Conservation is settler pre(re)servation: Khadidja Bouchellia, Uprooting Indigenous Algeria: Green Colonialism and Ecocide under French Colonial Rule, PhD dissertation, University of Arkansas, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Conservation is settler pre(re)servation: Khadidja Bouchellia, Uprooting Indigenous Algeria: Green Colonialism and Ecocide under French Colonial Rule, PhD dissertation, University of Arkansas, 2026

06Jul26

Abstract: Colonial conservation did not emerge from a single place or moment in history, but through a convergence of imperial strategies to control and occupy land across colonies. Conservation discourse in the colonies conceals a system of exploitation that co-opts environmentalism in the service of empires. While green colonialism is often discussed in the context of capitalism and neo-colonialism, this study argues that its roots extend to early imperial and colonial conquests. Green colonialism, in this dissertation, refers to the seemingly benevolent environmental institutions and policies imposed by the French administration on colonized lands and populations in Algeria. Chapter one tracks how print and visual media cultivate the affective and epistemic conditions of land myths applied by French colonial discourse to Algeria. These myths include tropes of terra nullius, detachment, translatio imperii, “wastelands,” and “land decline.” Chapter two shows how those myths morph into colonial laws and institutions on Algerian soil, including forestry codes, conservation policing, acclimatization networks, botanic gardens, and agrarian projects. Chapter three turns to Indigenous literature, specifically the works of Algerian Kabyle author Mouloud Feraoun, The Poor Man’s Son (1950) and Land and Blood (1953), to challenge those myths and recenter Indigenous land relations, knowledge, and resistance. This dissertation establishes that green colonialism was integral to the French conquest of Algeria. It also places Algeria’s colonial environmental history within the broader histories of Indigenous dispossession and decolonial struggles. It challenges petromyopia in SWANA/MENA ecocriticism and environmental studies. This work argues that green colonialism developed alongside military occupation and, according to Damien Short’s genocide-ecocide nexus, constitutes ecocide. Because dominant colonial discourses have denied, minimized, or refused to acknowledge ecocide, this research argues the necessity of naming French colonial violence against human and other-than-human life as ecocide.

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