When Natives Outnumber Settlers: Apartheid in French Algeria, South Africa and Palestine

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This dissertation project aims to reexamine the paradigm of apartheid by comparing legal regimesinstalled in three seemingly different settler-colonial situations that have, nonetheless, an interesting traitin common: the existence of a large population of natives that outnumbers the settlers. Settler hegemonyis arguably contingent on the adoption and preservation of racialized legal configurations that serve tomaintain control over the native population in all colonies. Nonetheless, little attention has been made tothe possible correlation between demographic superiority of the native population in a certain colony andthe vigor of racialized laws that came to be applied there. In many settler colonies of the Americas andOceania, this question was admittedly rendered irrelevant by the dramatic collapse in the nativepopulation due to the spread of pandemics and wide-scale massacres following European settlement.There are three settler-colonial situations, however, in which the natives did not face the same destiny:South Africa, French Algeria and Palestine.In all these places, settlers were arguably in need of a radical design of the legal system to maintain theirsuperiority over a large native population, including the adoption of measures geared toward maintainingracial segregation and domination. In the case of South Africa, these measures assumed an extreme formthat soon came to be identified under the notorious category of Apartheid. While this term has beenhistorically linked to the South African context, there have been new discussions in recent years about itsrelevance for analyzing Israeli practices in Palestine. Debates about the accuracy of this categorizationswing their pendulum in a dualistic range that is delimited between historical comparisons on one hand,and a universalized legal definition of apartheid on the other. This study tries to disrupt this equilibriumby acknowledging the importance of historical analysis in developing a more nuanced and diversifiedparadigm of apartheid that can retain its relevance across seemingly different places. For this purpose, itjuxtaposes the example of French Algeria and those of South Africa and Palestine with a view toreconceptualizing apartheid as a racialized system of legal measures and practices that are primarilyconditioned by demographic anxieties.