Introduction

This book has its origins in a conference held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on 27–29 September 2002, on ‘Islam, Democracy and the State in Algeria: Lessons for the Western Mediterranean and Beyond’. In the United States the Algerian crisis did not receive the attention it deserved, even as this crisis raged out of control in the mid- and late 1990s. After September 2001, attention grew even sparser. Yet it seemed then to the organisers, and still does, that the situation in Algeria provides a key to understanding much of what is happening in the Islamic world, as well as to the broader Mediterranean context.