An Excess of Truth: Violence, Conspiracy Theorizing and the Algerian Civil War

• Published in: Anthropological quarterly 2002-10, Vol.75 (4), p.643-674
• Main Author: Silverstein, Paul A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Africa; Algeria; Armed forces; Assassinations; Causality; Citizens; Civil War; Civil wars; Colloquial language; Conspiracy; Conspiracy theories; Criminal conspiracy; Cultural values; Deaths; Ethnicity; Ethnology; Expatriates; Government; Hegemony; Ideology; Intentionality; Killing; Massacres; Political Culture; Political Violence; Politics; Rhetoric; Social organization, political organization and power, relations with the State; Social structure and social relations; Terrorism; Theory; Transnationalism; Truth; Violence; War
• ISSN: 0003-5491; 1534-1518; 1534-1518
• DOI: 10.1353/anq.2002.0068

This essay examines the proliferation of practices of conspiracy theorizing among Algerian citizens and expatriates in light of the current civil war that since 1992 has resulted in 100,000 deaths and an ongoing state of emergency disrupting nascent democratic legal and political processes. Seeking to provide transparent accounts of opaque military actions, Algerian conspiracy theorizing adopts a totalizing rhetoric that eschews uncertainty and fetishizes causality and actor intentionality. The article argues that such rhetoric outlines a shared political culture for Algerians across ethnic, linguistic, and ideological divides. While constituting a vernacular sphere of transnational knowledge production and circulation (a Foucauldian "regime of truth"), this political culture of conspiracy simultaneously provides a discursive prop for military and governmental structures of power whose coherence is otherwise placed in jeopardy by the civil war violence. What is at issue in the end is the role of social practices like conspiracy theorizing in dialectical structures of hegemonic processes December 1998, Paris. I have just returned to my field site after an 18 month absence. I phone my main "informant," Akli, a Kabyle activist who has lived in France for the last six years since fleeing the ongoing civil war in Algeria. He is working as a language teacher and hotel manager, and is married to a French-Kabyle woman with whom he has a small son. After standard greetings in Taqbaylit (Kabyle Berber) we switch to French. "So," he asks, "who killed Matoub?" referring to the July assassination of outspoken Kabyle folksinger and militant, Lounès Matoub, while on a family visit to Algeria. Matoub had been nearly killed twice previously, first by an state policeman during the October 1988 nationwide demonstrations, and again when apparently kidnapped by an Islamist militia in 1994. (The details of both incidents, reported in Matoub's 1995 best-selling autobiography, had been widely doubted by his detractors). Matoub was also a friend and comrade of Akli. "The papers claimed he had been killed at a false roadblock, that the government has arrested several members of the GIA [Armed Islamic Group]," I reply simply. But Akli casts certain doubt: "Which newspapers? Do you believe them? Who knew he was going to be on that road, anyways? The question is: Who had the most to benefit." Akli then rehearses the political logic of a number of possible alternative scenario-the gove