Directly engaging a controversial history, A Desert Named Peace offers an important backdrop to understanding the Algerian war for independence (1954-1962) and Algeria's ongoing internal war, begun in 1992, between the government and armed groups that claim to fight for an Islamist revolution.Ī Desert Named Peace is a very impressive book. Benjamin Claude Brower uses these different perspectives to reveal the unexpected causes of colonial violence, such as France's troubled revolutionary past and its influence on the military's institutional culture, the aesthetics of the sublime and its impact on colonial thinking, the ecological crises suffered by Saharan pastoralists under colonial rule, and the conflicting paths to authority inherent in Algerian Sufism. It presents four cases: the military conquests of the French army in the oases and officers' predisposition to use extreme violence in colonial conflicts a spontaneous nighttime attack made by Algerian pastoralists on a French village, as notable for its brutality as for its obscure causes the violence of indigenous forms of slavery and the colonial accommodations that preserved it during the era of abolition and the struggles of French Romantics whose debates about art and politics arrived from Paris with disastrous consequences. A Desert Named Peace examines colonial violence through multiple stories and across several fields of research. Lying in the shadow of the colonization of northern Algeria, which claimed the lives of over a million people, French empire in the Sahara sought power through physical force as it had elsewhere yet violence in the Algerian Sahara followed a more complicated logic than the old argument that it was simply a way to get empire on the cheap. They are also amongst the most fragile and endangered biomes.In the mid-nineteenth century, French colonial leaders in Algeria started southward into the Sahara, beginning a fifty-year period of violence. They cover approximately 1/3 of the dry land of our planet (3, p1). There may also be an extreme variation between warm and cool seasons, including extreme winds and storms due to the mixing of cold and warm air.ĭeserts are vitally important to the planetary ecosystem. This is because the rock and sand absorb heat during the day and releases it at night. Some experience vast temperature fluctuations, especially hot deserts which may reach unbearable heat during the day and extreme cold at night (2). High evaporation leaves behind higher salt levels, affecting further which plants can grow and the individual size and the numbers of herbivores that may feed on them and, in turn, carnivores. Deserts will differ depending on their climate and location and their overall aridity can influence many things, not least of all the ecology, food chain, plant and animal types. A desert may receive far more than the “average†in one year and not experience any rainfall the year before and the year after. The coarse nature of the soil means most moisture seeps through the top soil rapidly.įurthermore, what precipitation a desert does experience is erratic. The higher the ratio, the less available moisture there is. For deserts, evapotranspiration ratio exceeds average annual rainfall by anything from 2:1 to 33:1.
This is the amount of water that the landscape would lose when available (1). These two aspects are combined into something called evapotranspiration. This means a high rate of water loss through plant reclamation (called transpiration) and through evaporation. But more than simply having low rainfall, a desert is “aridâ€. The simple explanation is that deserts are topographic landscapes that receive little precipitation in a typical year. How we define the desert biome are not about the types of rock, or the amount of sand, or even the temperature because there are both cold and hot deserts.
But deserts are far more than this and there are multiple types.
Deserts conjure up specific ideas about topography: typically, that they are dry and sandy dunes or rock, or a mixture of both.
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