Algeria 50 Years Later

In 2004, Algeria commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the War of Liberation on November 1, 1954. This was a major event that ultimately led to the country’s independence in July 1962, after 132 years of French colonial presence. The National Center for Research in Social and Cultural Anthropology (CRASC) and the anthropology and social sciences journal Insaniyat, which it publishes, deemed it important to mark this event first by publishing a double issue of Insaniyat on the theme “Algeria Before and After 1954,” and then by organizing, in September 2004, a symposium on the “State of Knowledge in Social and Human Sciences,” which addressed the evolution of our understanding of Algerian society over the past half-century. The idea for this event followed various initiatives undertaken at the national level by academic and research institutions. CRASC contributed through the organization of meetings, such as those held in collaboration with the Institute of Sociology at the University of Constantine, the conference held in November 1999 in Timimoun, and through various other publications in the Cahiers du CRASC series or in the journal Insaniyat. The aim of the 2004 symposium—an ongoing task, in fact—was to take stock of the achievements of the past fifty years, as well as the gaps to be addressed and the challenges encountered in the development of various social disciplines in Algeria.