It will shed light on the local context of the uprising, the resistance at a local level and the conjunction of foreign support (German and Ottoman). Light will be shed on the connections of the Muhammad ‘Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi - the qadi of the Banu Waryaghal - and of his son, Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi, with local and foreign actors, such as Spain, Germany and the Ottoman Empire during and after WWI. A special attention will be given to the relation between Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi and ‘Abd al Malik bin Muhyi al-Din and the help he provided him. He was one of the youngest sons of the Great Algerian leader of resistance to French occupation in the 1830’s - ‘Amir Abd al-Qadir - and led the strongest local resistance movement in Northern Morocco from 1915. Indeed, Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi, arrested by the Spanish in 1915, remained in prison until his father interrupted his help to ‘Abd al Malik and the Germans. Then, ‘Abd al Malik’s fall and his position toward the nascent Rif War will be analysed. This contribution draws from various archives and documents throughout different sides in the conflict such as Morocco, the Ottoman Empire, France, Germany and Great-Britain.

Current historiography on the making of the Tripoli-Tunisia border has focused on imperial diplomacy between France and the Ottoman Empire following the establishment of the French Protectorate over Tunisia in 1881. In such a way, the scholarship has emphasized the formal negotiations and disputes between Ottoman and French delegations to delineate a legal boundary between these two territories. Nevertheless, the current historiography has overlooked non-imperial actors' participation in making this border a fluid boundary—a boundary defined by the mobility of nomads, refugees, and locals who reshaped and undermined imperial conceptions of fixed borders. This paper examines the making of a mobile borderland from 1881 to 1893 when nomads and refugees resisted French and Ottoman attempts at delineating an official border between Tripoli and Tunisia. It consisted of two parts: 1) the mobility of nomads and refugees in destabilizing imperial conceptions of the Tripoli-Tunisia border and 2) the attempt to harness mobility to advance imperial interests. In particular, this paper inspects the activities of Tunisian and Tripolitanian nomadic tribes and refugees along the Tripoli-Tunisian border following the establishment of the French Protectorate over Tunisia. I argue that large mobile groups consisting of tens of thousands of nomads and refugees continually reshaped imperial conceptions of the Tripoli-Tunisian border and attested to new challenges and difficulties both empires had to address. Likewise, this paper contends that imperial tensions over the border evolved into attempts to harness nomadic tribes' and refugees' mobility as a destabilizing force to secure imperial interests. It demonstrates that mobility presented a dilemma: it was at once a detriment for empires that sought to settle recalcitrant, mobile populations and a boon if harnessed and directed towards undermining rival imperial interests. Overall, this paper offers a new perspective on making the Tripoli-Tunisia border and reassesses how non-elite actors played a constitutive role in shaping and redefining Ottoman and French imperial interests in late nineteenth-century North Africa.