The Battlefield: Algeria 1988-2002, Studies in a Broken Polity

Rating:
Summary: Turning Algeria Inside Out
Review: Hugh Roberts is the leading anglophone expert on Algeria and this book will cause you to question all of your pre-conceived and half-baked notions of what has been going on in Algeria during the last decade and a half. Roberts is a passionately committed scholar who questions everything and comes up with original and serious critiques of what passes for scholarship and with fascinating reflections that will reward your curiousity and cause you to think deeply about why we understood so little about Algeria.

Rating:
Summary: A work of considerable scholarship
Review: The Battlefield: Algeria 1988-2002 by Hugh Roberts (Senior Research Fellow of the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science) is a close and meticulous study of the recent violence that has wracked Algeria. This impressive history eschews oversimplifications reducing the conflict to simply Islamists vs. a secular state, or the generals vs. the common people. Carefully examining the makeup and motivating forces for the Islamists, the Berberists, various factions in the army and in the general regime, The Battlefield is a compelling dissection of the heart of bloodshed. A work of considerable scholarship but one which is easily accessible by the non-specialist general reader, The Battlefield is highly recommended for students of 20th Century Algerian history.