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 administration of Algeria, and the neglect, displacement, and torture of its peoples.

The Introduction provides a nuanced summary of the actors, movements, and events central to the war for independence, and France's efforts to maintain Algeria as the geographic extension of sovereign France in North Africa. Johnson then discusses the research precedent and notes its limitations. By foregrounding nationalists' struggles on Algerian terms, Johnson argues her work helps remedy African historiographers' overall neglect of Algerian agency, voice and history, which overemphasize western and non-Algerian interpretations of the conflict and its aftermaths. She also notes how her book challenges those accounts that fail to trace the interconnections forged by nationalists with global actors and entities as part of the push for independence.

Chapter One details the history of France's colonial capture and administration of Algeria, and its pursuit of an Algerie Frangaise that benefitted the state and settler communities at the economic, social and also health-related expense...