Cantonnement/Refoulement
CANTONNEMENT/REFOULEMENT
french colonial policies.
These French policies were meant—first in the mid-nineteenth century and then in the years just before independence—to confine sections of the Algerian population to areas that could be supervised by the colonial army. This was to prevent access to agricultural land by the local population or to areas judged strategically important by the French. By the independence of Algeria in 1962, an estimated 3 million rural Algerians had been displaced, thus adding considerably to the extremely high urbanization rates the new government faced as a result of these earlier cantonnement and refoulement policies.
Bibliography
Ruedy, John. Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Dirk Vandewalle