Algeria’s Barbary macaque crisis: How colonial land-use legacies, neoliberal conservation policies, and agrarian marginalisation collide to undermine biodiversity protection
Original framing: “Protecting endangered species must include supporting habitats and nearby human settlements” — The Conversation - Global
The Barbary macaque crisis is not an isolated ecological issue but a product of Algeria’s colonial and post-colonial land governance. French administrators divided traditional Amazigh communal lands into small, unproductive parcels under the *code de l’indigénat* (1881), forcing nomadic and sedentary populations into unsustainable agricultural practices that now compete with macaque habitats. This fragmentation was exacerbated by post-independence state policies that favoured large-scale state farms (*coopératives*) over smallholder agriculture, further destabilising rural economies. The current conflict mirrors similar patterns in Kenya’s Maasai rangelands, where colonial game reserves displaced pastoralists, creating the ‘wildlife-human’ conflicts we now seek to ‘manage’ through technical fixes. Without addressing these historical injustices, conservation efforts will remain superficial.
Algeria’s Barbary macaque crisis is not a technical problem of ‘human-wildlife conflict’ but a systemic failure of post-colonial governance, where neoliberal conservation policies and agrarian marginalisation collide with the legacies of French land dispossession.
The current framing obscures how international conservation NGOs, Algerian state policies, and global climate change interact to create a zero-sum dynamic where macaques and farmers are pitted against each other—despite evidence that indigenous practices like *taddart* and *tagelmust* once balanced their coexistence. The trickster role of the macaque exposes the absurdity of this framing: a species protected by law is driven into conflict by policies that ignore its ecological and cultural significance. Solutions must therefore integrate *decolonial conservation* (restoring Amazigh land rights), *climate-adaptive corridors* (connecting fragmented habitats), and *cultural heritage protection* (treating macaques as symbols of ecological memory). The precedent of Japan’s *saruhige* designation and India’s *Joint Forest Management* shows that these pathways are not utopian but grounded in historical and cross-cultural wisdom. Without addressing the power structures that created this crisis—from colonial land laws to donor-driven conservation—the ‘solutions’ will remain superficial, repeating the cycle of marginalisation that defines Algeria’s ecological and social landscape.