The Unmixing of Populations in Wartime Algeria, 1954–1962

Abstract The length and brutality of Algeria’s decolonial war has tended to obscure the centrality of refugeehood to the conflict and its outcomes. Mass displacement served, in the first instance, as a primary tool of the French colonial effort to preserve Algeria for the French empire; but as its brutal campaigns of removal unfolded and expanded, participants from all sides began to see opportunity and possibility in the war’s large-scale dislocations. By the end of the hostilities, multiple manifestations of displacement in and around the war for Algeria— refugeehood, partition, resettlement —had come to represent not mere byproducts of the struggle but constitutive, if contradictory, aspects of an emerging political landscape across the western Mediterranean. This essay explores the development, trajectory, and uses of mass displacement in wartime Algeria, investigating how the old interwar principle of ‘unmixing of peoples’ underlaid the production and management of dislocation as a primary venue for constructing this new postcolonial order.