States of Emergency

States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum navigates the states of emergencies linking three distinct French colonial space-times: the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), the Kanak Insurrection (1984–1988), and France’s banlieues uprisings (2005–2020). Attending to the most recent state of emergency imposed in 2015, the book traces the mechanics of this counterrevolutionary legal framework across multiple geographies in order to draw out and fortify key anticolonial solidarities across space and time. From regroupment camps in Algeria, to the colonial stronghold that is Nouméa, and from the Casbah of Algiers and tribes across Kanaky, to the police stations of France’s banlieues and the bidonvilles of Nanterre, the French state of emergency is here spatialized through a narration of the very protocols that continue to enable and underwrite the far-reaching violence of this legal measure. In so doing, the book makes the colonial continuum legible: one traversed by the many military actors, agents, immigrants, and revolutionaries working both for and against the shared project of liberation.