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Thesis (Pd.D.)—Boston University / Since World War II, the crisis in Algeria has intensified interest in French literature concerning North Africa. Attention has been refocused on Louis Bertrand (1866-1941), creator of the colon novel. Bertrand, born in Lorraine, graduated from the Ecole Normale. After teaching in Algiers (1891-1900), he abandoned pedagogy for writing and settled on the Riviera. He achieved membership in the Acad~mie FranQaise in 1926. Bertrand's extensive work includes twelve novels and over sixty nonfiction volumes. He contributed extensively to French journals. Critics early favored but later disparaged his contribution on personal as well as literar.y grounds. They have failed to interpret satisfactorily the unifying element in his work: latinite. By latinit-4 Bertrand referred ostensibly to the Latin peoples, to a core of their social and aesthetic ideals, and to the lands of lumiere in the western Mediterranean basin. He bade Latins rise to new preeminence by espousfug an authoritarian ideology based on class inequality of Roman Empire vintage. Bertrand determined that the latent unanimity of latinte might be animated by heightening the awareness of continuite from early Christian Rome to the present, with the Roman Catholic Church as proof extant of that link, and by appealing to the racial ego. [TRUNCATED]

This thesis is a report of a study of some aspects of the architecture and urban planning of the M'zab Valley communities of southern Algeria, North Africa. The interrelation of physical planning and religious/social structures of the communities of the M'zab Valley are explored. This study was concerned with the following questions: (1) What are the various environmental factors that influence the design values of the M'zabites? (2) To what extent is the distinctive style of architecture in the M'zab due to religion: the Ibadi heritage or Islam in general? (3) How has the M'zab social structure responded to outside influences in recent years? (4) What is the present trend of the M'zab urban communities in architecture and planning?

Farmers in the high plateau region of Algeria are assumed to exhibit risk averse behavior, particularly, due to highly variable weather conditions inducing income instability over time. This in turn directly affects their production behavior. The Eastern High Plateau (Setif) is not a homogeneous region. In the El-Eulma daira, for example, three different agroecological zones have been identified on the basis of climate, topography and soil quality. In addition, two distinct agricultural sectors (private and socialist) coexist side by side in each of the agroecological zones. This study constitutes an attempt to measure farmers' risk attitudes in three communes (El-Eulma, Oum Ladjoul and Beni Fouda) which are representative of the three agroecological zones of the El-Eulma daira. Farmers' risk attitudes were measured through the experimental approach developed by Binswanger in India. The technique used consisted of presenting the subjects, i.e. the farmers, with a set of alternative prospects involving real money. Based on the derived risk aversion coefficients, a series of tests was run to determine if farmers' risk attitudes are dependent on the zone and/or the sector. The effect of socioeconomic characteristics (age, schooling, number of working children, etc.) on partial risk aversion was analyzed. Finally, the derived risk aversion coefficients were used in a risk programming model (MOTAD) to determine optimal farming plans for private as well as socialist sector farmers. The experiment results indicate that regardless of the zone and the sector, farmers unanimously exhibit risk averse attitudes. At low payoff level, the distribution of risk preferences is more spread. A narrower distribution occurs at higher payoff levels (e.g. 200 DA scale). There was no evidence of significant difference among sites and between sectors. Also socioeconomic attributes correlate poorly with the estimated partial risk aversion coefficients. In the socialist sector major discrepancies between the risk programming model solutions and actual activity levels occured. They were expected because of the specific structure of this sector. The inclusion of government cropping pattern recommendations in the constraint matrix indicates that government interventions have a different effect on socialist farmers' welfare of the three zones. / Graduation date: 1986

Approved For Public Release; Distribution is Unlimited / Political Islam has emerged as an unambiguous threat to liberal and Western-leaning regimes throughout the world. Public discourse has focused on the Islamic nature of this challenge, emphasizing the cultural characteristics of the threat. In contrast, this thesis argues that Political Islam is essentially a political challenge. Further, states can and do dictate the political space available to Islamists. In order to illustrate this argument, Indonesia and Algeria serve as case studies. These two culturally, economically and ethnically diverse nations share a predominance of Muslim adherents. Each nation has struggled with Political Islam. Yet, the consequences of state policy have profoundly differed. Recent innovations in political science theory are employed to provide a uniform structure of comparison between the two case studies. The thesis concludes that states make a choice whether to play offense or defense against their political opposition. When states choose the offensive, using targeted, preemptive repression to subsume the political space, they are successful. When states choose the defensive, using indiscriminate, reactive repression to foreclose political space, they are failures. This thesis implies that states, far from being hapless victims of fervently religious movements, can exercise a broad array of policy options to compete with Political Islam. / Major, United States Marine Corps / Lieutenant Commander, United States Navy

Thesis advisor: Julian Bourg / The social and cultural aftershocks of the end of French empire in Algeria reverberated throughout the former colony and metropole long after independence in 1962. This dissertation illustrates the process of decolonization between the start of the Algerian war in 1954 and the election of François Mitterrand to the presidency in 1981. Rather than “forgetting Algeria” after 1962, French administrators, social aid workers, and the public were constantly confronted by traces of empire, and especially by the presence of Algerian migrant workers and families on metropolitan soil. I trace the evolution of a group of private social aid associations that were created to help integrate newly arrived families in the colonial era, and that continued their work even after it ended. These social aid associations acted as mediating bodies between Algerians and the French welfare state. They offered services to a growing population of Algerian workers and families to help them become more at home in France. As the number of Algerian families grew in the post-independence era, the colonial modernizing mission justified social aid associations’ interventions to “emancipate” Algerian women through social aid and education. The “slow end to empire” demonstrated by the growth of social aid for Algerians even after they were no longer citizens highlights the importance of studying not just the empire and the colony in a single analytic field, but also the post-empire and the post-colony. Furthermore, this dissertation reveals the social logic behind increasingly restrictive immigration protocols toward Algerians. Historians have argued that colonial and ex-colonial subjects created the potential for France’s economic growth during the Thirty Glorious Years. It would not have been possible without access to this cheap labor. Though the availability of employment helped to pave the way for migration initially, family and worker migration far surpassed this threshold in the 1960s and 70s. The perceived inability of Algerian families to integrate, which had allowed for the growth of social aid also led to its downfall. Paradoxically, the failures of social aid associations justified contracting Algerian family migration in the 1970s. Attention to integration alongside immigration reveals how the perceived social burden of welcoming Algerian families also conditioned their ability to resettle there. Against the backdrop of a faltering global economy and disintegrating Franco-Algerian relations, support for the specialized social welfare network for Algerians began to collapse in the late 1970s. As a result, the network reoriented its services to the whole body of migrants arriving in France. This “universalizing” republican approach to welfare conceived of social aid as a structural problem without regard to nationality. This approach, I argue, served the purpose of helping the French forget their colonial past in the years immediately preceding its supposed “resurgence.” The winnowing of the specialized social welfare network provided support for this revival, but not because France had yet to reckon with its colonial past. Rather, the French administration had litigated this past since Algerian independence in the context of social aid for Algerian families. The powerful return of “neo-republicanism” in the 1980s thus occurred as a result of the long process of decolonization.

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Authoritarian elections present a dilemma for opposition political parties. Should the opposition participate in elections that are largely unfair? Should the opposition boycott the elections or resort to extra-electoral means? What explains the choice of strategy among key opponents of a regime? The goal of this project is to further our understanding of the opposition's strategic choices in authoritarian elections. Focusing on a strategy - boycotting - that occurs more often under authoritarian regimes, this dissertation builds a framework for understanding the set of strategies adopted by opposition parties in authoritarian elections. In particular, I develop an incomplete information model of opposition strategies to explain when opposition forces willingly participate in elections, when they engage in an electoral boycott. The predictions of the model are evaluated with both qualitative and quantitative methods. I first examine the predictions of the model using case studies of Jordan and Algeria, constructing narratives of elections and opposition strategies in each country. Second, I test the propositions derived from the model cross-nationally using a unique dataset of every national-level election (both parliamentary and presidential) held between 1990 and 2008. A central argument of the dissertation is that the opposition's perceptions of regime legitimacy are an important determinant of its strategic decisions. Specifically, this dissertation demonstrates how changes in the opposition's beliefs concerning the legitimacy of the regime drive changes in the strategies adopted.

<p>In the Algerian city of Oran in 1857, a French civil court convicted and condemned to death the Captain Auguste-Edouard Doineau, officer of the Arab Bureau, for killing Si-Mohammed-ben-Abdallah, the agha of the Beni-Snouss tribe. The trial generated tremendous public attention The the civilian population in Algeria greeted the verdict with approval, but the military administration viewed it with great dismay. In fact, the intensely negative publicity the Arab Bureau, and the military in general, attracted as a result of this trial produced a significant change in the political structure of the French colonial government in Algeria. In 1858, Napoleon III transformed the administration of Algeria from a division between civilian and military administrative zones to an entirely civilian administration. Traditional accounts of Algerian history overlook or underplay this minor administrative shift. Indeed, the change lasted only two years, because Napoleon III returned power to the military in 1860. Nonetheless, this peculiar and short-lived change, and the circumstances which led to it, illuminate the problems and conflicts that the French faced in the early decades of their rule in Algeria. The trial of Captain Doineau and its resulting backlash illustrates the deep division between the civilian and military administrations in Algeria, a division that historians have overlooked but which held profound effects for the establishment of a thriving French colony.</p><p> The roots of this division lie in two major points of conflict between the civilian and military administrative branches: the extent to which the French should adopt or tolerate pre-existing political and social norms and, most important, the process by which Europeans acquired and settled the land belonging to the indigenous population. These issues were informed by post-Revolutionary French political thought and concepts of individual civil liberties. In 1870, the republicans of the Third Republic ended the military administration, the conclusion of decades worth of struggle by the civilian factions in Algeria to end the "rule of the sword." Traditional historical narratives treat this as a triumph for the liberal, republican values proclaimed by the Third Republic and consider a beneficial change for the colony and its inhabitants, both European and indigenous. The military administration, and the Arab Bureau in particular, represented, however, an alternate approach to governing the new colony that failed, ultimately, because it failed to conform to French post-Revolution expectations of what constituted a just and liberal government power. The military and the Arab Bureau advocated a tolerance for and acceptance of local legal and social customs, but the prevailing political culture of nineteenth-century France lacked an ability to accommodate this approach. Moreover, the economic need, and growing colonist demands, for more land for European colonization, accelerated during the 1850s and 1860s, placing financial pressure on the French government to dismantle the local legal and social structures that hindered the process of land appropriation. The French settlers and their supporters in the French civilian administration, in contrast to the Arab Bureau, wanted local practices replaced immediately by French laws and values. The different administrative approaches advocated by the civilian and military administrations, and the significant effect they held for land policy, created tension between these two branches of the French administration in Algeria. These tensions converged in the Doineau Trial of 1857, and the conviction of Captain Doineau initiated the decline of the Arab Bureua's power and its alternate approach toward administering the indigenous population in Algeria.</p> / Dissertation

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