Whither State? The Institutional Politics of American Nation-building Policy
This article discusses the difficulties associated with military-led stability and nationbuilding operations and argues that the United States’ current policy negatively affects defence capabilities, unduly influences how stability operations are prioritized and conducted, limits State Department capacities, and allows the military to be seen as the ‘face’ of American foreign policy. Several options exist for the United States to adequately address this issue to include the working within the established system, a reassignment of leadership responsibilities, or restraining the American tendency to intervene. The United States’ military has proven that it is capable of conducting nation-building operations, but at the cost of global misperception, painful inefficiency, significant risks to United States’ overall defence capabilities, and the issues of civilian control that follow from reliance on warriors in the role of diplomats.
Army administration tensions over Algeria's Centres de regroupement, 1954–1962
Abstract Thirty years after the end of the Algerian War of Independence the bulk of the contemporary military documentation has been released, after classification, and is available at the military archives of the Service Historique de l'Armee de Terre at Vincennes. This study re‐examines the French army's pacification policy and its strategy of regrouping the rural population into resettlement centres and re‐evaluates the role of the Sections Administratives Specialisees (SAS) in administering this resettled population. The speed and scale of regrouping is reconfirmed from army statistical data. The significant critical inspections carried out by the quasi‐civilian Inspection Generale des Regroupements de la Population (IGRP) led to army‐civilian conflict as did the efforts of SAS units to turn this damaging military operation into a more positive rural renovation programme. By the end of the war both the IGRP and the SAS gave ground to military evaluations of the situation and disillusionment crept in a...
Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule
During its long history as the French colonial city par excellence, Algiers was the site of recurrent conflicts between colonizer and colonized. Through architecture and urban forms confrontations were crystallized, cultural identities were defined, and social engineering programs were shaped and challenged. In this pathbreaking book, Zeynep Celik reads the city of Algiers as the site of social, political, and cultural conflicts during the 132 years of French occupation and argues that architecture and urban forms are integral components of the colonial discourse. Algiers' city planning, based on what Celik calls 'the trial-and-error' model of French colonial urbanism, included the fragmentation of the casbah, ambitious Beaux Arts schemes to create European forms of housing, master plans inspired by high modernism, and comprehensive regional plans.Eventually a dramatic housing shortage led all planning efforts to be centered on the construction of large-scale residential enclaves. French architects based their designs for domestic space on the concept of the 'traditional house,' itself an interdisciplinary colonial concept intertwined with the discourse on Algerian women. Housing also offered the French colonizers a powerful presence in a country where periodic resistance to the occupation eventually culminated in a seven-year war of liberation and an end to French rule. Extensively illustrated with photographs, maps, and housing plans, Celik's book presents a fascinating example of colonial urban planning. Algiers comes alive as a city that reflected all the conflicts of colonialism while embracing innovation.