The civil war in Algeria shows no sign of imminent resolution. Yet little has been written about the conflict, its various participants, and the opinions of Algerians--indeed, even about what exactly is being fought over. Restrictions on movement within Algeria have severely limited the ability of foreign journalists to analyze these issues, and there has been a paucity of firsthand accounts of how the conflict has played out across Algeria.

Now, one of Europe's leading authorities on contemporary Algerian politics has gained the kind of access necessary to present a clear, evenhanded...

Since the 1960s a new assertiveness has characterized India's formerly silent majority, the lower castes that comprise more than two-thirds of the population. Today India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, is controlled by lower-caste politicians, as is Bihar, and lower-caste representation in national politics is growing inexorably. Jaffrelot argues that this trend constitutes a genuine "democratization" of India and that the social and economic effects of this "silent revolution" are bound to multiply in the years to come.

In the new global political economy, "privatization" names a transformation of the roles of public and private actors with the goal of reforming government policies and economic aid programs. It is an objective, a slogan, a fetish. But what does it signify? On the one hand, it refers to the process of changing industries, businesses, and services from governmental or public ownership to private agencies. But privatization now also extends to what are normally the prerogatives of national states: taxation, customs, internal security, national defense, and peace negotiations. In much of the...

The spread of Islam around the globe has blurred the connection between a religion, a specific society, and a territory. One-third of the world's Muslims now live as members of a minority. At the heart of this development is, on the one hand, the voluntary settlement of Muslims in Western societies and, on the other, the pervasiveness and influence of Western cultural models and social norms. The revival of Islam among Muslim populations in the last twenty years is often wrongly perceived as a backlash against westernization rather than as one of its consequences. Neofundamentalism has been...

This book gathers together French-language authors who in the last decade have played a part in the renewal of interest in the question of nationalism. This volume organized along thematic lines and with a genuine transversal approach, seeks to give audiences a glimpse of some of that research, whether related to theoretical, normative or analytical questions.