About
After graduating from Oxford he undertook doctoral research on Algeria, spending a year teaching English in Bouïra in the Kabylia region and another year as a French Government Scholar at the University of Aix-Marseille while carrying out extensive fieldwork in Algeria in the long vacations. He taught politics and political history in the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia from 1976 to 1988 and then worked in London as an independent scholar and freelance writer in order to be able to follow the developing crisis in Algeria full time.
In 1997 he returned to academic life as a Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics, a post he held till 2002. In 2001 he moved to Cairo where he lived from 2001 to 2012, continuing his work on Algeria, conducting additional research on Egyptian political history and the history of Islamism in North Africa and working for the International Crisis Group as Director of its North Africa Project in 2002-2007 and again from January to July 2011. He has also taught at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex (1986-7), the University of California, Berkeley (spring semester 1996) and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London (1997-8).
Algeria was the great intellectual love of his life. He was working on a book on Algeria up until two weeks before he died. His tribute site can be found here, and his obituary can be found here.
Major Publications
- Algerian socialism and the Kabyle question (University of East Anglia monograph, 1981)
- The Battlefield: Algeria 1988-2002. Studies in a broken polity (Verso, 2003)
- Berber Government: the Kabyle polity in pre-colonial Algeria (I.B.Tauris, 2014)
- Algérie-Kabylie: études et interventions (Éditions Barzakh; 2014)
- Loved Egyptian Night: The Meaning of the Arab Spring (Verso, 2024)