Conflict imaginaries in Algeria after the black decade: peace without reconciliation

ABSTRACT

This article presents the results of fieldwork carried out in France and Algeria in the spring of 2019 with survivors of the Algerian civil war (the so-called black decade of the 1990s). Interviews were filmed, thus allowing close analysis of not only verbal testimony (including narratives, tropes, and pronouns) but also gestures and body language, amounting to what Wetherell (2012) calls ‘affective practice’. Analysing closely participant reactions to the amnesty and reconciliation policies of President Bouteflika, as well as their own representations of political violence, the article moves beyond Taylor’s (2004) definition of the social imaginary as ‘the ways in which people imagine their social existence’. Focusing on constructions of conflict, the article argues for a definition of conflict imaginaries as the following: the production and reproduction of constructions around violence mobilised through shared stories, tropes and vocabularies which are inflected by time, place, multiplicity, and evident across all of these, affective value. This facilitates an understanding of how those who have survived political violence in the past experience its legacy in the present. While this paradigm is generated from Algerian data, it is hoped that it may prove applicable to other conflict zones.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article présente les résultats d’un travail de terrain qui s’est fait en France et en Algérie en printemps 2019 avec des survivant.e.s de la guerre civile algérienne (la décennie noire des années 90). Les entretiens ont été filmés afin de faire une analyse non seulement des témoignages (des mots, y compris récits, tropes, pronoms) mais également des gestes et du langage corporel – ce que Wetherell (2012) nomme ‘la pratique affective’. En analysant de près les réactions des participant.e.s aux politiques du Président Bouteflika sur l’amnéstie et la réconciliation, ainsi que leurs propres représentations de la violence politique, cet article dépasse Taylor (2004) et sa définition de l’imaginaire social en tant que ‘the ways in which people imagine their social existence’. L’article propose cette définition des imaginaires du conflit: la production et réproduction de constructions sur la violence à travers des histories, tropes et vocabulaires partagés, caractérisées par les thèmes du temps, du lieu, et de la multiplicité, et de l’importance de la valeur affective. Cela nous aide à comprendre comment les survivant.e.s de la violence passée vivent sa présence au présent. Nous croyons que ce modèle pourra s’appliquer non seulement en Algérie mais dans divers zones de conflit.

Introduction: the imaginary and conflict

This article presents the results of fieldwork into perceptions of conflict and transitions to peace on the part of survivors of the 1990s Algerian civil war. Drawing on theories of the social imaginary (Taylor 2004) and affective practice (Wetherell 2012), it will ultimately propose the concept of a conflict imaginary which, I argue, facilitates understanding of how those who have survived political violence in the past experience its legacy in the present. The immediate context for the fieldwork is provided by the peaceful protests of the Hirak movement against the Algerian regime which began in February 2019, but more widely the fieldwork concerns reactions to the post-conflict policies of President Bouteflika (notably the concorde civile of 1999 and the Charter of 2005, both keystones of the regime’s reaction to a decade of civil conflict). The apparent success but deeper failure of the reconciliation process in Algeria has resulted in what one of our participants called peace without reconciliation, and another ‘peace, but peace in the shit’ (la paix, mais la paix dans la merde).

The interviews which provide the data for the current analysis were carried out in Algeria and France between January and July 2019, hence immediately before and during the first few months of the Hirak. In retrospect this was a very opportune time, an emboldened moment for ordinary Algerian citizens, when the questioning of the Bouteflika regime’s legitimacy, and urgent demands for change (as in the slogans système dégage/yetnahaw gaa/they should all go) were in the air. According to Cheref (2024), despite its being closed down by a mixture of lockdown measures and state repression from 2020 onwards, the Hirak remains ‘a source of pride’ (because of its prolonged, wide-spread and above all peaceful manifestation) for the millions of Algerians who lived through the murderous black decade of the nineties. Both this reflection back and the period of the Hirak itself can be seen in contradistinction from official narratives, especially the Algerian state security forces’ repeated attempts to generate paranoia and ‘un imaginaire de suspicion’ based on memories of the civil war (Fabbiano 2019, 127).

Before giving an account of that conflict, known in Algeria as la décennie noire, the ‘black decade’, I want to introduce the key concepts underpinning this research. The principal paradigm, often used in the humanities but not always precisely defined, is the imaginary. In Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, Schröder and Schmidt (2001, 3, 8) assert that since violence is ‘a total social fact’, it is informed not only by ‘practice’ but also by the ‘imaginary’; hence violence is not just ‘operational’ in so far as it may pursue a functional objective, but also remains ‘a form of symbolic action that conveys cultural meanings’. Schröder and Schmidt also argue that ‘[g]roups follow cultural models of appropriate action’ (2001, 4, 9). This insight echoes Tilly’s concept of learned models of violence as repertoires of contention. For Tilly, such repertoires represent context-specific behaviour emerging within a distinct social or political group: ‘people in a given place and time learn to carry out a limited number of alternative collective action routines, adapting each one to the immediate circumstances’ (1991, 2). The sense of normative expectation here is crucial, and is close to Taylor’s definition (2004, 23) of the social imaginary as ‘the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, […] the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’. For Davoudi and Brooks (2021, 54) the imaginary is also ‘a performative act’ through which ‘relations of power’ are ‘reproduced and contested’.

To this can be added a secondary but related concept, that of affective practice. Wetherell (2012) notes that emotions are social as much as they are psychological, and that affective practice—the embodied routines and narratives that express emotion in particular situations—is both normative and collaborative. Rather like Taylor’s social imaginary then, or like Tilly’s repertoires, affective practice is ‘normatively organised as part of socially recognised routines’ (2012, 80–81, italics in the original). Simply put, ‘affect is a social semiotic act, stuffed full of meaning’, and narratives of affect share what Wetherell calls ‘communal and cultural interpretative repertoires of sense-making’ (2012, 94).

However, these theories have rarely been applied to studies of civil war. Imaginaries of conflict in particular have often been neglected in studies of violence, and indeed they remain undefined in the literature. To take one example amongst many, Igreja’s research into practices of watching film violence in conflict zones speaks of ‘imaginaries of violence’ (2015, 679, 685) without ever defining them. This reluctance to define violent imaginaries remains the case even when scholars—Schröder and Schmidt (2001) or Tilly (1991), for instance—explore how what I would call imaginaries of conflict shape the everyday lives of those who experience political violence. The issue arises no doubt because of the emphasis on shared practices in fundamental conceptions of the imaginary, from Castoriadis’s well-known image of ‘magma’ as a ‘unifying factor that provides a signified content’ ([1975] 1987, 101) to Taylor’s focus on the ‘ways in which people imagine […] how they fit together with others’ (2004, 23). But the role of the imaginary in representations and practices of conflict entails an engagement with what divides, as much as with what unites. Of course, the one can imply the other. Violence and conflict ‘may constitute an integral element in a group’s ideology of self-definition, creating a social imaginary’ and its ‘anti-social, “outside” counterpart’ (Schröder and Schmidt 2001, 14)—in other words, an in-group and an out-group. Nonetheless, as our findings show, there is more to conflict imaginaries than a simple in- /out- or us/them binary (cf. here too the dialogic concept of agonistic memory, to which I will return below.). In addition, attention to the local context is crucial. As Wetherell states, context remains ‘essential to understanding affective practice’ (2012, 97). The particular nature of the Algerian civil war (not just its brutality but its confusion, its opacity and the questionable rush to bury the conflict under a blanket of state-sponsored peace-making) makes Algeria in the nineties an excellent case from which to elaborate a more complex, asymmetrical approach to researching violence, and to understanding our participants’ narratives of ‘peace without reconciliation’.

This research is part of a wider project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, entitled Screening Violence, which explores local imaginaries of conflict embedded in Algeria, Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia and Northern Ireland. We seek to go beyond the universalising abstracts of high-level discourse about moving from conflict to peacebuilding interventions—what Roger Mac Ginty has called the ‘flat-pack peace’ (2008, 145)—and aim instead to understand diverse everyday local contexts, interviewing participants about their experiences and perceptions of civil war. To start with, however, it is necessary to identify the key characteristics and events of the Algerian conflict.

The Algerian civil conflict and its aftermath

The Algerian civil war of the 1990s was a complex and bloody struggle, principally fought between the state security forces and armed Islamist groups which had formed after the cancellation of elections in late 1991. The leading Islamist party of the day, the FIS (Front Islamique du Salut), which had been on the point of winning the election, was swiftly criminalised as military control was established and a state of emergency declared. The country rapidly descended into chaos and violence. Costing up to 200,000 lives (Stora 2001) and between 15,000–20,000 ‘disappeared’ (disparus), the civil conflict has been described as ‘a multi-faceted tragedy which has permeated all aspects of daily life’ in Algeria (Aït Sidhoum 2002, 396). The particular brutality of the conflict is manifest not only in the vast number of civilian victims, but in the grotesque nature of the violence employed to kill and torture victims, by such means as decapitation, throat-cutting, disembowelment and rape. A 2002 report on mental health in the aftermath of the war concluded that the ‘effect of the violence on the […] functioning of the Algerian society is immense: a lack of trust, feelings of hopelessness, and a decline in social cohesion and support threaten […] the population’ (Aït Sidhoum 2002, 402). Accounts of the war still remain contested, in particular around the question of who were the victims and who the perpetrators, summarised in the still-prevalent phrase ‘qui tue qui/who killed who?’ (Lazali 2018).

Although during the 1990s there were secret negotiations between the Algerian state and the FIS, including its military wing the AIS (Armée Islamique du Salut), no official peace deal was ever signed. After an AIS ceasefire in October 1997, other armed groups escalated atrocities and massacres. The militant GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé) ferociously targeted civilians, bombing public transport, schools, markets and government buildings (Wiktorowicz 2001). But despite infamous atrocities such as the massacre of 400 civilians at Sidi Hamed on 11 January 1998, accounts of the conflict need to be nuanced, and to avoid a simple ‘bifurcated model’ focused on ‘the state/rebel dichotomy’ (Mundy 2013, 34). Complicating factors include widespread media censorship, confusion regarding the agents of violence and the prevalent settling of private scores (Wiktorowicz 2001, 79). The suspicion and obscurity clouding the black decade have only added urgency to calls for transparency, while ongoing ‘ambiguity’ over events is one reason why ‘traumatic emotions’ still attach to memories of the war (Zeroualia 2020, 41).

It has been observed that in recent years ‘Africa has become a major laboratory for peace, a landscape of U.N. missions’ informed by the ‘transnational neoliberal technocracy of peacebuilding’ (Mundy 2013, 26). Such activities have not, however, emerged in Algeria, where under President Abdelaziz Bouteflika the state pursued a policy of amnesty and amnesia while keeping international bodies at arm’s length. The ‘central idea’ of the post-conflict regime led by Bouteflika was to keep the peace ‘through forgetting the painful past’ as quickly as possible (Zeroualia 2020, 47). Algeria resisted involving external bodies such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the United Nations (UN) in its post-conflict processes. Bouteflika was first elected president in 1999 on a platform promising peace and reconciliation after more than seven years of civil war. His concorde civile of 1999 passed a national referendum with apparently 90% voting in favour. In 2005 the government passed the Charte pour la paix et la réconciliation, employing terminology based upon South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (Beyond the rhetoric, however, there are very few similarities between the methods used in Algeria and South Africa to build a post-conflict landscape.) Bouteflika’s Charter was ratified by another national referendum. The figures are much contested, but officially on a turnout of 78% the proposal was approved by 97% of voters (Joffé 2008, 220). Such vast approval scores contrast strongly with our participants’ views on Bouteflika’s Algeria as a secretive regime bent on covering up the past. The apparent discrepancy between these popular votes and the frequently expressed desire of many Algerians to revisit the conflict and ‘find the truth’ of what happened may be explained by two elements informing our definition (below) of conflict imaginaries: time and affect. Widespread hope gave way in time to disillusionment as the Algerian state refused to explore its own role in the conflict, to construct proper hearings, or to engage in dialogue with victims. In addition, voter positions are not always governed by logic. Affect can explain apparent inconsistencies in the behaviour of individuals or communities. The model of conflict imaginaries I propose in my conclusion allows for inconsistencies which to an outside observer may seem contradictory or even detrimental to the material interests of the participant.

Theoretical approaches to reconciliation have not always acknowledged the importance of local specificities, but these can be crucial. As noted by Funk, ‘traditional Arab-Islamic understandings of reconciliation’ include ‘achieving a moral good that repairs harm done to victims while also working to build accountability and restore community’ (2020, 270). Funk adds that the ‘traditional reconciliation process known as suluh’ involves ‘humble acknowledgement of the truth with respect to wrongdoing […] reparations and social respect for victims’ and ‘a magnanimous […] offer of forgiveness’ (2020, 272). Such elements would certainly inform Algerian expectations of what might be forthcoming from agents of violence after the civil conflict—from the state in particular. Yet in the eyes of our participants, justice and accountability, a humble acknowledgement of the truth, and social respect for victims remain strikingly absent. The Algerian state has pursued a strategy of burying the past, and imposing its paradigm of reconciliation through a top-down policy of forgetting. In this context, our participants spoke about their perceptions of violence during the 1990s and since. As noted by Bull and Hansen (2016, 396), the desire to speak, be heard and receive acknowledgement is often found in survivors of civil conflicts where the ‘post-conflict environment [is] characterised by hostile social and political reception of their stories and a general will to forget about the past’—as is clearly the case in Algeria.

It is worth reiterating that the 1999 concorde civile and the 2005 Charter both served to legitimise Bouteflika’s regime and yet failed to provide dialogue, openness, or any investigation into the violence of the black decade. The implementation of the concorde has been widely criticised, since probation committees ‘lacked transparency’ and granted amnesty to almost all applicants—rejecting only 350 out of 5,500—’resulting in a de facto impunity for abuses committed by armed groups’; and the 2005 Charter has been termed a ‘self-amnesty’ by the state because it granted wider immunity to security forces than to armed Islamist groups (Arnould 2007, 240). In addition, both the Charter and a 2003 ad-hoc commission concerning the disparus blamed ‘rogue agents’ for the official figure of 6,000 disappearances (although other groups estimate the number at 15,000–20,000), whilst ‘exonerating state institutions’ (Human Rights Watch 2005). In effect, then, the Algerian state has sought to disappear the disappearances (Lazali 2018, 214). As a result, the fate of the disappeared remains a contentious issue and was often referenced during the Hirak protests against Bouteflika’s regime which spread across the country from late February 2019. As recently as December 2020, it was reported that according to the UN, out of thousands of disappearances dating back to the 1990s, only 30 cases had been ‘clarified’ by the authorities (Lamriben 2020).

Lacunae in understanding the conflict have been exacerbated by the actions of the Algerian regime which ‘made research into these questions illegal’ through the 2005 Charter (Mundy 2013, 30). Any attempt at ‘investigation, questions’ or ‘seeking the truth’ has been described in official speeches and discourse as Fitna, ‘seeking to destroy the country’ and its hard-won peace (Zeroualia 2020, 47). Yet in this context of state-sanctioned forgetting, imaginaries of the conflict are still carried in the present, a phenomenon evident in the words and body language of our participants. The conflict is inside them; as I will demonstrate below, they continue to embody and perform it, contrary to official discourses of national peace and reconciliation.

Findings from fieldwork with Algerian participants

Our research team carried out numerous interviews during the first six months of 2019. Eight are the focus of this article: of these, three were undertaken in France, five in Algeria. Three interviewees were Berbers, five were Arabs; three were female, five male. All interviews were undertaken in French and video-recorded with the participants’ consent (For further details, see note below.¹) Even during the period of the Hirak, when opportunities for debate and protest about the regime briefly opened up in Algeria, attempting fieldwork on sensitive issues such as state violence was difficult and potentially risky. The primary means of recruiting interviewees was snowballing, based on personal contacts and via local organisations. The sample here is not meant to be representative in quantitative terms; this is qualitative research, and seeks granularity and depth rather than breadth. (The examples chosen here are from a wider field of participants that we interviewed, but even that field—numbering around 30—is not representative.) It will also be noted that interviews were carried out in French rather than Arabic and that the vernacular language of Algeria (derija) is thus absent. Within our research team French was much stronger than Arabic, and as regards our Berber participants, they were more comfortable with French than Arabic anyway. Of course, language issues are important in Algeria, not least regarding social and ethnic distinctions, and the absence of Arabic here could be said to skew the study. However, this is a snapshot, not a representative sample. If conditions on the ground allowed, it would be most useful for future research to add Arabic interviews to what is presented here.

Filming the interviews facilitated the close analysis of non-verbal elements of communication and affective practice, such as body language, gestures and tone of voice. The interviews in France were as follows: two in Marseilles with Arab male participants (P and M) who had direct experience of the 1990s conflict in Algeria, and one with S, a female exchange student who had been a young child living in Kabylia during the conflict. P, in his early sixties, had previously been a candidate for the FIS in the aborted elections of 1991. M, now in his fifties, had been a rookie photographer in Algiers as a young man, taking photos of the early stages of the conflict before fleeing to Marseilles. Our youngest participant was S, aged 27, studying in France but having lived all her life in the Algerian region of Kabylia, and strongly wedded to her sense of Kabyle (Berber) identity.

Two other Kabyle Berbers were interviewed for this research. One was F, a female activist in her forties, who had been heavily involved in female-led protests against state violence during the so-called Black Spring of 2001 (when the state security forces killed and allegedly tortured numerous protesting Kabyles). Another Kabyle Berber with direct experience of violence was T, a man in his late fifties, an architect who in the mid-nineties had become the leader of a ‘self-defence’ group against Islamist ‘terrorists’ in his local village. Our last three interviewees were Arabs. Both O and B were in Algiers attending a Hirak demonstration against the regime of Bouteflika, and protesting the disappearance of relatives during the black decade. B, aged 68, is the mother of a ‘disappeared’ son and O, in his late twenties, the son of a ‘disappeared’ father. Finally C, a man in his late fifites, was interviewed outside his house in his home town of Blida. He had lost family during the black decade, when Blida had been an epicentre of the violence, in the so-called ‘triangle of death’ south-west of Algiers.

Findings are organised here in a way that reads across the various participants, in order to present what I contend are the essential components of a conflict imaginary emerging from these testimonies

Imaginaries of time

Conflict imaginaries develop over time. They also re-imagine time, reflecting and perpetuating subjective experience whereby past events can feel ever-present. This clearly applies to Algerian imaginaries around the war of liberation against the French, for instance, fed not only by traumatic personal experiences but by official mythologising of the ‘million martyrs’ in the decades that followed—although, as suggested by sources such as Malek Bensmaïl’s 2008 documentary La Chine est encore loin, the power of that particular imaginary seems to have been waning for some time among the younger generations. As Giesen notes (2004, 112): ‘Social constructions of collective identity are never unanimous, nor are our modes of remembering the past. Instead, […] they vary according to the life-world of the social carrier group and are transformed by the turnover of generations.’ It is the ‘turnover of generations’ that Bensmaïl’s film explores (amongst other things).

That said, the feeling that past violence is continuing in the present is reinforced for several of our participants through a sense that they are carrying painful experiences inside them. To cite Giesen again, ‘referring to a past as a collective triumph or a collective trauma transcends the contingent relationships between individual persons and forges them into a collective identity’ (2004, 113). Conceptually, this tendency can be linked to constructions of victimhood and hurt, and how these feed a sense of identity (Ahmed 2014). A feeling of what we might call historical woundedness is most evident in P’s articulation of what he calls the Algerian state’s ‘extermination’ policy of the 1990s (against Islamist voters and activists such as himself), and in S’s articulation of ‘genocidal’ state assaults on the Berbers of Kabylia. Both speakers position their group (political or ethnic) as victims of the Algerian regime, and do so in part by mobilising references to past suffering and past resistance. In answer to a question about current tensions in Algeria, S enumerated several past conflicts which she considered still unresolved, including the post-independence blood-letting in which Berber fighters were ‘betrayed’ by Arab factions in 1962, the 1963 Berber rebellion ‘savagely repressed’ by the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale), and the Berber Spring protests of 1980. According to S, these conflicts, never ‘sorted out’ at the time, have resulted in the return of ‘the same problems’—that is, the repression of Kabyle identity by the Arab-dominated Algerian state.

In the imaginary of many Algerians there is an ongoing sense of disempowerment which has become the status quo. The time of power can appear to stand still, while years may pass for citizens with no sense of agency or progression. B, a mother protesting in Algiers to find answers about her son’s disappearance in the 1990s, declares: ‘We went out young, we came back old, as you see. I was 43 when I went out for my son, and now I’m 68.’ State policy has encouraged forgetting, the fate of the disparus remains undisclosed, and there has been no thorough investigation by the authorities. Hence there is no opening to the future, no imagining of the future, just a perpetual present. As S puts it, those challenging the state have been confronted by ‘closed doors’, so that ‘we have become frozen in time’. O, the son of a disappeared father, states that living like this is ‘moral torture’, since ‘we cannot even mourn our dead’.

The weight of the past does not, however, mean that all participants are unable to imagine a future. To cite tropes used by several interviewees, the refusal by the authorities to ‘dig up’ or ‘uncover’ the truth does not always prevent imaginaries of ‘building a future’—usually one envisaged without the interference of the state. This wish is at times utopian: a ‘dream of solidarity’ as one participant puts it. Kabyle student S states: ‘I’d really like people to be reconciled.’ Her vision of reconciliation includes the Other: ‘It’s respect for each other which allows you to build something.’ The metaphor of building is recurrent: ‘to build a country you need a people and also memory, history’. While participants’ imaginaries of conflict are embedded in the past, some do envisage a future for ‘the people’. But others have a less optimistic view. The activist F begins to cry as she states: ‘It’s impossible to construct peace, because today, to go towards the future, towards peace, you cannot get there with impunity. [Pause.] Algeria will never have peace.’ Later she adds that this is because of violence which ‘goes back a long way’. F replaces the path forward envisioned by some participants with a loop back into the past from which there seems to be no exit. Participants’ willingness to envision a future is thus contingent upon conditions, the most important of which are an openness of the past to scrutiny, a willingness of the state to allow truth-telling about its role in past conflicts, and an opportunity for justice before a path or door can open to the future

Sites of conflict: internal and external

Affective practice is always embodied (Wetherell 2012). Bodies can perform routines and narratives embedded in the past, and hence in the conflict imaginary the time of past violence is connected to the place of the present body. The photographer M holds his hands up, spread wide, to indicate how he was chained up in a police cell in the nineties—the night before he decided to leave Algiers for Marseilles. Former Islamist candidate P repeatedly leans back and shuts his eyes as if remembering. During his difficult evocation of Saharan concentration camps where Islamists were incarcerated by the state, he pauses and swallows as if struggling to swallow memories of what happened. The student S uses a salient gesture to evoke her Kabyle identity: she touches her chest repeatedly, as if indicating her heart. She does this particularly when evoking the tradition of Kabyle revolts against authority, plus the importance of the Kabyle landscape, and the local values which are ‘anchored in me’. Her Kabyle imaginary is built of multiple geographical and historical references, including mountains and forests around her home town, plus Berber insurgencies from the 1800s to 2001, as well as the civil conflict of the nineties. S’s reference points are materialised by local sites including a café owned by her uncle where the bloodied handprints of a youth shot dead by state forces in 2001 are preserved on the wall. Traces of the youth’s death are evoked in her gestures during the interview, when she holds up both hands twice, indicating four handprints, explaining that these represent the victim’s twenty years of age when he was killed. To cite Giesen: ‘Even those members of the community who did not participate in the event itself can recall it by ritual celebrations and mythical stories’ (2004, 113). This is one such example of a mythical moment embedded in the Kabyle imaginary of conflict. Another powerful gesture recreating the so-called Black Spring (and in this case, mobilising eyewitness testimony) emerges as F testifies to what she saw in the Kabyle town of Tizi-Ouzou in 2001. As she recalls the killing of a friend by state gendarmes, she mimes their shooting him dead, then repeats the gesture with the following words: ‘the gendarmes arrive, he’s wounded, they pissed on him, [shooting gesture] they shot him in the head. That is what the Algerian government did in Kabylia.’ The emotional power of this evocation is enhanced by the sudden silence of those listening (F is speaking to a group of Kabyle activists) and by F’s use of gesture. In Wetherell’s terms, this kind of affective practice is both ‘semiotic’ (narrative) and ‘performative’ (embodied), creating a ‘moment of strong affect’ (Wetherell 2012, 89).

The evocation of place by our participants is most immediate in the interview with C, filmed on his doorstep in Blida. Behind him is a scarred wooden front door; to either side (offscreen) runs an alleyway. Describing local events during the nineties conflict when there was a 5pm curfew, he asks: ‘Do you see this alley? When there were terrorists about, people living in the mountains [points upwards] used to stay here.’ C then gestures left and right along the ground, evoking the scene when refugees from the violence in the hills slept on cardboard sheets ‘right in this alleyway’ and the passage was blocked by bodies. In a more figurative sense, as we have already observed, participants often used spatial tropes of doors and paths to evoke opportunities for dialogue and developments towards a potential violence-free future, as well as images of ‘closed doors’ to symbolise a foreclosed future. A vocabulary of passageways, routes and doors is used by T in his account of how it felt as a young man to organise a ‘self-defence’ group against Islamist violence in Kabylia during the nineties. In T’s testimony the doors, fences and routes evoked are actual places of violence (and defence). Nonetheless there is a certain symbolic value to these evocations. In the early years of the civil conflict (up to the establishment of the self-defence group in February 1995) T was ‘living in fear’. His conflict imaginary can be mapped as a series of concentric circles enclosing home: his region (Kabylia), his mother’s village, his family and so on. Gates and barriers guarded these spaces and provided crucial security against the ingress of violence, the external threat of the Islamists: ‘I put up electric fences […]. To get to my house you had to go through alleys, you had to go through gates: 1, 2, 3, 4 gates.’ These barriers were all the more important since the village was a ‘crossroads’ allowing access to ‘all of Algeria’, and so ‘indispensable for the terrorists’. The nadir was a day in February 1995 when two local youths were found murdered, their throats cut by Islamist insurgents. In reponse, ‘[w]e were united for a single cause, to defend the village’. The concentric circles of physical defence are mirrored by the circles of the family and the self: ‘From the moment that we started to protect our honour, the health of our wives, of our children and of ourselves, it was all good.’ Meanwhile, outside these circles of protection is the place of the Other, often coded as them, the terrorists—constructions of alterity which will be considered next.

Mutiplicity and multipolarisation

Various subject positions (for oneself and for others) were mobilised by our participants when speaking of violence. The well-established conflict binary of victims/perpetrators was clearly present, but so were more complex, shifting positions and polarities. The act of naming provided a crucial means of expressing these positions—especially the use of pronouns (including us/them) and loaded terms, notably the terrorists and the people (le peuple). Novelist Boualem Sansal has declared that in Algeria ‘the people are untouchable’ (cited in Harchi 2016, 249). Asked why he is in Algiers protesting as part of the Hirak, O replies: ‘Firstly we are part of the people. Secondly, we’re for the case of the disappeared and those kidnapped by the state, by the security forces in the 1990s. We are the families of the disappeared.’ At the same demonstration B declares, glancing round at the crowd: ‘We’re fighting to know the truth about the fate of our children. We’re here for the same reason as all these people.’

B clearly identifies who she blames for the state’s failure to investigate the fate of les disparus. Recalling a meeting with Bouteflika in 1999, she states: ‘We went with photos of our children, we said, “Mr President, what about our disappeared children?”’ Bouteflika shouted back ‘“Stay where you are, madam, your children are not in my pockets!”’ For B, all that has been achieved since the end of the black decade is exculpation for the perpetrators, be they state agents or Islamists: ‘They [ils, meaning the state] pardoned the rebels and automatically they pardoned the guilty. […] To hide their [own] crimes.’ At times, a simple pronoun like this (they/them) is enough to mobilise shared assumptions about the agents of violence confronting a group or community. For the relatives of the disappeared, as in the case of B, these violent Others can be multiple (the state and the Islamists); for Berbers they are often state actors operating over the last 20 or more years. The term they is enough to be understood by local listeners. Berber activist F connects the violence of the civil war to state violence in 2001 and since, by stating simply: ‘They killed, they murdered, they did everything.’

Student S dismisses the Algerian state as a genocidal dictatorship and the concorde civile as ‘a big con’. Photographer M describes the reconciliation policy as useless, bringing ‘peace, but peace in the shit’ (la paix dans la merde). Former political candidate P dismisses the concorde civile as ‘an agreement between Bouteflika and the exterminators, the ones who committed genocide, who killed Algerians […] to allow them impunity’. A degree of ambivalence is found in the words of only one interviewee, C: ‘La concorde civile? [shakes head] […] You can’t know who is hiding behind all that [makes “behind me” gesture]. You can’t know. Perhaps some good will come of it.’

While P lays charges of genocide against the regime, he denies the term Islamist as applicable to himelf and refuses to name the party for whom he stood in 1991, the Front Islamique du Salut. Instead, he calls his party ‘the ones who were campaigning to save the identity of this country’. After his victory against the FLN candidate in the first round of elections and his subsequent arrest, accused by the state prosecutor of wishing to establish an Islamic state, P says: ‘That word means nothing to me: I’ve never used it, I said.’ Instead he employs the trope of the people: the 1991 elections were part of a ‘rising up of the people’ and were ‘a tsunami of the people’ (un tsunami populaire). The people trope is mobilised by several other participants. Although its deep historical roots make it a symbol of national unity (the FLN slogan in the war against the French was Un seul héros, le peuple), it is often used by our interviewees to express division or dissatisfaction. The photographer M describes the Algerian people as ‘magnificent’ but abandoned. M voices what has become the classic triangular motif to describe the black decade: the army and the Islamists were both ‘accomplices’ in the conflict while, positioned passively in the middle, ‘the people paid for it’. Thus diverse participants, of different backgrounds, ages and ethnicities, often imagine a ‘popular’ subject that endures the injustices of the political order and political violence.

Looking more closely at the use of us/them pronouns in our fieldwork interviews allows us to reach conclusions regarding the potential among Algerian participants for transition from conflict imaginaries to some sense of peace and of reconciliation. Mother of a disappeared son B regularly uses they (ils) to evoke the faceless state: ‘I ask them what have they done to my son.’ When asked ‘Who are they?’ she replies: ‘It’s the state. And those who made Bouteflika president.’ While for some ils refers to the insurgents, the so-called terrorists, for B ‘there are no terrorists. They are the terrorists.’ That is to say, the state is the primary perpetrator of violence. At the same time, the regime is seen as using that very epithet (terrorist) to legitimate its violence against various targets. F makes the point that in Kabylia in 2001 the gendarmes in Tizi-Ouzou, ‘saw everyone as a terrorist’. Hence, she states, the agents of the state killed without compunction those they had dehumanised by that term (and also by the term ‘thugs’, voyous). Nonetheless, for half of our participants, the term terrorist (even more so than ‘them’) is used as a marker of threatening alterity and violence, applied routinely to the Islamic insurgents of the nineties.

Many participants (especially Kabyles) baulk at the presence of former ‘terrorists’ freely walking the streets. Unlike the faceless state, these are identifiable individuals, albeit often grouped together as simply ‘them’. S states that the concorde civile created impunity for the killers, ‘while the victims of terrorism are still suffering’. Meanwhile, those who ‘killed innocents’ are pardoned: ‘I cannot understand how they can be pardoned, they are pardoned for that, and you see them … walking down the street without a care.’ Asked ‘Who were the terrorists?’, C gives the most nuanced reply of all our participants. He sees them as ‘Just young people. There were even my own friends from when I was a kid. [He touches his chest.] My own childhood friends were terrorists.’ Moreover, he represents them as victims as well as perpetrators, since many were forced to join the armed Islamist groups, their adherence based on threats rather than on ideology: ‘“You come with us, otherwise we’ll kill all your family.” There are people who sacrificed themselves for their family.’ C’s later evocation of the brutal violence suffered by his own family in Blida at the hands of the terrorists is nuanced by this understanding, since he describes the position of those who made a ‘sacrifice’ by joining the Islamist forces before he explains how ‘they’ killed 16 members of his family in a single night. The enormity of this violence and the affective value it carries for C is evoked most simply by his repetition of the number 16, which he does several times, holding up a single finger: ‘Sixteen. In one night. Sixteen.’

The complexity and mulitiplicity that underlies C’s account of the civil conflict chimes with other accounts—such as those of Lazali (2018)—which observe that during the black decade numerous communities occupied plural positions; many either chose or were forced to support one ‘side’ while also maintaining connections, understanding or support for the ‘other side’. To this extent, then, binary constructions of two rival camps or of victims/perpetrators ring false in the Algerian case. But the conflict imaginaries presented by our participants did include binaries, too. Our final example is the testimony of T, who confronted Islamists attacking his village. T uses the pronouns them (ils) and us (nous) to mark a distinction between the two sides in his experience of the conflict (Islamists and Kabyles, in the absence of the third ‘side’, the army, largely invisible in his account). For example: ‘They kept quiet, them, the Islamists, they hated us, but they couldn’t do anything, because on our territory their position was weak.’ Evoking the catalyst for the establishment of his self-defence group, the murder of two youths by Islamists, T states that when ‘they saw the villagers coming, they fled’. For T and indeed for his small audience during the interview (local Kabyles), there is no doubt who they [ils] refers to. Against this is posited the we/ourselves of the family, the village, the region (Kabylia) and ‘our honour’. Mobilising the us/them pairing but in the singular, T says of the imagined Islamist terrorist: ‘It’s just him, he tries to, he wants to make war. Me, I’m not making war. I am just defending myself … that’s all.’ At this point T holds his hands up, as if defending himself still.

As noted above, imaginaries and affective practices are normative. Assumptions and routines are largely shared across particular groups or communities. However, there was a clear moment of tension or rupture in one of our interviews, with competing understandings of the regime’s incarceration of Islamists in the Sahara Desert during the 1990s. T constructs this not as an act of violence by the state, but simply as a tactical error, and thus minimises the human suffering involved. Asked who is to blame for the civil war, T replies: ‘The state. What was the big mistake of the state? To assemble all the Islamists, the FIS on a national scale, and to put them all in the same place … the South.’ (This is what Algerians call the Sahara, where the French colonial regime carried out nuclear bomb tests and incarcerated dissidents). He continues: ‘And there they organized themselves […] really well, in the sun, in the South.’ T smiles when saying this, making it a joke, and there is laughter from some listeners at the expression in the sun (au soleil). He is immediately challenged by an unseen female listener, who states: ‘But they were exposed to radiation, they came back with cancer.’ Her use of the term they does not preclude concern for the prisoners’ mistreatment by the regime. This is a revealing moment in terms of how those perceived as enemies might or might not be dehumanised. Moreover, in contrast to T’s dismissive account, the former political candidate P bitterly recalls how FIS members and supporters were ‘placed in concentration camps in the Sahara’ where more than ten thousand people were exposed to radiation in ‘gulags’. The manifest conflict between T and P here (and also the unseen listener’s intervention) reveals the plurality of Algerian conflict imaginaries according to diverse subject positions.

The intervention noted above, by a listener challenging T’s construction of Islamist detainees, suggests a potential for a more ‘agonistic’ form of memory, to use Bull and Hansen’s term. The latter state that ‘an emphasis on perpetrators versus victims runs the risk of perpetuating a contraposition between “us” and “them”’ (2016, 394). They go on to propose (399) an agonistic mode of memory, defined as dialogic and open-ended, avoiding binary position-taking (‘good’ against ‘evil’, ‘victim’ against ‘perpetrator’), remembering the past ‘by relying on the testimonies’ of mutiple actors including witnesses and bystanders, as well as recognising ‘the important role played by emotions’. This is reflected to an extent in our findings, most notably perhaps in the importance of emotion and affect in the performance of conflict imaginaries.

Defining conflict imaginaries

Based on the reflections of Algerian participants, I define a conflict imaginary as the production and reproduction of constructions around violence mobilised through shared stories, tropes and vocabularies which are inflected by time, place, multiplicity, and persistent in all of these, affective value. Following the analyses above, those characteristics can be summarised as follows: (i) time: the collapsing of temporal periods, such that past experiences inform the present and may shape what Xiaming and Chan call ‘dreamings of the future’ (2020, 174); (ii) place: the importance of the local, such as the embedding of conflict experiences in identifiable places, spaces and even bodies: (iii) multiplicity: subject positions are structured in ways which may include but also surpass binaries, hence allowing multiple identifications, even if apparently contradictory, such as actors represented as both victims and perpetrators; and (iv) affective value: a term taken from Ahmed (2014, 11), who sees emotion as social as well as personal, hence a shared value which serves to crystallise conflict experiences.

The fieldwork reveals participants who are living in a post-conflict Algeria while also living with imaginaries of conflict—and the mistrust, memories and metaphors that make up such imaginaries. These people are at a grassroots level and hence below the level of those political and military actors who organised the conflict and who are now organising the peace. They often feel disempowered, and want ‘answers’ (the bodies of the disappeared, the ‘truth’ about what happened). The most common position held by our participants, irrespective of ethnicity (Arab/Berber), gender, age, or, indeed, the location where interviews took place (Algiers, Blida, Kabylia or France) was a rejection of Algerian state policy in the aftermath of the black decade. That policy, although approved overwhelmingly in the 1999 and 2005 referenda, can be seen to have generated feelings of disjuncture, abandonment and disgust, including at the perceived impunity enjoyed by state agents and Islamist insurgents.

Reactions to the regime’s post-conflict policies were almost always framed by participants in terms of polarisation between the state and the people. However, in addition to this central binary, other distinctions also emerged, signifying that the framing of victims/perpetrators, in- and out-groups, us and them, was often much more fluid than a simple symmetrical model would suggest. Binaries do not always obtain in Algerian imaginaries of conflict (nor are they likely to obtain unproblematically in other conflict zones). This is due in part to the asymmetrical nature of the violence during the black decade, plus the confusion as to who did what (qui tue qui), and why. In the interviews, binaries were habitually complicated by triangles; polarisation became multiple. Islamist insurgents were seen by Kabyle villagers as both perpetrators (T’s testimony) and also (by some of T’s audience) as victims of the state. A mother of the disappeared (B) linked the state and the Islamists; rather than positioning them as opposing each other, as a binary understanding of the conflict might suggest, she stated that both benefited from impunity and that in effect the state were the ‘true terrorists’. While this multiplicity of subject positions is therefore local, it is not likely to be limited to the Algerian case and is likely to be found in other conflict zones or post-conflict societies—as may (subject to culturally specific variations) the other factors defined here as characteristic of Algerian conflict imaginaries.

My fundamental conclusion, then, is that in Algeria conflict imaginaries continue to be active, and that they present an impediment to reconciliation. Post-conflict Algeria remains riven with perceptions and vocabularies that continue to construct multiple divisions, complex and diverse. Among the data that came to the fore in our fieldwork, the most consistent factor was a mistrust of the state. The failure of the state to embark on a thorough and open investigation into the violence of the black decade has played a major part in the perpetuation of these imaginaries, generating feelings of resentment and anger at official amnesty policies. The result is a widespread perception of peace without reconcilation—a feeling that years after the end of the civil war, nothing has in fact been resolved.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [Screening Violence].

Notes

1 The initials of interviewees have been changed. All participants gave their consent to be cited but anonymised. Interviews were conducted in French and have been translated here. Translations from the interviews are by the author. Many thanks to Habiba Djahnine and Yacine Helali for filming the interviews, and to Giulia Fabbiano for her help organising the interviews and focus groups in Algeria (Kabylia). Thanks to Roddy Brett for his advice on an earlier draft of this article. Ethical approval for this research project was granted by Newcastle University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Ethics Committee on 7 March 2018.