Farewell to Hugh Roberts: The British Intellectual Who Defended Algeria Until His Final Breath

✍️ BY: Dr. Hana Saada

From Bouira to the World Stage, Roberts Was a Lifelong Advocate for Algeria’s History, Identity, and Political Complexity

Algiers, Algeria | May 11th, 2025 — The academic and diplomatic world is mourning the loss of Hugh Roberts, the eminent British scholar and one of the most committed and principled voices to ever engage with Algeria’s past and present. Roberts passed away on Wednesday night at the age of 76, after a fierce five-month battle with cancer. His death marks the departure of a towering figure whose intellectual legacy will continue to illuminate the complexities of Algerian society, history, and politics.

Roberts’s passing has resonated deeply across academic and political spheres, especially in Algeria, a country he championed intellectually and emotionally for over five decades. His Algerian journey began in the 1970s when he arrived in Bouira, in the heart of the Kabyle region, to teach English. That humble beginning became the gateway to a profound, lifelong engagement with the Algerian people and their history.

A graduate of Oxford University, Hugh Roberts quickly distinguished himself with an analytical approach that fused social history and political anthropology, going on to teach at prestigious institutions such as the University of East Anglia, the London School of Economics, and Tufts University in the United States, where he taught until 2022.

Roberts was never just an armchair academic. He immersed himself in the very fabric of Algerian society and developed an unparalleled understanding of its traditional governance structures, particularly in Kabylia. His landmark book, Berber Government: The Kabyle Polity in Pre-Colonial Algeria, remains a seminal text. In it, he meticulously dismantled Orientalist myths that reduced Berber societies to “stateless” entities, offering instead a nuanced account of collective governance and pre-colonial political sophistication.

Beyond academia, Roberts also played critical roles in strategic and policy advisory. During the violent civil conflict of the 1990s, Roberts was among the rare Western voices who asserted that the Algerian state would withstand the onslaught of terrorism. His analysis, particularly to major corporations like BP, helped sustain international economic partnerships with Algeria at a time when fear and misinformation threatened to sever them.

From 2002 to 2007, he led the North Africa program at the International Crisis Group, producing deeply influential reports on Maghreb geopolitics that became key references for diplomats and decision-makers worldwide.

Even after stepping back from full-time academic duties, Roberts remained intellectually devoted to Algeria. He continued to write and lecture on the country’s evolving political landscape—from the post-Bouteflika era to the Hirak movement and the ongoing debates over political reform and constitutional change. In spring 2024, in the depths of his illness, he expressed a heartfelt wish to visit Algeria one last time. Fate, however, had other plans.

With the passing of Hugh Roberts, Algeria loses not only a brilliant mind but also a faithful and incorruptible ally—a man who consistently defended its truth against distortion, and its people’s dignity against reductionism. His scholarly contributions remain essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Algeria on its own terms—not as it is imagined or simplified by outsiders.

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