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Abstract The role of the peasantry during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) has been long neglected by historians, in part because they have been viewed as a ‘primitive’ mass devoid of political consciousness. This ground-breaking social history challenges this conventional understanding by tracing the ability of the peasant community to sustain an autonomous political culture through family, clan, and village assemblies (djemâa), organizations that were eventually harnessed by emerging guerrilla forces. The long-established system of indirect rule by which the colonial state controlled and policed the vast mountainous interior through an ‘intelligence state’ began to break down after the 1920s as the djemâas formed a pole of opposition to the patron-client relations of the rural élites. Clandestine urban-rural networks emerged that prepared the way for armed resistance and a system of rebel governance. The anthropologist Jean Servier, recognizing the dynamics of the peasant community, in 1957 masterminded a major counterinsurgency experiment, Opération Pilote, that sought to defeat the guerilla forces by constructing a parallel ‘hearts and minds’ strategy. The army, unable to implement a programme of ‘pacification’ of dispersed mountain populations, reversed its policy by the forced evacuation of the peasants into regroupement camps. Contrary to the accepted historical analysis of Pierre Bourdieu and others that rural society was massively uprooted and dislocated, the peasantry continued to demonstrate a high level of social cohesion and resistance based on powerful family and kin networks.
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