Camps Are Not Centers: French Military Displacements in Colonized Algeria

During the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), the French army demarcated a number of rural inhabited areas as forbidden zones in which not a single human presence was authorized or tolerated. This counterinsurgency operation resulted in the forced displacement of roughly two million Algerian people and the construction of an alarming number of camps, which the French army strategically called centres de regroupement (regrouping centers). The paper investigates the raison d’être of these camps, their judicial characteristics, spatial configurations, and socio-economic impacts on the Algerian population