This project will investigate the relationship between globalisation, political change and political violence in North Africa by comparing the Algerian and Egyptian experiences of economic liberalisation and political change over the last twelve years. Having much in common in the cultural sphere, these two countries pursued very similar paths of political development until the onset of the latest phase of globalisation with the end of the Cold War. Since then, Algeria, which had followed the Egyptian model very closely until 1989, began sharply to diverge from it in embarking on a seemingly radical experiment in political liberalisation. This eventually collapsed and for the last nine years Algeria has been ravaged by violence of a scale and intensity that vastly exceeds the violence which has occurred in Egypt. What explains the political breakdown in Algeria and how are we to characterise the violence which has resulted? And what explains Egypt’s success in avoiding a comparable breakdown while facing similar challenges? In seeking to answer these questions, this research will take the Algerian polity and the Egyptian polity as its objects of study, and will explore the hypotheses that the way in which Algeria has diverged from the Egyptian model is an essential element of the explanation of political breakdown there, and that this divergence is at least in part explained by the differential impact of globalisation on the two polities. The research will further consider the content and dynamics of political change overall in the two countries and will explore the hypothesis that this change, far from amounting to a transition from authoritarianism to democracy, has in reality constituted a mutation of the polity in both countries which has primarily modified the modalities of political representation in a manner which has fallen a very long way short of a genuine reform. It is in this context that the research will also seek to identify and explain the rationale of the political resort to violence in the two countries; it will be a major objective of this research to investigate the relationship between the particular character of these mutations and the varying extent to which political conflict has subsequently come to be articulated in the register of violence and to precipitate political disorder instead of stimulating political development.

Hugh Roberts, 'Truths about the dirty war', Times Literary Supplement, 5141 (12 October 2001), pp.28-29

Hugh Roberts, 'Dancing in the Dark: the European Union and the Algerian Drama', in Richard Gillespie and Richard Youngs (eds), The European Union and Democracy Promotion: the Case of North Africa, London: Frank Cass, 2002, pp.106-134

Hugh Roberts, 'La Kabylie a la lumiere tremblotante du savoir maraboutique', Insaniyat: Revue algérienne d'anthropologie et de sciences sociales, 16 (January-April 2002), pp.99-115

Hugh Roberts, 'The Left and the Algerian catastrophe', in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds), Fighting Identities: race, religion and ethno-nationalism, Socialist Register 2003, pp.152-171

Hugh Roberts, 'Algeria: can national order be restored?', in Judith S Yaphe (ed.), The Middle East in 2005: the impact of regional trends on US strategic planning, Washington DC: National Defense University, 2002, pp.15-41

Hugh Roberts, 'De la segmentarité a l'opacité: a propos de Gellner et Bourdieu et les approches théoriques a l'analyse du champ politique algérien', Insaniyat: Revue algérienne d'anthropologie et de sciences sociales, 19-20 (January-June 2003), pp.65-95

Hugh Roberts, 'Gellner et la segmentarié au Maghreb: a propos de l'analyse des champs politiques maghrébins', special issue of Awal: Cahiers d'Etudes Berberes, 2004