UNRRA in North Africa: A late colonial history of refugee encampment

Abstract

Abstract This article tells the story of two long-forgotten United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) camps in wartime French North Africa, using their history as a lens through which to view the emergence of a modern global regime of refugee encampment. It examines these camps’ entanglements with the mechanisms of late colonial rule; their resonances with the systems of detention articulated by the Third Reich and its Vichy collaborationists; their rehabilitation of the practice of encampment for post-war colonial ‘development’ schemes like French Algeria’s centres de regroupement; and their eventual clearing of the way for the Cold War–era extension of an internationalist, American-dominated regime of refugee internment, first into Tunisia and Morocco and later across much of the Global South. Through its attempt to present its North African refugee camps as a new, modern, humanitarian form of encampment, UNRRA managed to rehabilitate the old colonial strategy of migrant internment as fundamentally humanitarian rather than punitive, successfully eliding its relationships with Nazi and Vichy practices in the process and establishing encampment as a central strategy of the modern internationalist refugee regime for the era of decolonization.