Berber Government: The Kabyle Polity in Pre-Colonial Algeria Library of Modern Middle East Studies

The recent rise of Berber identity politics in North Africa has proved difficult to explain. The 2001 riots amongst the Berber of Kabylia - apparently motivated by the desire for official recognition of the Berber language - exemplified this. Experts had long assumed that before the advent of the colonial state, Algeria's Berbers were a disparate collection of kinship groups, with no indigenous political traditions or collective identity.

But as Hugh Roberts argues in this iconoclastic book, this view is based on flawed assumptions. For one thing, it overlooks pre-colonial political institutions such as the village assembly, the jem'a. Drawing on years of original research, Roberts offers the first comprehensive portrait of the social and political structures of pre-colonial Kaybylia.

In doing so, he challenges the influential writings of Ernest Gellner, and offers a radically new way to understand the complexities of contemporary Algerian politics.