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The contemporary era of global transformations has re-oriented academic debates on the growth of non-nation-based solidarities and transnational cultural constructions. Despite this, social constructionists suggest that the concept of ‘diaspora’ continues to privilege the notion of ethnicity as the point of origin in the construction of solidarity between migrants, overlooking the differences of social class and gender. This research interrogates this contention by exploring the role of gender in shaping diaspora – a complex process by which migrant women articulate new identities and give new social and political meanings to their relationships with one another, with co-nationals living elsewhere and with an imagined ‘homeland’. It investigates the motivation behind the emigration of highly skilled Algerian women during the ‘Black Decade’ of the 1990s and its aftermath, and looks at the agendas of this particular set of migrants, the extent to which they feel they belong to a diaspora, and their attitude towards returning ‘home’. Their political engagement takes a variety of forms, but the research reveals that certain modes of online discourse and manifestations of a diasporic social consciousness are common to their self-presentation. In order to investigate their networks, I used Social Networking Websites Analysis (mainly Facebook) and a Respondent-Driven-Sampling (RDS) method to sample and recruit participants, coupled with 15 in-depth interviews. The majority of participants cited the amnesty law (which absolved the perpetrators of violence during the 1990s, including violence against women, of their crimes) and the rise of radical Islamist ideology as the main barriers to considering present-day Algeria as ‘home’. Participants appeared to exhibit both a sense of exile and a desire to be part of a diaspora.

Le 1er novembre 1954, la guerre d’indépendance algérienne éclate. Une armée est alors progressivement construite et organisée. En 1962, après sept ans et demi de guerre, des dizaines de milliers de combattants constituent l’Armée de Libération Nationale (A.L.N.). À l’été 1962, elle est rebaptisée Armée Nationale Populaire (A.N.P.). À l’indépendance, le nouvel État algérien doit transformer cette armée de libération hétéroclite en une armée professionnelle. Cette transformation recouvre de nombreux enjeux qu’il convient d’analyser, comprendre et expliquer. Conjointement à l’étude de la construction de l’armée algérienne, il s’agit plus spécifiquement d’étudier les hommes qui prennent part à ce processus dans le cadre d’une étude prosopographique. Cette thèse se propose d’apporter un premier éclairage tant sur la construction de l’armée algérienne que sur les acteurs de ce processus. En effet, même si de nombreux travaux historiques se sont penchés sur la guerre d’Algérie, aucun ne s’est attaché à étudier la formation de l’A.L.N. en tant que telle. Quant à l’histoire de l’Algérie indépendante, elle demeure largement méconnue et 1962 apparaît comme une date infranchissable dans l’historiographie de l’Algérie. Alliant histoire de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne et histoire de l’Algérie indépendante, cette thèse se concentre sur l’étude de l’armée algérienne de sa naissance en 1954 jusqu’en 1991, au moment de l’interruption du processus électoral qui inaugure la terrible décennie 1990. Comment l’A.L.N. s’est-elle constituée ? Qui sont ses membres ? Quels sont les enjeux, après l’indépendance, auxquels la jeune armée algérienne doit faire face ? Comment l’A.N.P. est-elle organisée ? Qui sont les hommes qui participent à la reconversion de l’A.N.P. ? Quelles sont leurs trajectoires ? Quelles relations entretiennent-ils ? Ce sont quelques-uns des questionnements auxquels cette recherche apporte des premiers éléments de réponses. / On November 1st, 1954, the Algerian War for Independence begins. A resistance army is gradually built and organized. In 1962, after seven and a half years of war, tens of thousands fighters form the National Liberation Army (N.L.A.), soon renamed National People’s Army (N.P.A.). After the declaration of independence, the new Algerian State must transform this heterogeneous liberation army into a professional army. This transformation involves several issues that should be analyzed, understood and explained. The study of the building up of the Algerian army, is simultaneously and more specifically a study of the men who take part in this process through a prosopographical study. This thesis aims therefore to shed light on the building of the Algerian army as well as the actors involved in the process. Numerous historical works have focused on the Algerian War, but none has attempted to study the formation of the N.L.A. as such. As for the history of independent Algeria, it remains largely unknown, as 1962 appears as an impassable date in the historiography of Algeria. By combining the history of the Algerian War for Independence and the history of independent Algeria, this thesis focuses on the study of the Algerian army from it birth in 1954 until 1991, when the interruption of the electoral process inaugurates the terrible decade of the 1990’s. How did the N.L.A. take shape? Who are its members? What are the stakes the young Algerian army has to face after independence? How is the N.P.A. organized? Who are the men involved in the transformation of the N.P.A.? What are their trajectories? What are their relationships? These are some of the questions that this research aims to answer.

Au croisement de l’histoire des juifs d’Algérie et de celle du mouvement anticolonialiste algérien, cette thèse analyse les trajectoires de la minorité de juifs algériens qui ont participé à la lutte anticolonialiste, de l’entre-deux-guerres à leur départ d’Algérie indépendante (survenu le plus souvent à la fin des années 1960).Avant l’étude biographique à proprement parler, la première partie interroge quand et pourquoi « les juifs » forment, dans les discours et pratiques de l’administration et des mouvements politiques, une catégorie politique en Algérie coloniale, et confronte ces discours et ces pratiques à la diversité des subjectivités politiques qui s’affirment parmi les juifs d’Algérie des années 1930 à 1962.Premier moment de l’étude biographique, la seconde partie s’intéresse au processus de « devenir-Algérien » qui touche les hommes et femmes étudiés, qui grandissent dans l’ordre du monde de l’Algérie coloniale et développent un rapport dissident à ce monde autour d’un moment de rupture structurant dans la plupart des trajectoires : Vichy. Dans ce cadre, lesmouvements de jeunesse et d’étudiants communistes sont analysés comme un des lieux d’incubation, entre 1946 et 1954, d’une algérianité fondée sur une radicalité politique et des sociabilités transgressives au regard de l’ordre social colonialEnfin, la troisième partie, consacrée aux parcours de ces militants pendant la guerre d’indépendance et en Algérie indépendante, met en lumière la confrontation entre les algérianités qui s’inventent dans les épreuves de la guerre et l’algérianité officielle que les élites du nouvel État imposent dans les premiers mois de l’indépendance / This dissertation, at the crossroads of the history of the Algerian Jews and the Algerian anticolonial movement, studies the trajectories of the minority of Algerian Jews who shared in the struggle against colonialism, during the period spanning the end of the First World War to their departure from an independent Algeria mostly at the end of the 1960s.The first part, coming before the actual biographical study, looks at the timeframe and reasons "the Jews" of colonial Algeria are considered to be a political entity by the administration and the political movements, and confronts this political discourse and these practices with the many political subjectivities that emerged among the Algerian Jewish population from 1930 to 1962.The second part introduces the actual biographical study and looks at the process of Algerian identification that the male and female study population is engaged in, men and women who grew up under a colonial world order definition and who developed a dissident attitude to that order, with the Vichy era appearing to be, in most cases, the clenching factor for this break. In this context, the Youth and Student Communist movements, from 1946 to 1954, are approached as hotbeds for a politically radical Algerianness and transgressive sociabilities in view of the colonial social order.Lastly, the third part focuses on the journeys of those militants during the Algerian War of independence and after, and highlights the conflict between the Algerian identities that emerged during the trials of the War for independence and the official version of a national identity the governing elite of the new State decided to impose in the first months followingindependence

Since the euphoria of a hard-won independence and the hopes attached to socialist nation-building, Algeria has experienced liberalisation, increasing inequality and civil war. This thesis sets out to explore memories of post-independence nation-building in the 1970s, interrogating the past-present relationship, by asking how Algerians remember their own recent past, and what these memories reveal about contemporary subjectivities. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in the low-income Algiers neighbourhood of Bab el-Oued, the research focuses specifically on memories of politics, urban space and sociability. While the authoritarianism of the period was rejected for its repression of civil liberties, the overwhelming narrative on the period was nostalgic, with the past routinely couched as more positive than the present. Memories of intense social mobility and rising living standards within the context of state-led development, competent urban management and warm neighbourhood relations governed by traditional morality and solidarity were used to critique the present; particularly the retreat of the state from its responsibilities since the 1980s and the fragmented, consumerist society that has emerged from civil conflict since the 1990s. However, social memory also translated a series of principles that demonstrated the continued relevance of the egalitarian claims made by postcolonial nationalism. Popular notions of social justice mapped future aspirations for the Algerian polity. Nostalgia was not only a matter of the past, but of the lost future of material plenty and equality promised by industrial modernisation that once seemed just over the horizon, but is now divorced from present experience. Such memories translated the passing of the dream of mass utopia, even though the modernist principles of equality, justice and progress continued to underpin both daily interactions and the political aspirations of the present.