Regroupment Camps and Resettlement in Rural Algeria during the War of Independence | Dorothée Kellou

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Resettlement and transfer of populations deemed problematic has long been a strategy employed by states throughout the world from tribal settlement campaigns in the Ottoman Empire and Indian Reservations in the United States to penal colonies in Australia and Siberia. During the twentieth century, "the camp," which represents various types of improvised mass resettlement and centralization of populations, emerged in many forms including refugee camps and the infamous concentration camps of the Second World War. In this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast, Dorothee Kellou discusses regroupement, which was a tactic used by the French military during the Algeria War of Independence (1954-1962) in order to control mountain and rural populations and separate them from FLN combatants. As many as two million Algerians were removed from their villages and settled into camps called regroupment centers, many of which became the sites of permanent settlements.

Dorothée Kellou is a graduate from Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies studying the history and memory of French colonialism in North Africa
Chris Gratien is a PhD candidate studying the history of the modern Middle East at Georgetown University (see academia.edu)
Select Bibliography:
Bourdieu, Pierre ; Abdelmalek, Sayad, 1964. Le Déracinement. La Crise de l'Agriculture Traditionnelle en Algérie. Paris, Edition de Minuit.
Cornaton, Michel, 1998. Les regroupements de la décolonisation en Algérie. L'Harmattan, Paris
Rocard, Michel; Duclert, Vincent, 2003. Rapport sur les camps de regroupement et autres textes sur la guerre d'Algérie, Mille et une nuits, Paris.
Keith Sutton, 1999. "Army Administration Tensions over Algeria's Centres de Regroupement, 1954-1962", British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Nov., 1999): 243-270
Keith Sutton; Richard I. Lawless, "Population Regrouping in Algeria: Traumatic Change and the Rural Settlement Pattern", Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 3, No. 3, Settlement and Conflict in the Mediterranean World (1978): 331-350