Johnson, Jennifer: "The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism."(Book review)

• Author: Varley, Emma

Johnson, Jennifer. The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Jennifer Johnson's The Battle for Algeria provides a painstakingly researched and richly descriptive analysis of the strategic importance of medicine, human rights, and humanitarianism for Algerian nationalists' evolving and expanding political agencies, and the internationalization of their struggle during the war for independence. In showing how nationalist movements harnessed the humanitarian and human rights logics engendered by international organizations, treaties and conventions in the post-World War II period, Johnson traces the complex ways such logics were used to ascribe political as well as moral legitimacy to nationalists' fight for sovereignty. In so doing, Johnson then shows how nationalists, and the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) in particular, were ultimately successful in establishing themselves as a viable and legitimate alternative to French colonial administration. More than this, Johnson illuminates how nationalists' tactical humanitarianism, and the medical care and human rights attention provided to combatants and impoverished Algerians by the health-services division of the National Liberation Army (ALN), the FLN's armed wing, were intended to stand in striking contrast to the inhumanity inherent to France's...