A particularly vicious and bloody civil war has racked Algeria for a decade. Amnesty International notes that since 1992, in a population of 28 million, 80,000 people have been reported killed, and the actual total is almost certainly higher. This terrible war overshadows Algeria's long and complex history and its prominence on the world economic stage second in size among African nations, Algeria has the longest Mediterranean coastline and contains the world's fifth-largest natural gas reserves. Algeria, 1830-2000 is a comprehensive narrative history of the country. Benjamin Stora, widely...

In the Arab world as elsewhere, authoritarian regimes have come under pressure for change. As yet, however, democracy has not taken root as an alternative form of governance. This book on Algeria looks at both the erosion of the authoritarian model and the difficulties of making a transition to democracy. Within the past decade, Algeria experienced one of the most promising experiments of opening up the political system and allowing a remarkable degree of freedom. That initial effort failed, however, when elections were won by an Islamist party that was unacceptable to the military, and it...

In September 1978, William Quandt, a member of the White House National Security Council staff, spent thirteen momentous days at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, where three world leaders were holding secret negotiations. When U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin emerged on September 17, they announced a monumental accomplishment: the first peace agreement between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors.

Praised by some for laying the foundations for peace between Egypt and Israel, the accords have also...

"Having observed earlier periods of determined, persistent, creative and wise American diplomacy on the Arab-Israeli conflict, we are left to ponder whether that kind of American leadership and diplomatic wisdom can be recaptured. We also are left to wonder whether the supportive domestic environment in which previous administrations operated will recur, or whether Congressional and public support for Israel has limited administration options and thus changed the very nature of the American role in the peace process. Our overall conclusions in this volume represent a mix of process,...