In this intriguingly titled book, Jacob Mundy takes on an important contemporary issue: the domination of the study of intrastate conflict by and from a single, narrow perspective, and a related domination of the response to conflict with a single, narrow strategy. Within the world of academia, as within the international community, the choice of perspective and of strategy grows out of hegemonic interests, and reflects the triumph of neoliberalism and its denial of politics (i.e., power, its distribution and utilization) and of history (i.e., the history of “great powers” with the now postcolonial states). Hence, conflicts are viewed as internal, with no contribution from external actors; they are characterized either as civil war or as terrorism; they are said to be driven by the material interests of subnational forces, while states exercise no agency except insofar as they are forced to react. This perspective and related strategy leave the “great powers” “off the hook” since, as Mundy notes, there are no discussions about relations of power that ought to be changed, nor even about the role of former imperial powers in current conflict environments. Furthermore, no matter the extent of atrocities committed and numbers of deaths, the so-called international community, in fashioning the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) program, has its own idiosyncratic criteria for intervening: the state has collapsed or is about to; genocide is imminent or underway. And no matter the peculiarities of the conflict, it has its pet tools for realizing postconflict peace: South Africa-style truth and reconciliation commissions are universally advocated.

To provide substance to his eloquent critique of “conflict science” and “conflict management,” Mundy uses the case of Algeria that experienced protracted violence—some say “civil war”—throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium. In his estimation, writings about and responses to Algeria exemplify how scholarship and policy have gotten it all wrong: “(F)ew had bothered to truly understand Algeria's violence in the 1990s” (163); besides, mass violence linked to “geography, history, and power” (23) does not inspire intervention. However, apart from the occasional innuendo, Mundy, unfortunately, does not explain “what the violence actually was” (91), nor does he elaborate how, in fact, the violence was linked to “geography, history, and power” (although the implicit suggestion is that the international community unwittingly acknowledged those linkages since it desisted from intervening).

In developing his argument, Mundy covers a lot of ground and offers some compelling observations, especially toward the end of the book, in his relatively abbreviated treatment of decision-making within the humanitarian intervention “regime” and the fickleness of the international community in the face of mass atrocities. As for the case of Algeria, he goes to great lengths to show how the violence was understood, quoting from multiple sources, and then how the (mis)understanding informed the decision not to intervene to protect civilians. He suggests that in its denial of politics, the international community's response to the violence was ultimately determined by geopolitics: as did other scholars of Algeria before him, Mundy underscores the centrality of both oil and the 9–11 attacks. Since Algerian oil continued to flow throughout the 1990s, despite the violence, and international oil companies continued to do business undisturbed, there was no perceived need to intervene to protect civilians. And since the Algerian regime, following 9/11, could claim victim status alongside the United States, as the perpetrators of Algeria's violence were finally determined to be “Islamic terrorists” (while their identity had remained uncertain until then), it was enough to provide diplomatic and material support to the beleaguered regime in its counterinsurgency operations.

Mundy devotes the better part of four chapters to elucidating all that is wrong with existing analyses of Algeria in the 1990s. Typical of studies of “late warfare,” they tend to be apolitical and “excessively endogenized,” ignoring the contributions of history and of external actors. Characteristic of “economic framings of civil conflict,” they deny the agency of the state in the onset and persistence of violence; they assign rebels material motives linked squarely to self-interested profiteering, while overlooking the predatory practices of the state and international actors. While Mundy identifies a single scholar as guilty of the former (L. Martinez 1998) and another as emblematic of the latter (A. Testas 2001), he actually misrepresents the literature on Algeria in the 1990s by failing to acknowledge those studies that elucidate precisely what he claims is missing, among them, those that: reference the impact of exogenous forces (inter alia, A. Moussaoui 2006; H. Roberts 2003); insist that state repression was at the origin of the violence and that the state remained a perpetrator of violence (inter alia, Y. Bedjaoui 1999; A. Charef 1998); and argue—in one case, in direct response to the Collier-Hoeffler “greed vs. grievance” model—that an array of social, political, and economic grievances inspired insurgents from the outset, while over time and for a variety of reasons, material interests came into play for both insurgents and the state (D. Hadjadj 1999; M. Lowi 2005). These studies, most of which appear in his bibliography, receive, at best, a passing mention in a footnote: “(F)or more careful analysis, see” or, “For nuanced accounts.”

Along with this failure to acknowledge analyses which complicate his argument, the author, at times, does not cite sufficiently or provide evidence for statements he makes. When, in the second chapter, for example, he addresses interpretations of Algeria's violence and refers to debates between those privileging one interpretation or another, there are few names and few sources. In his appraisal of peacebuilding through “transitional justice,” he makes the damning claim that the organizers of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission “selected testimonies and confessions on a dramaturgical basis,” for their “entertainment value” (138), but provides not a single piece of evidence, nor even a source to which readers could refer. As a result, the reader is unable to evaluate the author's assertions.

Overall, and despite some quite lucid discussions about the ways conflicts are understood and managed, Jacob Mundy's book is disappointing. Not only does the author's misrepresentation of scholarship on Algeria render unconvincing his association of the Algerian case with the flaws of “conflict science,” but also, by the end, following Mundy's persistent effort to identify all that's wrong with existing analyses and policies, the reader still does not know how to make sense of the Algerian experience and how the violence should have been addressed.