Brazzaville's Diaspora: Colonial Development, Counterinsurgent Violence, and the Struggle for Self-Determination, 1941-1958

Abstract

“Brazzaville’s Diaspora” explores the relationship between colonial reform and mass violence during the revolutionary independence struggles in Madagascar (1947-48), Indochina (1945-1954), and Algeria (1954-1962). After the Second World War and especially following the Brazzaville Conference of 1944, officials throughout the French Empire confronted local demands for national autonomy and international calls for self-determination. This work demonstrates how French administrators appropriated the discursive foundations of anti-colonial nationalism – including doctrines of minority rights, national self-determination, and human development – to justify and perpetuate campaigns of unprecedented brutality wherever their rule was threatened. It traces how these liberal discourses intersected with long-standing French fears of “detribalization” and racial mixing, catalyzing colonial practices of violence including torture, mass population relocation, and state-sponsored civil war. Employing a multi-scalar approach, it sheds light on this process from both local and transnational perspectives. In particular, it reveals the integral role that local elites allied with the colonial government played in igniting cycles of intercommunal violence from Algiers to Saigon. This text makes two central contributions to the study of decolonization and the history of the international order. First, it complicates the scholarly consensus positing national self-determination and nation-state sovereignty as the defining features of the international system after 1945. Instead, it illuminates an alternative vision of postcolonial sovereignty – fractured along racial, ethnic, or so-called “civilizational” lines – that advocates of European colonialism wove into the very foundations of the postwar international order. It argues that this alternative to the nation-state radicalized the violence of decolonization and helped create inter-communal rifts across the Global South that endure to the present. The work also challenges that prevailing historiographical view that attributes the extreme brutality of French colonial conflicts to “fascistic” officers and European settler communities. Tracing the entangled and transnational trajectories of France’s postwar colonial reformers, it illuminates the crucial enabling roles of colonial liberals and anti-fascists in repressive campaigns responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. It argues that the forms and norms of violence that the French army deployed overseas emerged from within the liberal civilizational project of the postwar French Republic.