Hello and welcome to Almanac, the Oxford Middle East Podcast.
My name is Matthew Smith. Today we interview Michael Wallace, who has a brand new book out on Algeria.
And in our conversation, we talk about Margaret, politics,
the place of the Maghreb in modern Middle East studies and, of course, Michael's favourite books, the movies.
Michael Willis, fellow in Morocco and Mediterranean studies here at St Andrew's College, Oxford, and of course the Middle East Centre.
We've got a new book out, Algeria, Politics and Society From the Dark Decade to the Hirak.
So why don't you walk us a little bit through what's the book about? What inspired you to start this project and what was your research like?
Thank you. Martin Thank you for inviting me to do this podcast.
The book comes out of being approached by Hearst Publishers in about 2014 to write a book on contemporary Algeria.
I had written a previous book in Algeria based on a Ph.D. that I did back in the 1990s, and I wanted to write a look at the period since then.
And I noticed that in terms of the exact starting point in the exact period,
I wanted to look at that really there had been a significant change which had occurred in Algeria around the turn of Millennium,
the end of the 1990s, early 2000, when three big things had happened that really change the political landscape in Algeria.
The changes were in the fields of leadership, the economy and in society.
In terms of leadership, it's obvious change was the fact that the election of the new president,
Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and he came in in April 1999 and he stayed for exactly 20 years.
So he sort of defines that period. But even though the most obvious change that occurred,
I think it's the least probably the least important of much more importance was the change in late 1999.
So again, we're looking at that period around the turn of the millennium,
there was a significant upturn in global oil prices, and this continued for over a decade and a half.
And for a country like Algeria, which is heavily dependent on energy prices, oil and particularly gas,
this had a transforming effect, this rise in prices over this period for state finances.
So that was a second major thing that happened. And in many ways, I think the most important thing,
the third thing that changed was that there was a noticeable decline in the violence that was associated with the civil conflict of the 1990s.
It was a fairly gradual process, but it was noticing the violence decline from the late nineties into 2000.
And I felt that these three things unstable leadership,
civil conflict and a very dire economic situation that defined Algeria for most of the eighties and nineties.
And these three new things changed for sort of gain and produced a new set of things that came then.
So the book was really looking at a new sort of political landscape that was created.
But I also noticed about the time that I took on the book, the importance of looking at these things was further sharpened by the fact that
there had been big changes in two of those three things within the last year or so.
This is back 2014, 2050. First of all, in the field of leadership, Bouteflika was still president,
but he had had a serious stroke in April 2013, but effectively removed him from the public eye.
He appeared in public a handful of times after that period.
This coming on top of being quite ill since 2005.
But he was not really present on the scene. He was still president, but there was just a gap in leadership.
And a lot of Algerians beginning to question who is leading this, who is who was actually there.
So that was the other thing that changed. And I think much more serious was the steady decline from 2014 in the international oil price.
And I think within the space of just over a year, it lost 70% of its value.
And the effect on Algeria, where it heavily dependent on these revenues but had been spent and it actually sort of rebuilt Algeria and
sorted out a lot of the problems that Algeria it had in between time was quite clearly going to be significant.
And that raised at my time whether these two things would have an impact.
On the third issue, the decline in the violence associated with the civil conflict in the 1990s,
particularly given that Bouteflika had played a leading role in the initiatives to try and end the civil conflict,
particularly amnesties for the armed groups. And he'd have made it his issue to try and the civil conflict to reduce violence.
And secondly, that the oil revenues that had come in,
in huge amounts since the rise of the price of oil and gas had really helped underwrite a lot of this peace process.
A lot of the armed groups that surrendered and took up amnesties were given often rather indirectly,
money and jobs and businesses to sort of smooth the way in.
There were payments made to victims of the conflict, both on the side of the regime and on the armed groups,
people whose relatives had disappeared in state custody and also ordinary citizens who had lost loved ones.
And these were paid out in a lot of money, underwrote jobs.
There's a massive increase in jobs and housing with the increased.
Oil revenues, but had really smoothed this process over.
So that was a big question mark.
But with the decline in the price of oil and gas and the revenues coming in, where this would suddenly start to undercut the civil peace.
They had never despite there having been a peace process and a peace deal.
There's never been a systematic accounting of a conflict, this sort of peace and reconciliation process.
We've seen in other countries that the Algerians didn't have, that we were just people were paid off.
There was agreement that people wouldn't take anything any further and moved on.
It was often described, and I use a description of both because it was more a case of amnesia,
rather an amnesty as well, just people forgetting about what had happened.
So there was a question about whether that would actually now begin to fray that civil peace,
because people beginning to be increasingly unhappy about it.
And when the first draft of a book was finished in about 2018, we could see things beginning to possibly move in my direction.
But something very surprising happens in 2019. You get a mass protest movement, completely peaceful.
That goes on for over a year.
And really, the book sort of ends with looking at that process and how we can understand it came out of these 20 years before that.
So the book really explains, hence what happened without a decade,
which refers to the conflict of the 1990 through until 2019 with the mass movements Iraq,
Iraq being Arabic for movement, and how we understand what has happened in Algeria in that period.
And it sort of analyses thematically, I look at how the conflict was was brought to an end.
I look at how politics works in certain regions.
I look at pictures of latitudes just trying to explain how politics evolved and how politics works in Algeria during these two decades.
The queue walks a little bit through. The research was a lot of archival fieldwork interviews.
It was a mixture of things. Algeria isn't the easiest place to do research in.
It's not as open to researchers as others, particularly on contemporary issues.
There's quite a lot of research being done on the colonial period and particularly the liberation struggle.
Most of what I did, I was able to spend several months in Algeria conducting research.
I did it for some things. I did quite a few interviews with politicians and officials on the whole range of those topics.
Talking about those sort of things somewhere were easier than others.
I also used it to try and collect as much material I could that was produced by Algerian researchers.
I think that's quite important to do. There's a lot of very good research being done in think tanks, also just academics and journalists in Algeria,
but published in Algeria, available in Algeria, but don't really make it out about.
Yes, I spent quite a lot of time collecting those things that you just couldn't get outside the country.
I wanted I think it's important to try and give voice and give and access to people who are actually writing about their own country.
It was also just getting a sense of the various issues.
I want to be by talking to ordinary people, spending time in the country to seeing things themselves.
There's quite a quite a bit of secondary material in second research on Algeria, but it takes a lot of digging out.
So I dug quite a few things out. I relied on quite a lot of the some of the chapters on research done for my Ph.D. back in the 1990s that I
was vindicated by preserving all this material and not sure whether I'd ever use it or interviews I've done.
I've never ended up using or I changed topic or I never published.
I was able to use this material, so I dug out all my old notebooks from the 1990 and found some absolute gems.
It's often very interesting to look into things you didn't think were significant at the time.
When you look back again, you suddenly realise some very interesting things that some interviewees said.
But because your project wasn't focussed on metal with time or the passage of time, you see how more significant they are.
I did a whole series of interviews, for example, with senior people in the field in the 1990,
and I was able to draw on that one of the peace negotiations of how that came out of the civil conflict.
So that was mainly it was just gathering a lot of things to do in the Algerian press is certainly until very recently was very brilliant.
You've got a lot of it was a very quite a critical, quite engaged press and the coverage of politics,
international events and even in such relations with very good.
So you've got actually proper discussion, a sort of a critical discussion of what was going on politically.
And they were actually a very the source based journalists were also very happy to interview a lot of journalists just to uncover material,
get perspectives on things. So that was another good source base, the Algerian press.
Unfortunately, the Algerian presses began being clamped down upon even just in the last year, and it's no longer the source base that it was,
particularly journalists like Al-Watan and Liberté and several others were extremely
useful in providing a lot of information about local political developments.
I think that's a great jumping off point then.
So the Hirak movement starts in 2019 that makes headlines across the world and Al Jazeera, New York Times.
But then we haven't really heard a lot about Algeria since.
So can get this idea of what's been going on Algeria during the pandemic and was the hirak movement.
Achieved, if anything at all? Yes. Well, I think you referring to the pandemic is the right starting point, because the hirak continued.
There were two things it marks out firstly, but it was exclusively peaceful and it maintained that.
And the second thing, it was determined to keep going, whatever.
But the authorities in Algeria had hoped for during the summer months,
people wouldn't want to march and people kept on marching every week, every Friday.
And they achieved the first anniversary. Still, there were big weekly demonstrations in Algiers and the other big cities.
But then we get to March 2020, and like rest of the world, it became really unviable to carry on doing the marches.
So the movement voluntarily suspended the marches in the cells, and it was felt that possibly this may be the end of it.
But when things eased again in February 2021, the weekly demonstrations started again.
And the feeling that showed you that hadn't gone away, that the issues were still there.
They were still saying there hadn't been enough change that the movement itself had demanded initially the departure of President Bouteflika,
not because he was some terrible dictator, but because he clearly wasn't running the country, because he was so ill.
In fact, he wasn't even in the public eye. People in Algeria were particularly alarmed by the fact in his last years or so
he was represented at national events by an enormous giant portrait of him.
You know, the Algerians said, well, that we, North Korea or something, we don't even know who's running the country yet.
So this was one unhappiness. But even when Bouteflika resigned and didn't seek to run again,
they wanted to clear out of the whole political elite and they wanted to change the system.
Most didn't really happen. They wanted to keep the protests going.
But unfortunately, there was another second wave and the pandemic, as we remember, in 2021.
And this forced the the Hirak movement to suspend it in protests again.
And this time it was backed up by fairly heavy repression by the regime, targeting of key people,
making sure that there was no revival protest would happen every Friday in Algiers,
and they just flooded it with police vans and police every Friday there on in to make sure that it never really revived.
It hasn't revived for a third time. That said, a friend of mine who was very active in the hirak when I asked him, Is the Hirak dead?
He said, Well, it's not dead because it's an idea, it's not a movement and it's an idea.
And that idea hasn't gone away about that.
Wholesale reform in Algeria needs to give it a representative regime that isn't corrupt but actually responds
to the needs of the people and actually make full use of the resources that Algeria's being been blessed with.
So we really have seen the regime sort of reassert itself, its changes personnel.
And this is another very interesting aspect to Algeria that virtually all of the people from about 50 era have now gone.
But new people have come in or in reality, recycled people have come back in with virtually hardly a ripple on what has gone on.
So the regime has been able to replace itself and continue with pretty much the same trajectory as before,
which shows the resilience of the regime and also how it isn't really based in individual personalities.
It's all based on institutional actors and people coming through the ranks.
There's other countries in the Arab Maghreb. So if your mind, let's turn to Tunisia,
which just had a large referendum this summer that some commentators have said this is the end of the Arab Spring project in Tunisia.
That and others once dreams of an open and free democracy after Ben Ali are now gone with this national referendum led by Kais Saied.
So what do you think of that? I think it's really quite disappointing and depressing what's happened in Tunisia.
You've really basically got the reassertion of a much more authoritarian regime, more precisely through the suspension of a democratic part of it.
The current president, Kais Saied, was democratically elected in 2019, but then in the summer of 2021,
decided to suspend the parliament and just suspend and rewrite the constitution,
basically giving himself most of the powers and making sure the other institutions
were fairly subservient to him in a way that really wasn't democratic.
The parties were really pushed out of the system. There are now scheduled to be elections in a couple of weeks time.
The parties are not allowed to participate in it. Everybody is an individual candidate.
The judiciary has been hemmed in. The press has been hemmed in.
The parties have.
And really, you're seeing really the dismantling of a lot of the democratic structures that were put in place ten years ago after revolution.
How permanent? That was difficult to say. Certainly it hasn't been much resistance.
I think one of the problems is the opposition in Tunisia is waiting for the high side regime to fall apart and then to move it.
But that's not guarantee the damage inflicted in between time.
I think there's several things going on there. I think there was. Disillusion of the parties and the processes, and I think my side exploited that.
But most of the disillusionment was to do with economic unhappiness, with the very dire economic situation that Tunisia finds itself into.
Jobs best case didn't come with some grand new economic plan.
He came with a plan to reorganise the constitution arrangements of Tunisia.
He's a constitutional lawyer, and that didn't really solve anything. So I think Tunisia, economically, people's unhappiness they ever were.
He is getting people to vote for various things he wants, but below 30% of the population are voting.
Most people are even more disillusioned with things than before.
So rather it isn't quite a return to a binary system, but it's progressing along that road.
And you may end up seeing Tunisia in one of these semi democracies.
Unfortunately, I've been hearing from scholars, including yourself and some of your thesis students,
both on the master's level of the differ level, that there's a significant sort of nostalgia for the Habib Bourguiba times now in modern Tunisia.
Can you talk a little bit about that? Yes, this is a sort of inevitable phenomenon.
You often get in the situation with the fact that after the revolution,
with the new constitution arrangements, no party dominated and there were multi-party coalitions.
The there wasn't a huge improvement in the social economic situation in Tunisia.
Many reasons for that.
And there began to be a slight nostalgia for the days of the more authoritarian rule, not so much under the last dictator Ben Ali,
but his predecessor, Habib Bourguiba, who was the founder of modern Tunisia, or as the sort of leader for main nationalist movement.
And I think you're seeing echoes of this in present sight.
I mean, this is just us. This is the view.
And you hear it in many societies about the need for a strong man to take control of the situation.
All these squabbling political parties need to be pushed out of the way.
Everybody knows what needs to be done. And I think there's a little bit of a nostalgia coming there.
But whether it actually produces anything and actually improves the everyday lot of most Tunisians,
I very much doubt and I think also there's a lot of this nostalgia is left.
A lot of nostalgia isn't actually really based on reality.
With you go back to the certainly the last decade or so given he was very well regarded by the population in the sixties and seventies,
but by the end he'd become substantially senile and the country really wanted to see the back of him,
not because they didn't respect what he did, but because he was really capable of running the country and was running it completely personally
because he believed he was the only one who understood what needed to be done in Tunisia.
So I don't think people want to get rid of him. They now look back and said it was wonderful and everything was great under him.
But I think it's a rather, as with most nostalgia, a little bit rose tinted.
It's now moving back across the Maghreb towards the Atlantic and also Morocco.
Morocco's been going through a bit of an identity crisis, hasn't it, in the past couple of years.
So they've been turning less towards the Arab world, more towards their African identity and their other minority identities.
I know you've been supervising some students who've been looking at that.
So what does that been looking like in the kingdom of Morocco?
Yes, I think one of the interesting things have been going on in Morocco was a discussion of Moroccan identity and its place in the world.
Its place in the region has been evolving, is probably most evident in the greater emphasis given to aspects of its history
and identity that haven't perhaps had the prominence it had in the past.
You see that certainly in the last ten years, Morocco's put a lot more emphasis on its place in Africa.
That's seen in expanded trade, expanded diplomacy.
But King of Morocco visits sub-Saharan Africa a lot. And there's a big push to see Morocco as much more part of the African continent.
At the same time, there's been a great expansion with official backing of the role and significance
in place of the country's amazing Berber culture and identity and history.
A language sample the Berber language time as it is now, an official language of Morocco alongside Arabic.
Those sort of changes have been introduced. There's been a lot more interest and emphasis and research done on Morocco's extensive Jewish past.
Up until 50, 60, 70 years ago, Morocco had the largest Jewish population of any country in the Arab world, vested with substantial connections there.
And Morocco put a lot of emphasis on that. So you get these other forms of identity being pushed.
But at the same time, it's is what some students have been looking at is what is being pushed back.
And clearly, one of the identities that's being pushed back about is the Arab identity of Morocco.
That's not to say it's ignored. Arabic is still my language, but it is is seen as much less important.
Now, there are various reasons for that, but I think one of them is I think Morocco is interested.
In creating a little bit of separation of itself from the wider Arab world.
And I think one of the main reasons to that is to sort of insulate it from, can we say, pan Arab movements and tendencies,
particularly something like what became known as the Arab Spring, the movements of 2011.
The government dealt with it fairly effectively. There weren't huge major changes.
There were too much upheaval, but it was clearly concerned.
But things could have been worse.
And I think this is part of the process of saying, well, we can't really have an Arab Spring if we're not really Arab.
We've got all these other things going on. You see it played in practical things as well.
It's much more emphasis on other parts of world. The normalisation of relations with Israel is part of that movement away from the Arab world.
Also obviously linking him with its emphasis of its significant Jewish heritage.
Also a feeling, I suppose, that parts of the Middle East and the Arab world are somehow seen as problematic by other parts of the world.
So Morocco likes to separate itself. But some above all of this is a forging of a very moroccan, centred notion of identity.
So you get discussions of Moroccan Islam with big emphasis on colloquial Moroccan Arabic as a distinct language, but it's even basic taught as such.
And that should be written as she begins to see in adverts, for example, things adverts written in Derbyshire.
Oh, wow. Which is quite a, quite a new thing. And that's part of this idea that Morocco has its own very particular identity.
So the national identity is strength, and that strengthens the central government and also insulates Morocco against these more transnational trends,
which could be destabilising for it and having a move away from current events of the region.
Let's talk a little bit about the field of Middle East studies generally.
You study the Maghreb, but often Middle East studies programs are dominated by scholars of the MUSHTAQ.
Yeah. So as a Maghreb scholar, how do you find the most?
Should I focus on Middle East studies? How do other Maghreb scholars navigate that?
And where is the beginning of true Maghreb scholarship and Maghreb scholars saying,
we need to really study this part of the world in a significant way like we do, say, Egypt or the Gulf of Oman?
I think there's been there's been changes. I think it's natural in the Anglophone world and particularly in Britain,
that the emphasis has been on the East and our world lost track of the Levant, Egypt, the Gulf, and they have burglary.
Historically, Britain was much more engaged in the colonial period in these parts of the Middle East.
Research naturally was on because of family connections and through institutional connections.
Those are the people working on history will use with archives of the British archives we have here at Middle East Centre.
A lot of is come from British officials who served in the Gulf at that time.
So these connections are quite normal.
The Middle East historically has also tended to have more going on it in terms of politically political in affairs.
We think of the Arab-Israeli conflict, we think of the wars in the Gulf, those sort of things.
So it's natural. Most people work on it, but really it is the Maghreb in that sense was was really a very,
very minor party that hardly ever got studied in British institutions, even as late as the early 1990s.
When I started studying about that, there were very few people working the Maghreb and I was joke and say when I started working on it,
and if I was in a middle East event in Britain and I mentioned that I was studying the Maghreb,
I was studying Algiers at that point, I get sort of rather puzzled, looks from people who would say, Well, I don't really know anything west of Cairo.
And then they'd sort of look brightly and say, Well, oh yes.
My wife's cousin went on holiday to Tunisia a few years ago and seems very nice there and there was very little her, not that.
And I was in my department, I was in at the University of Durham,
I was put in will be only one person working on anything again west of Cairo, somebody was working on Libya.
Suddenly anyone. But I think that's substantially changed. There's a lot more interest in the longer.
I mean, the other reason for it was a fact that really had been left to France as the main colonial past,
certainly in Algeria, changes in Morocco and the French study. But I think those sort of old dividing lines have changed a lot more.
French scholars are now working from Australia and a lot more Anglophone scholars working on the Maghreb.
Like me, I've seen more and more people come through. We still really are this sort of sister of Middle Eastern studies.
I teach, for example, in the Middle East Centre, not not the Middle Eastern North African centre,
but agree that your study on math and beyond is the degree of modern Middle Eastern studies.
There's no mention of North Africa or the Maghreb. I find that I think that with that I'd like to see about change one day.
It may not change anytime soon, but we certainly cover Margaret Thatcher.
But in terms of interest, obviously I'm interested in that and I can explain why I'm interested in it.
I went on after doing my peers in Algeria, I went to Morocco for seven years at university, so I had my interest there.
But I've noticed there's been a growth and I can look at it for example in certainly the graduate work but we don't really centre.
When I arrived Millie Centre in 2004, eight years ago, that makes me feel very old.
I assume that when I took Dphil students that I would have only a very occasional one would
assume a lot grip and I would work on other themes that were things to me at least pretty well.
All of my graduate medical students over the last 18 years have been watching the same people come in on that.
Even more gratifying is the fact that I offer an option in politics of Margaret, and that's offered most homes to students on the anvil.
And I see and students take it but interesting enough it's not because they come with background
in the MARGARET but a lot of students just want to study something they haven't studied before.
So the novelty of a MARGARET has actually drawn students into sort of my options,
several of whom have gone on to the fields in the now established academics working on that.
So but it was due to the novelty. When it becomes less of a novelty, I don't know whether I'll get so many students, but I don't know.
But certainly has grown. A lot of things have changed that there's a lot more interest.
For example, Tunisia, which was really very few people studied before Revolution 2011, you didn't go to it was a police state and police states.
As most people know, we're not only difficult places to study, we're not terribly interested in things to study.
Well, it's just the same thing happening. But I'd go round rounds and they'd say, Well, basically Ben Ali runs everything and everything's ready,
repressed and the same as when he came three years ago.
Unfortunately, we're back with a revolution that changed massively, and Tunisia actually became a huge site to research.
An enormous amount of research has been going, which I think is fascinating.
And most of the research is focussed on the post-revolution period.
And now I've been trying to encourage him to do stuff on pre-revolution.
Now Tunisia's much more accessible, but you almost have the opposite problem with other parts of a region being more difficult to visit.
There's almost been overfocus on Tunisia. There's the ongoing problem, I think in the offing.
Get a lot of things where people study things that are easier to study and then study things that are more difficult to study.
I think there are reasons for that. We try and correct that.
That's one of the reasons I wrote the book on Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco are much easier to study online.
I can find out much more to and I could probably better book something.
But I felt that Algeria needed to have something written about it because it was difficult to research.
It is difficult to get visas to do research there.
People are less open to being interviewed and to try and find out what has actually happened in the system.
So I think overall thing, things have changed quite a bit.
There is more and more interest. I think it's beginning to even out,
but I still like to moan that I'm really a little bit forgotten about and that nobody really is interested
in things that happened west of Cairo when actually I think there's a lot that happens west of cotton.
We talk a lot about the greats and Middle East studies like Albert Karani, who are some of the the great Maghreb studies.
That was a generation that really came out and did most of their research in the 1960s and wrote some of the foundation books.
I think you met you did my policy Maghreb like I made you read from a great was John Waterbury working on Morocco's book Come On to the Faith.
There's a classic interview David Marine after we were writing on Algeria, a William Quandt, Bill Quant,
who went on to work more on the Middle East peace Facebook was on that is a is a foundation one that was funny that we read that
in your seminar and also in Eugene history the Middle East seminar this year two books do not have an article by William Cohen.
Oh, yes. Because he went to work on more Arab-Israeli and other things as well.
So but he started on the ground. And in one sense that that's always a bit sad.
But we lost him to John Waterbury as well, starting work on Egypt.
After that he became more difficult or less interesting to work on the Maghreb, but these are still some of the research done in the climate.
Henri work here in Tunisia was another one. People were interested in the region because it was about time of independence.
But really things drift away.
In the seventies, eighties, you don't get the same number of people that people in Britain, for example, who emerged in the sort of seventies,
Hugh Robert's work in Algeria, and then George Joffe, A worked across the region that she working on Morocco, began to put forth.
When I came in the eighties,
there hadn't been a lot of people studying and and really things began to revive a little bit in the 1960, the generation nineties.
So a lot of those people who were from the sixties, Bill Zalman, is another person who did a lot of very good early work on that period.
So that was in one sense the Golden Age and it's nice to try and get more people coming in later on, regrettably.
Charles Joffe, they just died earlier this year and that generation is beginning to pass through.
And I hope the new generation will come, will come through. But we really did build on a lot of the great work they had done.
One of our last question we ask every guest and we don't prep for X. We want a genuine outsider.
What's your favourite book on the Middle East that you would recommend to our listeners?
What have you picked? One vote. Either this sparked my interest or this is something I think everybody wants to know.
Something about the Middle East should have to read again a form that sparked my interest.
So I think the first book I write, but really, really caught my interest on the Middle East was Robert Fisk's intimidation.
It was a book on basically Lebanon from, I think, through the seventies.
I think it came out in the late eighties, a very early nineties.
And it was Robert Fisk, as you know, was the long time correspond to the times and then the independent of the Middle East.
And it was his account of the Lebanese conflict drawing a lot from his own personal experience.
He lived in Beirut for most of this period. Now, Robert Fisk went on to be very controversial.
Not everybody is a fan. He has a lot of critiques.
Even I would be critical of some of the perspectives he had, some of the things he did, some of his arguments.
But what I, I thought was remarkable, not even nation was that it could really inform and also get you to think about things.
And also it was the emotional connection.
He would write about things that happened in Lebanon, about the experiences of ordinary people, the best way the best journalist can read.
And I remember reading it, this is over 30 years ago and there are bits in that book.
I remember reading what I literally had to put the book down and just gather myself.
But then it was the things he was describing was so emotionally shocking, really.
But that made me think about the region. It made me care, made me interesting and in a way that brought it to light.
It's very easy to get lost in the sort of politics and this sort of more academic side of things.
This is really about people he was writing about people and the fact that the conflict in Lebanon really affects ordinary people in ways,
but we should really engage and care about. And that made me think about it.
I'm not at all sure whether I've been able to follow that tradition,
but in terms of being able to engage and think about the region and think about it in terms of people and how it affects people's lives,
I think that sort of writing, again, as I said, Robert Fisk isn't without his critics, but in terms of being able to engage,
that book really changed me and that really pulled me into studying the Middle East, you know, any parting?
Thanks for our listeners. Before we head off, come and study them.
Margaret There's lots of interesting things going on there, you know. Well, with that, my other colleagues both thanked me for saying this.
But yeah, we've done research on the Arab-Israeli conflict. A lot of research from Egypt come to study with Margaret, but nobody's about from Tunisia.
Algeria needs, for example, a huge amount of research, particularly on things that happened in the post-independence period.
My book has come out from Algeria where there is enormous,
enormous gaps for people to come and write a much better book on that, and I encourage you to come and do that.
So please do that. Morocco, Tunisia, fascinating countries come and study.
And one last pitch. What's the name of the book and where can we find it? Yes, it's Algeria.
Politics and society. From a dark decade to. Published by Hearst.
But we'll be poached by European states in a year or so this time, and you can find it either on Amazon or on the Hearst.
Excellent. Mike Wallace, thank you for joining Almanac. Thank you very much.
My pleasure. Thank you for listening to this episode of Almanac, the Oxford Middle East Podcast.
Almanac is the student run initiative of the Middle East Centre at the University of Oxford.
Episodes expressed in this podcast do not represent the official opinions of the University of Oxford for the philosopher.