Bauerkaemper, Arnd, Gusejnova, Dina 
ORCID: 0000-0003-1356-9530 and de Arcos, Marina Perez
(2025)
Wartime internment in camps as a global practice and experience.
Immigrants and Minorities, 43 (1).
1 - 19.
ISSN 0261-9288
Abstract
This double special issue examines internment camps in the First and Second World Wars as exceptional wartime social institutions which were intended to isolate and segregate groups considered threatening or undesirable but also had the unintended effect of becoming zones of knowledge transfer. The studies of internment in the world wars presented here connect to a broader historiography around cultures of confinement, carceral practices, and camp societies in the modern era. The First World War established the paradigm for understanding modern mass internment on a worldwide scale, with “enemy civilians” becoming an increasingly significant category of internees. The Introduction discusses how the global turn in the study of wartime internment, detention, and imprisonment, enables scholars to understand the way internment experiences were conceptualised in different societies. What kinds of expertise about society were initially produced in and around the camps? How did internment affect the way individuals from these groups related to their host countries? To what extent is the history of incarceration also a history of population movements to multiple locations? Special attention is paid to the way internment turned national or imperial minorities into “globally circulating” populations, with nationalities such as the Germans, traditionally associated with state-forming “majorities”, appearing as minorities within different empires at war with Germany in both world wars. As such the special issue contributes to new approaches to internment studies, which include expanded geographies and the acknowledgment that global entanglements can be grasped through local sites and case studies.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group |
| Divisions: | International History |
| Subjects: | D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D204 Modern History H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology |
| Date Deposited: | 28 Mar 2025 11:27 |
| Last Modified: | 10 Apr 2025 16:21 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/127670 |
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