Dr. Hugh Roberts, "Buttressing the Status Quo: The Problem of Algeria's "Opposition" and its Democratic Deficit"

An audio recording of Dr. Hugh Roberts' lecture at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School on October 15.

After graduating from Oxford, Dr. Hugh Roberts undertook doctoral research on Algeria, spending a year teaching English in Bouïra in the Kabylia region and another year as a French Government Scholar at the University of Aix-Marseille while carrying out extensive fieldwork in Algeria in the long vacations. Dr. Roberts taught politics and political history in the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia from 1976 to 1988 and then worked in London as an independent scholar and free-lance writer in order to be able to follow the developing crisis in Algeria full time. In 1997 Dr. Roberts returned to academic life as a Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics, a post he held until 2002. In 2001, Dr. Roberts moved to Cairo where he lived for the last 10 years, continuing his work on Algeria, conducting additional research on Egyptian political history and the history of Islamism in North Africa and working for the International Crisis Group as Director of its North Africa Project in 2002-2007 and again from January to July 2011. He also taught at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex (1986-7), the University of California, Berkeley (spring semester 1996) and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London (1997-8).