Read more
Zusatztext " Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence is a well-argued study about the weaknesses of contemporary efforts to manage violence, explaining that it reveals the "antipolitics" in the framing of understanding and managing conflict in Algeria during the 1990s...The book nicely problematizes foreign intervention and conflict management by looking at Algerian violence in the 1990s."––Ryan Shaffer, Terrorism & Political Violence Informationen zum Autor Jacob Mundy is Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. He is coauthor of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution (2010). Klappentext Jacob Mundy is Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. He is coauthor of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution (2010). Zusammenfassung Using the war in 1990s Algeria as a point of departure, this study examines the ways in which the science and management of armed conflicts after Cold War has become increasingly reliant upon antipolitical, and thus highly defective, understandings of mass violence. Inhaltsverzeichnis Contents and Abstracts Introduction: Conflict Science, Conflict Management, Antipolitics chapter abstract At the end of the Cold War, a new kind of war emerged. It was to be found not on the battlefields of the new world order; rather, it emerged in the imaginations of those who sought to understand, and so manage, warfare in the new world order. At the same time, an armed conflict also emerged in Algeria. Slowly at first, this war soon became one of the bloodiest and most opaque of the 1990s. Yet the complexity and indeterminacies of Algeria's violence did not inhibit the new sciences and managerial strategies of conflict from appropriating lessons from Algeria. An examination of these appropriations of Algeria's violence reveals a tendency towards antipolitical accounts of conflict after the Cold War, as well as antipolitical managerial strategies aimed to prevent, interrupt, and otherwise control mass armed violence. 1 Civil War: A Name for a War Without a Name chapter abstract The Syrian civil war has proven difficult to understand and resolve. This is not new. With the end of the Cold War, the international community became aware that wars inside of states were the primary security challenge of the 1990s. What followed was an explosion in social science research on the causes and consequences of civil wars. At the heart of this research was the concept of civil war itself, and the way in which it deinternationalized a problem that had been treated throughout the Cold War as the opposite, as inherently geopolitical phenomena. This deinternationalization was thus a depoliticization. Understandings of Algeria's violence in the 1990s as a civil war ran into conceptual difficulties. These owed as much to the contested nature of the killing in Algeria as to the conceptual schema through which mass violence was scientifically tamed into an intelligible and manageable object: a civil war. 2 Greed and Grievance: Political and Economic Agendas in Civil War—Theirs and Ours chapter abstract As the conflict sciences increasingly began to treat civil wars as entirely endogenous phenomena, so too have conflict prevention strategies begun to treat civil wars in ways that are indifferent to the ...
