Criminalizing the Casbahs - (Police/Worlds: Studies in Security, Crime, and Governance) by Danielle Beaujon

About the Book

"Beginning with the surge of North African immigration after World War I and ending with the first battles of the Algerian War of Independence, this book examines how both national policy and local concerns shaped colonial policing. Violence has marked police practice since the earliest iterations of organized policing. Yet if violence was ubiquitous, French police officers' use of violence on the bodies of North Africans developed in relation to both imperial discourses of North Africans' racial inferiority, and individual relationships of power and opposition"--

Book Synopsis

Criminalizing the Casbahs explores how French police officers in Marseille and Algiers associated the spaces they saw as North African--the "Casbahs"--with a particular form of criminality, one they insisted was inherently North African. Through local but connected histories of policing in these two cities, Danielle Beaujon traces how police practices mapped the racialization of North African colonial subjects onto urban space.

By demarcating and racializing space, the French police created repressive methods for controlling North African bodies while proclaiming to uphold republican ideals of colorblind justice. The invasive, often violent, policing of North Africans in the French Mediterranean blurred the political and the personal, broadening the spectrum of police power with lasting consequences for post-colonial policing. Criminalizing the Casbahs shows how patterns of discrimination created in the daily interactions between police officers and North Africans continue to resonate in debates about police accountability in France today.

About the Author

Danielle Beaujon is Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law & Justice and History at University of Illinois Chicago. She is a historian with broad research interests in policing, race, and power in the French Mediterranean Empire.