Emergency by Design: The “Native Repressive Tribunals” and the Normalization of Exception in Colonial Algeria, 1858–1904

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Abstract This study is the first to explore the creation of the Tribunaux repressifs indigènes (Native repressive tribunals, TRIs), a novel jurisdiction of exception promulgated at the turn of the twentieth century in colonial Algeria. The TRIs were the product of several intersecting historical processes that took shape over the last quarter of the nineteenth century: first, this period witnessed intense settler security panics marked by genuine anxiety that Algeria might succumb to uncontrollable banditry and mass uprisings. During this same period, colonial “sciences” couched in burgeoning race theory intersected with juridical knowledge-production to form a new legal discourse on assimilation. The TRIs were advanced using this new grammar of race-bound legal relativism, reimagined as consistent with republican universalism. This ascendant juridical epistème dovetailed with debates over the both indeterminate and overdetermined nature of sovereignty in Algeria, whose land was juridically and administratively “Frenchified,” yet whose Muslim (by definition non-citizen) colonial subjects remained excluded from access to civil rights or protections. A doctrine of racialized exception was invented and codified in the unfolding of an impassioned juristic and public debate. The TRIs were legitimized—and endured—thanks to a doctrinal rationale applied retroactively: that for Muslim colonized subjects, exception was the rule.