ABSTRACT
One of the many facets of the current civil war in Algeria, a war in which an estimated 125,000 people have been killed since 1992, has been the renewed importance of regional dynamics within the Algerian nation-state. From car bombings in Algiers, to village massacres in the Mitidja plain, to deadly roadblocks on the country’s major arteries, the conflict has been enacted in spatial as well as ideological terms. Kabylia in particular has been a site not only of the diffuse violence associated with the battle between the military and Islamist militias, but more importantly of increasingly violent confrontations between Kabyle civilians and the central state. This article focuses on the latter aspect of the conflict and the consequences it entails for the reinvention of Kabyle political subjectivity.
