Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
Algerian society is shaped by a history of conquest and resistance, independence and reinvention. Understanding Algeria means understanding the forces—colonial, religious, economic, and social—that have moulded its people.
Here we explore the figures who defined the nation, the institutions that govern, and the questions of identity that Algerians continue to navigate.
A few kilometres from the ruins of ancient Tiddis, a fortified settlement perched above the gorges of the Khreneg in what is now north-eastern Algeria, a cylindrical stone monument has stood for nearly two millennia. Known as the mausoleum of…
In the spring of 1843, tens of thousands of people — families, artisans, merchants and soldiers — moved across the high plains of Algeria. They travelled with their herds, their workshops, their treasury and their administration. They were not simply…
In the 11th century, the westward migration of Arab tribes from Egypt helped transform North Africa in ways that would be felt for centuries. Political power shifted, Arabic spread into new regions, and relationships between communities changed. At the centre…
By the end of the 1960s, Algiers had earned an epithet that few cities could claim. Amílcar Cabral, the Guinea-Bissauan revolutionary and leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), is said to have…
For roughly three hundred years, the Regency of Algiers was one of the principal centres of a Mediterranean-wide system in which European Christians were captured, bought, sold and compelled to labour. Tens of thousands passed through the city’s slave markets…
For more than a century, France maintained a legal system in Algeria that managed to be both inclusive and exclusionary at the same time. Muslim Algerians were claimed as French—bound by French sovereignty, subject to colonial law, unable to invoke…