Algeria

The territory of modern Algeria has been inhabited since prehistoric times, with rock art in the Tassili n'Ajjer plateau attesting to Saharan societies that flourished when the region was far wetter than today. By the first millennium BCE the coast and interior were home to Berber peoples, known to ancient writers as Numidians and Mauri, while Phoenician traders established a string of coastal emporia, of which the most consequential lay just east at Carthage. After the Punic Wars the Numidian kingdom of Massinissa emerged as a Roman ally in the second century BCE, and by 46 BCE the territory was absorbed into the Roman provinces of Africa Nova and later Mauretania Caesariensis, becoming a productive granary and a heartland of early Latin Christianity associated with figures such as Augustine of Hippo.

Roman authority gave way to a Vandal kingdom in the fifth century and to a Byzantine reconquest in the sixth, but the decisive transformation came with the Arab conquests of the late seventh and early eighth centuries, which brought Islam and Arabic to the Maghreb. Over the following centuries the region passed through a succession of Berber and Arab dynasties, including the Rustamids of Tahert, the Fatimids, the Zirids and Hammadids, and the great imperial federations of the Almoravids and Almohads, followed by the Zayyanid kingdom of Tlemcen. In the early sixteenth century, pressure from Habsburg Spain led local rulers to invite Ottoman support, and Algiers became the seat of a semi-autonomous Ottoman regency that endured for three centuries, governed by deys and famous across the Mediterranean for its corsair fleets.

The regency ended in 1830 when France invaded Algiers, beginning a long and violent conquest resisted most prominently by Emir Abd al-Qadir until 1847. Algeria was administratively incorporated into France, with the northern departments treated as part of metropolitan territory and settled by a substantial European colon population, while the Muslim majority was excluded from full citizenship. A nationalist movement crystallised in the early twentieth century, and the Front de Liberation Nationale launched an armed uprising on 1 November 1954. The ensuing war, marked by widespread atrocities on both sides, ended with the Evian Accords and independence on 5 July 1962.

Independent Algeria became a one-party socialist republic under the FLN, led successively by Ahmed Ben Bella, Houari Boumediene after a 1965 coup, and Chadli Bendjedid from 1979. Economic strain and the October 1988 riots prompted a constitutional opening, but the cancellation of legislative elections in January 1992, after a first round won by the Islamic Salvation Front, triggered a decade-long civil war that left an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 dead. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, elected in 1999, presided over a gradual return to stability and a controversial fourth-term bid that, in 2019, ignited the peaceful Hirak protest movement and forced his resignation.

Algeria today is a unitary semi-presidential republic governed under the constitution most recently revised in 2020, with a directly elected president, a prime minister, and a bicameral parliament composed of the People's National Assembly and the Council of the Nation. The military, formally the Armée Nationale Populaire, remains an influential institution, and the country continues to administer the disputed status of Western Sahara as a matter of regional rather than domestic policy.