The speed with which Algeria has gone from symbol of revolutionary socialism to Islamic battleground has confounded most observers. Charting Algeria's political evolution from the turn of the century to the present, Robert Malley explores the historical and intellectual underpinnings of the current crisis. His analysis helps makes sense of the civil war that is tearing Algeria apart.

Using contemporary Algerian politics as a case study of the intellectual movement labeled "Third Worldism," Malley's thoughtful analysis also elucidates the broader transformations affecting countries of the Third World that once embraced ideologies of state-centered radical change. Malley focuses on the interplay between politics, economics, and ideology to explain the rise, essential components, and precipitous decline of Third Worldism—a movement that attracted scholars and activists in both the developed and underdeveloped worlds from the mid 1950s to the mid 1980s. He relates the disillusionment with Third Worldism to the growing appeal in the Third World of economic liberalism, versions of political pluralism, and ideological movements that threaten the very existence of the central state.

At a time when the public increasingly is associating countries of the less developed world with Islamism, tribalism, and ethnic warfare, The Call from Algeria challenges our assumptions and offers a new perspective.

Robert Malley wrote this book while serving as a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Algiers in the early 1970s was the capital of the Third Worldist movement, and Simon Malley’s editorials in Afrique Asie, the glossy vade mecum of Third Worldism then widely available at the Algiers newsstands, were an authoritative guide to the trends within the fashion. Twenty-five years later, Robert Malley has produced a personal perspective on the movement in which his father played a notable part, and an epitaph of sorts. . . . The story of Third Worldism is the story of a combination of two distinct worldviews, that of the radical fringe of the Western intelligentsia, and that of the more radical anticolonial movements and of the states they created and tried to consolidate. In Malley’s account, this already complicated tale is intertwined with that of independent Algeria as the locus classicus of Third World vision, its catastrophic fall from the pinnacle it briefly occupied, and the subsequent sprouting of radical Islamism from the ruins of the Third Worldist project.”—Times Literary Supplement

“Intellectuals and some politicians in both the north and south once spoke as if the masses of the Third World would rise up and use the state to produce an egalitarian political order more compassionate than capitalism and less oppressive than communism. . . . Today cynicism and indifference have replaced much of that optimism, and in Algeria the moralistic, populist agenda has been co-opted by radical Islamists. Malley’s remarkable book looks carefully at the construction of this system of beliefs to see how it evolved and was adopted in diverse settings, such as among Algerian and French intellectuals. The author is exceptionally well read, creative in seeing connections and influences, and gifted with a graceful, if world-weary writing style.”—William B. Quandt, Foreign Affairs

"A fascinating interpretation of Algeria's past and present agonies, set against the broader backdrop of the rise and fall of 'Third Worldism.' Essential to anyone following Middle East politics and the extrapolation of the old 'North-South' struggle into the 'New World Disorder.'"—Graham E. Fuller, RAND, coauthor of A Sense of Siege: The Geopolitics of Islam and the West