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Dual Containment: The Demise of a Fallacy , by Hisham Melhem. 27 pages, occasional paper, endnotes. Washington, D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1997. $4.95 (Paper)

The FLN established a welfare state that seemed to fulfill the revolutionary demand for social and economic justice. Thus the masses in postcolonial Algeria saw their interests and fate intertwined with that of the state. They may have been denied many of the freedoms associated with democracy, Malley maintains, but they had a clear sense of national identity—a hallmark of any successful political system. All this changed in the 1980s, when the state began to redefine its role. Caught in the vise of Algeria's declining economy and the expanding population, Chadli Benjedid embarked on a series of western-style reforms intended to expand the economy: privatization, openness to foreign investment, and curtailment of social programs. This was followed by an opening of the political system, which included Islamists in multiparty elections. As Malley notes, most observers welcomed these reforms as long overdue, but many Algerians viewed them as acts of a state that had grown distant and disinterested. Thus he attributes the rise of Islamism to the social and ideological breach caused by a disengaged state whose revolutionary spirit had ebbed. Islamism stepped in to fill the void, speaking a different dialect of the same moral language that once infused Third Worldist rhetoric. Malley's argument is powerful and persuasive. The Call from Algeria is not without its flaws, but they are minor in comparison to the larger contribution it makes. Anyone who wishes to understand the complex political, social, and economic transformations underway in Algeria, the Middle East, and the developing world would do well to read, and reread, this book.