States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum navigates the temporal and spatial dimensions of France’s states of emergency across three colonial space-times: the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), the Kanak Insurrection (1984–1988), and the French banlieues riots (2005) and their fallout (2015–). In recounting the mechanics of this counter-revolutionary legal framework across multiple geographies—extending and fortifying key anti-colonial solidarities past, present, and future—this book reads the state of emergency not as an exception but as a heightened form of every-day colonial state violence.


Contrasting the architecture of sites like “regroupement’ camps in Algeria, the white settler city of Nouméa, and the police stations of Paris’s suburbs with that of Algiers's Casbah, Kanaky’s tribes, and Paris’s banlieues neighborhoods, States of Emergency narrates the bureaucracies and protocols that continue to enable and underwrite the far reaching violence of this legal measure, as well as the anticolonial and antiracist resistance brought against it. The book thus offers a guide and a method for making the colonial continuum legible across contexts and for spatializing the many actors, agents, immigrants, and revolutionaries working both for and against the shared project of liberation.


Translated from French by Lara Vergnaud, with a preface by Zoé Samudzi.