ABSTRACT
International organizations communicate with a certain audience in mind. What happens when people outside this intended audience use news from international organizations for their own ends? This chapter examines cases of unintended communication, focusing on the extreme case of interwar Algeria under French rule. Unlike inhabitants of the League’s mandates, Muslim Algerians were not meant to receive information from international organizations. Rather, they were accidental recipients of a flood of French news intended solely for settlers. They eavesdropped on European news networks and eagerly followed developments in the international system. The chapter reads French surveillance reports to examine how Algerians developed divergent understandings of international processes from rumors and other alternative sources. Though news of institutional organizations was not meant to affect Algeria, it ended up forging new languages of sovereignty there. In the interwar period, news networks transformed the entire colonized world by allowing people to see their local predicaments as part of a worldwide struggle against imperialism.
