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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Guy Austin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
This article presents the results of fieldwork carried out in France and Algeria in the spring of 2019 with survivors of the Algerian civil war (the so-called black decade of the 1990s). Interviews were filmed, thus allowing close analysis of not only verbal testimony (including narratives, tropes, and pronouns) but also gestures and body language, amounting to what Wetherell (2012) calls ‘affective practice’. Analysing closely participant reactions to the amnesty and reconciliation policies of President Bouteflika, as well as their own representations of political violence, the article moves beyond Taylor’s (2004) definition of the social imaginary as ‘the ways in which people imagine their social existence’. Focusing on constructions of conflict, the article argues for a definition of conflict imaginaries as the following: the production and reproduction of constructions around violence mobilised through shared stories, tropes and vocabularies which are inflected by time, place, multiplicity, and evident across all of these, affective value. This facilitates an understanding of how those who have survived political violence in the past experience its legacy in the present. While this paradigm is generated from Algerian data, it is hoped that it may prove applicable to other conflict zones.
Author(s): Austin G
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Modern and Contemporary France
Year: 2024
Volume: 32
Issue: 4
Pages: 445-459
Online publication date: 26/07/2024
Acceptance date: 14/06/2024
Date deposited: 06/08/2025
ISSN (print): 0963-9489
ISSN (electronic): 1469-9869
Publisher: Routledge
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2024.2368596
DOI: 10.1080/09639489.2024.2368596
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