At a recent Center for European and Russian Studies, Amín Pérez detailed how Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad forged a politically committed sociology during the Algerian War of Independence.

By Victoria Salcedo

UCLA International Institute, June 9, 2025 — Amín Pérez, associate professor of sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal, shared insights from his recent book, “Bourdieu and Sayad Against Empire” (Wiley, 2023) at a recent event co-sponsored by UCLA’s Center for European and Russian Studies and the Center for Near Eastern Studies. The scholar traced how Pierre Bordieu and Abdelmalek Sayad developed a politically committed sociology during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962).

Pérez’s lecture focused on the little-known collaboration between French sociologist Bourdieu and his student, Algerian activist and sociologist Sayad. “What does it mean to become a sociologist in the midst of an anti-colonial struggle?” Pérez asked. Through fieldwork conducted during wartime bombings and mass displacement, Bourdieu and Sayad came to see sociology not only as a method of inquiry, but as a tool of resistance. 

“They become sociologists by doing fieldwork,” Pérez explained, emphasizing that their empirical research shaped their political consciousness and analytical methods. 

Their goal, Pérez said, was to “grasp the grounds of their conception and practice of sociology that they would then extend to the study of multiple fields in the post-colonial… liberal era.” He described their framework as “a sociology of colonialism and revolution” that sought to “empirically demonstrate the means sociology can provide for an emancipatory project.” 

Amín Pérez (UQAM) and Susan Slyomovics (UCLA). (Photo: Victoria Salcedo/UCLA)

An unlikely partnership in a divided society

Bordieu and Sayad met at the University of Algiers in 1958. At the time, Bourdieu was just 28 years old and had not yet completed a Ph.D. A trained philosopher, he was first sent to Algeria in 1956 as part of his mandatory military service. 

“Bourdieu was in Algeria from 1956 to 1958 doing his military service. But after he finished… he decided to stay to understand the society and to inform what was happening from the field,” Pérez recounted. After his service, Bourdieu began lecturing in philosophy at the University of Algiers, where Sayad became his student. 

Although they came from different national contexts, Pérez noted a “striking homology” between their early lives. “Both of them were descendants of modest, rural (families) and were sensitized since their childhood by their family to the injustices of their system in the Metropole and in the colony.”

Rather than return to France or pursue prestigious academic careers, both men remained in Algeria to support the liberation struggle. “They sought to feel useful in the political landscape of the Algerian liberation war,” Pérez said. Bourdieu’s time as a soldier in Algeria led him to conclude, in his own words, that “colonialism cannot be reformed.”

At the time, sociology was still marginal in the French academy, considered a “heretic and marginalized discipline,” said Pérez. Its lack of institutional power made it especially appealing to anti-colonial thinkers. “There was an elective affinity between their anti-colonialism and sociology, which was then the most critical science on colonialism.” 

A new way of doing social science

The pair’s research broke sharply with colonial modes of knowledge production. “Producing knowledge from subaltern experience and combining statistics, ethnography, historical archives, photography and other methods… this was something quite different from existing practices,” Pérez said. They focused on documenting the human consequences of French colonial policy, including the massive forced resettlements that occurred during the war. 

“From 1956 to 1960, the empire forced a third of the Algerian population, about three million Algerians, to live in concentration camps,” he explained. These camps were part of a broader strategy to sever ties between civilians and nationalist groups such as the Front de libération nationale (FLN). 

“The goal was to destroy the relationship between the Algerian nationalists and the population, because the advantage of the FLN was their capacity to hide in the population.”

Bourdieu and Sayad’s fieldwork was distinctive not only in content, but in structure. Their fieldwork teams were intentionally diverse, composed of both French and Algerian researchers who came from both urban and rural areas. 

Pérez noted that these mixed teams helped challenge “the nationalist and racist lenses” typical of colonial research and allowed them to “adjust for the biases” that may have influenced all-French or all-Algerian research teams. 

Editions printed during Algerian War of Independence. (Photo: Viktor Lazic via WikimediaCommons 2017; cropped.) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Accomplishing the unfinished revolution

Pérez emphasized that the sociological work of Bourdieu and Sayad did not end with Algeria’s independence in 1962. “Independence does not necessarily imply emancipation. So, their purpose was to unveil the means to accomplish the unfinished revolution.”

For both scholars, fieldwork offered critical insights into how marginalized people responded to systemic injustice. “The experience of social and racial injustices creates modes of collective defense,” Pérez said, underscoring how solidarity and political consciousness arise through shared oppression. 

The speaker drew connections between their work and Frantz Fanon’s writings, particularly in their critique of nationalism. Sayad, he noted, was “particularly wary of how nationalist elites might reproduce hierarchical structures under a new guise” in a post-colonial regime. 

The stakes of knowledge

In closing, Pérez emphasized the political role of sociological inquiry. “Sociology became a battlefield,” he said. “This would not substitute [for] the political struggle. The interest was to forge from below the conditions for a realistic utopia that could contribute to liberation struggles.” 

He argued that Bourdieu and Sayad’s work exemplified an “intellectual revolution” where scholars from the metropole and the colonies came together to imagine postcolonial futures. 

Sayad, Pérez noted, believed that “both the colonized and the colonizers [must] get out of their role” for decolonization to truly take place. “This relational approach placed solidarity, not separatism, at the center of their intellectual and political vision.”

Published: Monday, June 9, 2025