The violent cycle of ‘modernity’ in Algeria since 1830

giacomo mccarthy

Recently, the French Conseil d’Etat—the French supreme court of administrative justice—upheld a decision from a lower court in 2016 to withhold citizenship from an Algerian spouse of a French citizen because she was unwilling to shake the hand of her male naturalization officer for religious reasons. The court ruled against her because her unwillingness to shake the man’s hand proved her “unworthiness or lack of assimilation” because she “refuse[d] to accept the essential values of French society and in particular, equality between men and women.”

Sixty years earlier, only three years before the 1962 decolonization of French Algeria, the French president Charles de Gaulle, on the proposed assimilation of French and Algerians, said that “[French are], before anything else, a European people of white race, Greek and Roman culture, and Christian religion,” continuing “Don’t try to fool me! The Muslims, have you seen them? Have you seen their turbans and their djellebas? You know well that they aren’t French. Those who promote integration have the mind of a hummingbird. Try to combine oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. Momentarily, they will separate again,” and “Arabs are Arabs, French are French. You think that France could absorb ten million Muslims, who tomorrow will be twenty and after tomorrow forty? If we integrate, if all of the Arabs and the Berbers of Algeria were considered French, would you stop them from settling in the cities, where the standard of living is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombey-the-Two-Churches but Colombey-the-Two-Mosques.”

In 1846, 120 years before de Gaulle and only a decade and a half after France had first colonized Algeria, the liberal French statesman Alphonse de Lamartine argued in parliament for perseverance in the Algerian project, saying “The Arabs were impermeable to European civilization; they could never be seated by the side of European communities in one body, politic and social; the fusion of the races—a fine phrase—happened to be beyond human ability.”

Since colonization, the French bureaucracy has struggled to recognize Algerians as capable of becoming French, for reasons of race, religion, and a lack of “modernity.” It is the process and result of this concept of modernity in Algeria that becomes the focus of this paper. This modernity is not separate from race and religion, as Frantz Fanon recognizes in The Wretched of the Earth, saying that the colonial Church is adulterated religion that brings the culture and the values of “the white man;” “the ways of the oppressor.” French racial and religious hegemony are instead parts of modernity’s “restructuring of society by regulating space, politics, and subjectivity of the individual—language, education, body, sexuality, values and ideas, family, health, feelings, taste, and so forth” that has been linked to violence and brutality since 1830. 

Three periods since the French colonization of Algeria demonstrate the influence of the imposition of modernity and the extreme violence that it is associated with. The first is the modernity of colonization—from France’s official entry in 1830 to the Second Republic’s 1848 declaration of Algeria as an “integral part of France.” Second is revolutionary or national modernity that came with the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s, and third is the postcolonial modernity that manifested itself in the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s. By connecting the prevailing rationale of modernity in these three periods, this paper argues that the violence of the Algerian Civil War was a product of the colonial French imposition of “modernity.”

Modernity and Violence

In the introduction to his book on violence and modernity in Algeria, Abdelmajid Hannoum tells the story of his conversation with a son of a shahid (a martyr who died fighting French colonial rule). The man held a striking opinion: although the colonial period was tragic and brutal, he believed that “’for us [Algerians], colonialism is the equivalent of Europe’s industrial revolution. It brought us modernity.’” Although this “modernity” had caused the death of his father as well as a number of his countrymen, this shahid’s son concluded that it was worth its price. Alexis de Tocqueville, the influential French political theorist, agreed with the shahid’s son, justifying the use of violence: “I have often heard men in France whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree, find it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women, and children.” For both Tocqueville and the shahid’s son, the value of modernity outweighed the value of Algerian lives.

In his 1990 book The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens addresses this violence that has succeeded modernity. Notably, colonial violence is not included on his list. Following the example of the shahid’s son, Hannoum suggests that the “reason for this may lie in the common belief that colonialism was redeemed because it brought modernity to the rest of the world,” or that colonialism negotiated violence with a set of values and ideas that would eventually bring a lasting peace and global enlightenment. However, the critics of modernity note that there has yet to be a lasting peace. As Michel Foucault says, “Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.” Modernity brings violence not only in the form of death and destruction, but also as a discursive formation of reason. This reason, which Foucault calls “the task of the Enlightenment,” found a chaotic world and “embarks on a rational ordering of the social world. It attempts to classify and regulate all forms of experience through a systematic construction of knowledge and discourse.” This system provides the framework of modernity and the platform from which power asserts itself. 

It is beyond the scope of this paper to course the development of modernity through Europe. Its emergence in that continent had taken hold in the seventeenth century onward, from where it began to spread. Its spread via colonialism through the lands of Islam and the “Orient” has been explained as its own discourse and termed by Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said argues that the “Orient” itself is the discursive formation of colonial endeavors, empowered by the tendrils of “modernity,” into non-Western territories. This Orient became exotic and romantic; the intriguing but careless antithesis to Western “modernity.” Western linguists, historians, theologians, and philosophers descended onto the “Orient” to observe, judge, and report back. Western perspectives saw a lack of “modernity” and created knowledge about the “Orient” that saw its society, people, and culture as lesser. This understanding fed the logic of necessary colonialism and the replacing of local epistemologies and ontologies with the modernity of the colonizer.

The trivialization of non-Western values opens the dichotomous space that the scholar of Africa V.Y. Mudimbe calls “marginality,” or “the intermediate space between the so-called tradition and the projected modernity of colonialism.” It forces individuals to choose from three options: the first, abandoning society for the old ways, perpetually punished by the cloud of colonialism, the second, accepting the new way and assimilating into the western system, or the third, subconscious option of existing in the marginalized space, unwilling to surrender to the west and associating with surviving structures of the past. Colonialism becomes a violent effort to enforce the marginalization of the colonized.

Colonial Modernity

The French incursion into Algeria officially began in 1830 after the Ottoman Dey presiding over Algiers insulted the French consul and refused to make the demanded reparations. The response was a fleet of one-hundred strong carrying 35,000 men. It departed on May 5 and landed on June 14 and soon captured Algiers, ending a 214-year period of Ottoman rule. The French, however, declared that their violence was directed towards the Turkish overlords, and that the inhabitants would soon be free. Despite this promise, the Bey of Titteri was given regional command and swore an oath of fidelity to France only a day after the French victory in Algiers. 

The new French rule was not yet secure. To the east, Ahmad, the Bey of Constantinople, maintained power even after the Ottomans surrendered the territory because his mother’s Arab heritage gave him regional legitimacy. To the west and south of Algiers, along the Moroccan border, was Abdel Qader, a sayyid from a powerful family. By 1832, Abdel Qader was proclaimed by regional leaders as the “sultan of the Arabs,” and by 1834 had signed a secret treaty with the French recognizing his sovereignty and providing him with territory, including the costal port of Arzew. Once word of this secret treaty got back to France, however, the new republican leadership was dissatisfied and replaced the French general in charge, who reneged on the established treaty and pursued an unsuccessful war against Abdel Qader. His failures led to his replacement by Thomas Robert Bugeaud, who became Abdel Qader’s main adversary until Abdel Qader’s defeat in 1847. Abdel Qader controlled as much as two thirds of the Algerian territory during his campaign against the French after a treaty signed in 1837. It was only in 1841 when Bugeaud was made governor of Algeria and was provided an influx of military resources that he was able to wage a total war of against Abdel Qader that more or less consolidated the former Regency of Algiers under the Tricolore.

The French suppression of Abdel Qader and other Algerian anti-colonialists was informed by the logic of modernity. In 1831, Barrachin, the ‘sous-intendant civil’ sent Governor General Berthezène a confidential memo describing a process of colonization aimed at a “slow and progressive refoulement of the indigenous people and their replacement with an imported population.” This refoulement was defined later by Amédée Desjobert, a colonial deputy whose job was to report periodically on the Algerian situation: “Up until this moment in time, no one has set out in writing the means by which the Arabs are to be exterminated, for wise voices have instead taken to using the term refoulement without troubling the meaning of this term or looking at what it might mean.” This tolerance for mass murder was developed through the Orientalist logic of colonialism that had developed in the centuries leading up to the colonization of Algeria. Ann Thomson’s study of European attitudes to the Maghreb in the 18th century demonstrates the development of this Orientalist logic, citing the 18th century French Orientalist Laugier de Tassy’s effort at combating French anti-Islamism, saying “On m’a demandé plus d’une fois s’ils avaient quelque idée de la Divinité. Mais je suis persuade que si ces personnes venaient à converser avec des Mahometans deguisés en chrétiens, elles leur trouveraient autant de raison et solitité qu’à ces derniers; mais qu’ils reprissent le turban, aussitôt toutes leurs qualités disparaîtraient.” She concludes that by the time the French forces had landed in Algieria, “any attempt to understand the peoples as equals…had vanished,” a conclusion widely supported in recent studies of Colonial Algeria.

Thus, the civilizing mission of modernity was justified even at the cost of violence. Often, this violence was made more tolerable when juxtaposed with French descriptions of Algerian-Algerian violence. French accounts of tribal wars emphasized their gore and brutality—rather than dying in combat, fighters were “decapitated,” massacred,” or “shorn of their heads.” In 1836, the French officially determined that “to decapitate one’s vanquished foes was a revolting form of barbarism deserving exemplary punishment.” The French role was to guide the Algerians away from their natural brutality to a more civilized form of warfare. This becomes ironic given that in 1831 Pierre Boyer, a French officer, had executed by decapitation two Moroccans in Algeria for being spies of the emperor of Morocco.

This was not an isolated incident of unnecessary and brutal French-Arab violence. The expected reaction to Algerian insurrections such as “cases where tribes had somehow betrayed the French, either by switching their allegiances or attacking French troops or tribes allied to France” became the razzia. These raids were extremely violent—examples include the 1836 bombardment of the town of Blida, the 1832 assault on El Oufia, “in which ‘men, women and children were massacred indiscriminately,’” or the 1833 raid on the Gharaba, which saw 200 tribal deaths, 500 injured, the confiscation of livestock, and the imprisonment of the tribe’s women, elderly, and children. The razzia had one of two purposes: it could be punitive, or, during the second decade of French presence in Algeria, it could be persuasive, intended to send a message to the tribe that they would be safer as allies of the French rather than Abdel Qader. For Algerians, these massacres became a system of cultural conversion that forced Frenchness and modernity as superior by using the violence that it claimed was its antithesis.

In France, these moments of extreme violence, when they were publicized by the media, were seen as aberrations of a colonial mission that occasionally used violence in the effort of peace. This public tolerance of France in Algeria was tested in 1845 when the French press was leaked the story of the massacre at Dahra. Buguaud had sent Colonel Jean Jacques Pélissier to subdue the Ouled Riah tribe, but after minor skirmishes and failed negotiations, the desperate tribe ensconced itself within a labyrinth of caves. They misjudged Pélissier, who ordered his men to throw burning bundles of tree branches into the caves. Twelve hours later, the French soldiers searched the caves for signs of life among 600-1000 corpses of men, women, and children. 

Internationally, the massacre was met with disgust. British media described it, saying “a fouler blot does not stain the page of French history,” and, in a poem, “Monsters, ye are not men!—a cursed deed is yours!” The popular American magazine Littell’s Living Age condemned it, begging the French to repent, “We know you Frenchmen to be brave. You have been proving it for centuries. Reprobate the Dahra massacre to prove that you are not cruel.” In France, however, opinion was different. One newspaper remarked, “Are we not guilty of having over excited, by the abominable affair of the grotto of the Dahra, the ferocious instincts of our savage adversaries? Have not we, a civilized people, given to our barbarian adversaries the example of barbarianism?” The French majority believed otherwise, casting Pélissier as a “modern Hamlet” faced with a difficult decision that he eventually made for the greater good. The opinion was represented in parliament by Mr. Ferdinand Barrot, who defended the act as necessary in the “conquest…of civilization over barbarism.” Only fifteen years into the French Algerian project, the massacre of as many of 1000 Algerians, the majority of whom were non-combatants, was not enough to slow the project of modernity. 

The violence of colonial modernity was not limited to blood, gore, and destruction. Abdelmajid Hannoum recognizes that “French colonialism engaged in the conquest of knowledge from the earliest stages of its long history, and it turned soldiers into scholars and administrators into historians and ethnographers. It became a machine of thought despite its sustained and violent physical practices. In only a few decades, 1830 to 1871, France’s reservoir of knowledge about Algeria grew to a colossal size. Colonial scholars did not neglect any region, city, or time period. Monographs, reports, maps, statistics, journals, and magazines were produced with amazing speed and efficiency to tackle each issue related to the colony.” In order to create the structure needed by modernity, the French first had to create the knowledge that is its keystone. Hayden White, in his “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” argues that this formulation of knowledge administers a narrativized perspective and distorts an ‘empirical’ history: the colonial historian who addresses Algeria, consciously or not, comes to the knowledge with a subconscious agenda, internalized in his mind by the narrative of the discourse he presumes to study. This creation of knowledge is what leads William Gallois to call early French colonialism in Algeria genocide by referencing Raphael Lemkin, who created the term and said that “the end [result of genocide] may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feeling and their religion.” The project of colonialism was brought to replace what was present in Algeria with the system of modernity and the culture of France. Donald Denoon and Patrick Wolfe claim that settler colonialism made communal farming, nomadism, and tent-based lifestyles impossible. In the early period of French presence in Algeria, the logic of the modern had made the lifestyles and customs of the past impossible or obscured, a part of an “uncivilized” and “barbaric” past.

Nation and Revolution: The Modernity of Decolonization

Jean-Paul Sartre charts decolonization in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The colonizer, fed up with his native slave’s stunted output (no matter how “beaten, undernourished, ill, or terrified” he is) reaches the settler’s contradiction: although he believes he should punish his slave’s insurrection with death, he cannot, for he relies on the slave’s production. Thus, “because he can’t carry massacre on to genocide, and slavery to animal-like degradation, he loses control, the machine goes into reverse, and a relentless logic leads him on to decolonization.” 

It was between 1847 and 1956, two years into the Algerian War of Independence, that the rest of the space that is known as Algeria was gradually conquered by the French armies. During this time, the French colonial project in Algeria expanded with its territory. Settlers—the French unemployed—were brought in unsuccessfully in 1848 to colonize the land. Success only occurred in the mid 1860s when the Société de Crédit Foncier et de Banque and Société Marseillaise de Crédit were created to spark European investment and settlement in Algeria. They served as the middlemen for the industry between France and Algeria which was crafted to benefit the French and its settlers, but not the Algerians. Sartre demonstrates this in Colonialism and Neocolonialism: goods are manufactured in France with the capital generated in Algeria which are then sold back to the colonizers in Algeria who generate money without empowering the Algerians by avoiding industry but instead investing in agriculture and raw materials. However, because all of the good land in Algeria prior to colonization was cultivated, Sartre calls the history of French colonialism in Algeria “the progressive concentration of European land ownership at the expense of Algerian ownership.” By the beginning of the revolution, Algerian land was divided with 3 million hectares belonging to European settlers, 11 million to the French state, and seven million to the Algerians. Two thirds of the agricultural production was European (92 billion francs), one third was Algerian (48 billion), except only a third of the Algerian production went untaxed or unpurchased by French entities. This maintained the population at a considerable level of poverty with just enough purchasing power to sustain the import of French goods. 

These were the economic conditions at the onset of the Algerian War for Independence. Although the war officially began in 1954, conflict first showed itself on Victory Europe Day—May 8, 1945. As French citizens celebrated the end of the European theater of WWII, Algerians protested for independence. Their protest turned violent and they massacred 100 settlers. The French army retaliated with the killing of between 1000 and 45000 Algerians. On October 10, 1954, the FLN (National Liberation Front) formed as a socialist political party with the revolutionary goal of overthrowing the French. After the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the FLN launched the Algerian War on November 1 by triggering nationwide revolts. The following August, their tactics became more direct and more controversial, attacking pied-noir (European) civilians directly. In September 1956 the Battle of Algiers began with three public bombings of European targets by Algerian women. After the failure of the French government to suppress the revolution, a group of pieds-noirs demanded Charles de Gaulle be made leader of France. He was given the position but was unable to stop the revolution and in 1959 determined that Algerian self-determination was necessary. By spring of 1962, a ceasefire had been declared between the FLN and the French government, and on July 1, 1962 six million Algerians voted for an independent Algeria, formally ending French colonialism.

The new Algerian nation found itself in a difficult position. The British-Ghanaian scholar Kwame Appiah described the challenge of nation building after decolonization, saying “if the history of Metropolitan Europe…has been a struggle to establish statehood for nationalities, Europe left Africa at independence with States looking for nations.” The borders of territory that was now Algeria had only been established since the French conquered a strip of land on the country’s western border in 1956—two years after the revolution had started. With this state territory, the new government had to create a nation. If a nation is, as Anthony Smith describes, “a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and memories, a mass, public culture…a territorial community of shared history and culture,” it follows that, despite the nationalism inherent to the revolution, it would be difficult to establish a coherent nation within Algeria’s massive borders. 

This summary reveals the imperfections of decolonization. It cannot turn time to a period before colonialism. Decolonization occurs in a world that has been built out of modernity. Modernity lurks in the asphalt of highways and runways, the conference rooms in office buildings and universities, the teacher’s blackboard, and the nation’s borders. The revolutionary argues for statehood apart from the colonizer’s influence even though the state is a western institution. He learns in universities that is of or a product of the colonizer. He rebels against the system but does not escape it. The only means of change left to him are those that were used to subjugate him. It is ironic that Frantz Fanon, the great controversial revolutionary psychologist and author in Algeria wrote and published his books in French, the language of the oppressor. His arguments are for violence as a retaliation for violence, which is contradictory; he argues that the only way to escape colonialism is to use its structures and its logic against it. The irony of this does not escape even Sartre’s laudatory preface, which questions the settler, “In the savagery of these oppressed peasants, does he not find his own settler’s savagery, which they have absorbed through every pore and for which there is no cure?” The logic of modernity asphyxiates its alternatives by disguising its own revolution as revolution against itself, only unmasked by the characteristic violence with which it is inseparable. 

Postcolonial Modernity

Three decades after the success of the war for independence, Algeria was once again thrown into a bloody conflict that brought into conflict a faction that seemed to resemble modernity and colonial influence and a group that championed itself as the voice of the people and the truly decolonized Algeria. In 1992, the government—which had seen rule by only one party, the FLN, since decolonization—cancelled the parliamentary elections because the Islamist FIS had secured a dominant victory. The result was a brutal civil war that saw high numbers of civilian casualties, estimated between 44000 and 200000. These deaths were often carried out in raids on villages that went unclaimed by either faction. In 1997 alone, there were 13 massacres that led to the deaths of at least 50 civilians. Marnia Lazreg characterizes the brutality as the second coming of the Algerian War of Independence; a revolution against the French and those Algerians (the FLN) who they see as upholding the legacy of colonialism.

The Algerian Civil War that was fought between two political parties was a war between two differently imagined Algerian nations. The FLN’s nation was Fanon’s nation—Arab, secular, and socialist. The FIS conceived its nation as Islamic; its nation was “to form the Muslim, Arab, Algerian nation in precisely the form that colonialism wanted to obliterate.” This nation relied on Islam overcome the Western cultural, economic, and political modernity that had sunk deep into the fabric of Algerian society. It borrowed concepts from Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Westoxification, a book that was instrumental in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Ahmad argues that the only way to shed the colonial influence is by relying on Islam, the only extant structure in Islamic countries that was not restructured by the West. The Algerian Civil War was then a war between the militant political party (now with the might of “The Algerian Government”) that was named “terrorist” by its French overlords in the 1950s and 60s and that fought to overthrow its colonial, foreign leaders and a new militant political party, forced to fight a guerilla war, named “terrorist” by the government of the FLN and that fought to overthrow the legacy of colonialism perpetuated by the foreign-educated national elite. In the process, thousands of non-combatant Algerians were killed, slaughtered, and murdered. 

Hannoum recounts another anecdote, this time from his childhood growing up in the Maghreb. He was assigned two books at the same time: in his Arabic literature course, he was given a book by a Salafist Moroccan, Allal al-Fasi, that treats on colonial exploitation. In his French course, he was given Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Both argue passionately against the colonial influence. The former is the FIS’s condemnation of colonial influence; the latter is foundational literature in the FLN’s anti-colonial revolution of the past. Yet they argue against each other; they are deemed incompatible. Neither realizes that modernity is the colonial legacy that each is unwilling to get rid of; that neither knows how to get rid of. This modernity is avidly consumed by Islamic revolutionaries and socialist professors alike. It goes uncritiqued. The Nigerian thinker Abiola Irele commented on the irony of modernity’s influence in the former colonies, saying that “we are conscious of the irreversible nature of the transformations the impact of Europe has effected in our midst and which are so extensive as to define the…frame of reference of our contemporary existence. The traditional pre-colonial culture and way of life continue to exist as a reality among us, but they constitute an order of existence that is…in a direction dictated by the requirements of a modern scientific and technological civilization. It also happens to be the case that Western civilization…provides the paradigm of modernity to which we aspire. Hence…the ambivalence we demonstrate in response to Europe and Western civilization is in fact a measure of our emotional tribute; it is expressive, in a profound way, of the cultural hold Europe has secured upon us—of the alienation it has imposed upon us as a historical fate.”

This quote resembles Mudimbe’s marginalized space, the place where the colonized mind exists. The Algerian “mind” then wears the hallmarks of colonialism: it is neither modern (as it was informed by colonial domination), but it knows that it is not of the past either. Meanwhile, Algerian political society has been ripped into a binary between the religious and the secular and the colonizer and the colonized. The FIS claims to represent true anticolonialism while the FLN, terrified of giving up its power, refuses to accept the inevitable democratic victory of the Islamists. In Civil War, political lines are drawn between citizens; they are Islamist or they are secular. Choose one, and you are safe from half of the violence; choose neither and you will be threatened from both sides. The terror of modernity reveals itself: the new binary represents small parts of society—the fervently non-religious leftists or the staunch Islamists—and fails to represent the vast majority of the people who exist within Mudimbe’s mindset of marginality—they are religious, and they live in the twentieth century.

Sartre illustrates the mindset of marginalization at the moment of decolonization in his preface to The Wretched of the Earth. The colonized, he says, realize that they would rather their traditions and their past to the “Acropolis” of Europe. However, “they can’t choose; they must have both. Two worlds: that makes two bewitchings; they dance all night and at dawn they crowd into the churches to hear mass; each day the split widens.” This is an impossible existence and the reaction is violent. It is violent against the colonizer and it is violent against the native who stands in the way. Whatever must be done to rid the individual of colonialism becomes tolerable to himself. But once colonialism is gone, the colors of the world are unchanged. There is still poverty, struggle, political dissatisfaction— the French palace becomes the Algerian president’s house. The dichotomy of pre-independence still exists—Algeria is neither modern nor is it of the past. The cultural divisions, tensions, and dissatisfactions still exist as they did in the colonial period, and so violence comes once again. 

Conclusion

Abdelhamid Ben Badis, a leader of the Algerian Islam reform movement of the 1930s, passionately claimed in a speech: “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, and Algeria is my nation!” He is emphasizing the parts of his identity that the French had negated—Islam, Arabic, and a national Algerian psychology. This is, despite its revolutionary anti-colonial tone, a modern statement. It is accepting “Algeria” as Algerian and it associates values to this national entity—Hannoum realizes that this statement would never have been uttered before 1830. Neither would there have been a Civil War, an Islamist movement, or a revolutionary overthrow of colonialism. All of these are reactions to the colonial moment.

In each period studied in this paper there have been commonalities: each was touched by violence, and each established binary relationships between different factions of society. In the first period, in which colonial knowledge justified mass killings and war crimes, there were the French and the natives. At decolonization, the battle lines were drawn between the pieds-noirs and the revolutionaries, and finally during the civil war of the 1990s there were the Islamists and there were the secularists. An elaboration of this process of modernity sees how these binaries can be created. Colonialism brings “modernity” which needs to create knowledge to sustain itself. This modernity and this knowledge holds certain wavelengths of human thought as superior, “reason,” “liberty,” “freedom,” and “equality” high among them. Ironically, a power dynamic develops between those who are seen to possess these qualities and those who aren’t. There are then two choices: those qualified to be modern by its most recent definition, and those who are not. The subaltern group, eventually realizing violence to be the demonstrably successful method of winning power, uses modern structures against those who had imposed “modernity” onto them. The structure of modernity then rebuilds, redeveloping the binary of the powerful and the powerless that it needs to sustain itself. Thus, the civil war of the 1990s was a continuation of the fracturing initiated by the 130 years of French colonialism in Algeria.

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