At the start of the 21st century, the following things did not exist: In the US, a large network of purpose-built immigration prisons, some of which are run for profit. In western China, “political education” camps designed to hold hundreds of thousands of people, supported by a high-tech surveillance system. In Syria, a prison complex dedicated to the torture and mass execution of civilians. In northeast India, a detention center capable of holding 3,000 people who may have lived in the country for decades, but are unable to prove they are citizens. In Myanmar, rural encampments where thousands of people are being forced to live on the basis of their ethnicity. On small islands and in deserts at the edges of wealthy regions — Greece’s Aegean islands, the Negev Desert in Israel, the Pacific Ocean near Australia, the southern Mediterranean coastline — various types of large holding centers for would-be migrants.
The scale and purpose of these places vary considerably, as do the political regimes that have created them, but they share certain things in common. Most were established as temporary or “emergency” measures, but have outgrown their original stated purpose and become seemingly permanent. Most exist thanks to a mix of legal ambiguity — detention centers operating outside the regular prison system, for instance — and physical isolation. And most, if not all, have at times been described by their critics as concentration camps.
We tend to associate the idea of concentration camps with their most extreme instances — the Nazi Holocaust, and the Soviet Gulag system; genocide in Cambodia and Bosnia. However, the disturbing truth is that concentration camps have been widespread throughout recent history, used to intern civilians that a state considers hostile, to control the movement of people in transit and to extract forced labor. The author Andrea Pitzer, in One Long Night, her recent history of concentration camps, estimates that at least one such camp has existed somewhere on Earth throughout the past 100 years.
Illustration: Yusha
The definition of a concentration camp is sometimes fuzzy, but at root, such camps represent a combination of physical and legal power. They are a way for modern states to segregate groups of civilians by placing them in a closed or isolated location via special rules that are distinct from a country’s main system of rights and punishments.
Many have been set up under military jurisdiction — by the British during the Boer War, for instance — while others, such as the Soviet gulags, have been used in peacetime to deal with social “undesirables.”
Cruelty and the abuse of power have existed throughout human history, but concentration camps have not. They are little more than a century old. The earliest began as wartime measures, but on numerous occasions since then they have become lasting features. They are a product of technologically advanced societies with sophisticated legal and political systems and have been made possible by a range of modern inventions. Military technologies such as automatic weapons or barbed wire made it easier for small groups of officials to hold much larger groups of people captive. Advanced bureaucracy and surveillance techniques enabled states to watch, count and categorize civilians in ways they couldn’t have done in earlier eras. As Pitzer writes, such camps “belong in the company of the atomic bomb as one of the few advanced innovations in violence.”
This innovation haunts the political imagination of liberal democracies. The concentration camp is a symbol of everything such societies are supposed to stand against: the arbitrary use of power and the stripping of people’s rights, the systematic removal of liberty; dehumanization, abuse, torture, murder and genocide. When it is used to refer to contemporary places, the term “concentration camp” is often reserve for the locations of the most serious human rights abuses, as when Amnesty International used it in a 2017 report estimating 13,000 people had been murdered by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the Saydnaya military prison outside Damascus. However, politicians, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among them, have also used the term to describe camps such as the ones US President Donald Trump’s administration has been running on the US border with Mexico.
To some, these comparisons minimize the use of concentration camps by Nazi Germany in its effort to exterminate Jews. For others, the comparisons are a necessary warning, not least because one kind of camp can easily transform into another. Pitzer gives the example of a refugee camp: If people are not allowed to leave, and are systematically denied their rights, then it starts to resemble more sinister creations. As authoritarians and right-wing populists reach positions of power in various parts of the world, liberals are voicing fears that history is repeating itself.
Surveying what he called “a century of camps” in the mid-1990s, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman warned that the temptation for governments to use them would always be strong “when certain humans are declared redundant or forced into a superfluous condition.” There is no shortage of threats in the current century — from environmental catastrophe to the unfolding coronavirus pandemic — that are creating such conditions. The question is how to ensure that the concentration camp is not the state’s inevitable response.
It is tempting to regard the concentration camp as an anomaly, but for some observers, such camps are a grim reflection of the way modern states work. After the World War II, as knowledge of the Holocaust became widespread, leading theorists sought to offer explanations for the genocide that had taken place, and the methods used to carry it out. Writing in 1950, the Martiniquan poet and politician Aime Cesaire argued that the Holocaust “applied to Europe colonialist procedures” that until then had been reserved exclusively for people of color.
Concentration camps were indeed colonial in origin. Their earliest uses came at the turn of the 20th century — by the Spanish in 1896 to put down a rebellion in Cuba, by the US in 1899 to do similar in the Philippines, and by the British empire in southern Africa during the Boer War of 1899-1902. The first use of concentration camps for a deliberate policy of extermination was not in Europe, but in German South West Africa — modern-day Namibia — between 1904 and 1907. (Germany only recently officially acknowledged its treatment of the Herero and Nama tribes as genocide.)
For Cesaire, the appearance of camps in Europe itself was a direct result of the way in which Europeans had attempted to dehumanize their colonial subjects in order to exploit them, but ended up dehumanizing themselves.
“Colonisation works to decivilise the coloniser, to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred and moral relativism,” he wrote.
German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt also turned her attention to camps after the war. Like Cesaire, Arendt drew links between the behavior of European powers in their colonies and their conduct at home, but she also highlighted how some of the tools wielded by authoritarians had been put in place by democracies before the rise of fascism. In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt pointed out that when France was occupied by Nazi Germany, for instance, the Gestapo was able to make use of draconian police powers already in existence to round up and detain civilians. These existed because France, like many other states in Europe, had been unable to deal with the mass displacement of people in the aftermath of World War I and had instituted harsh measures to deal with unwanted migrants.
In 1940, Arendt had her own direct experience of this relatively novel form of containment. After fleeing Germany for France, she was placed in an internment camp at Gurs, near the Pyrenees. The camp had been established a few years earlier to detain republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War; it was repurposed in 1939 for “enemy aliens” — a practice instigated by the British in World War I and subsequently copied by many countries. The inmates had to endure overcrowding, disease and insufficient food rations, and were made to live together regardless of the fact that some were Nazi party members and others, like Arendt, were Jewish refugees. It was partly the memory of this that led Arendt to place internment on a continuum with the Soviet gulags and the Nazi death camps — as she saw it, the “Hades, Purgatory and Hell” of state violence.
That the British, Americans, Spanish, French and Germans, among other nations, had all used concentration camps led some thinkers to ask whether such camps were inevitable features of the modern state. Perhaps the most provocative answer comes from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose ideas have grown in prominence in the past two decades.
For Agamben, the existence of the concentration camp reveals something fundamental about power — who holds it, and what gives them the authority to wield it. His work is dense, ranging across ancient Greek and Roman law, Biblical texts and Renaissance literature, but it has been influential on a generation of scholars and activists in the past two decades — particularly among those who wanted to understand the camp established by the US at Guantanamo Bay , under an emergency policy after 9/11, or the growing phenomenon of immigration detention at the borders of the rich world.
Sovereignty, as Agamben sees it, is founded on absolute power over human life, and has been since ancient times. The sovereign has the power not only to kill, but to strip people of rights through forms of banishment, reducing them to a state of what he calls “bare life.” In the past, sovereignty would have been concentrated in the figure of the monarch; modern states are supposed to have improved upon monarchy by restraining the arbitrary use of power through democratic checks and balances. However, according to Agamben, the tendency to banish and dehumanize keeps on coming back in the form of the concentration camp: A space where people are outside the law, yet more subject to its power than anywhere else.
For Agamben, this reveals the basis on which power is exercised by modern states. In his words, the concentration camp is the “nomos” or fundamental principle of modern societies, the “hidden matrix” of politics in our age. While they may only sometimes use it, governments retain the power to declare emergency measures — a “state of exception” in Agamben’s words — to strip us of rights, and confine us to spaces in which we live a kind of exile. The camp’s logic, he implies, pervades seemingly free societies through modern state techniques of surveillance, bureaucracy, violence and other forms of coercion.
Grand theories such as those of Cesaire, Arendt and Agamben are valuable, but risky. By seeking to identify common patterns across specific societies, at different moments in history, they warn that all modern states have the potential to set up concentration camps.
Misconstrued, however, they can end up obscuring crucial differences — such as the distinction between camps used in a deliberate policy of extermination, and those where people die through neglect. Holocaust deniers, for instance, or people who seek to downplay the severity of colonial massacres, often try to muddy these distinctions.
When theory becomes dogma, it can also limit our understanding of the present. Agamben’s own recent trajectory offers a cautionary tale: in late February this year, he published a short essay in the left-wing Italian newspaper Il Manifesto criticizing his government’s draconian restrictions on public freedoms aimed at halting the spread of the coronavirus. The piece referred to “the invention of an epidemic,” and went further than merely questioning the long-term impact of these restrictions; it condemned them as “frenetic, irrational, and entirely unfounded,” arguing the virus was “not too different from the normal flu.” The piece has been widely criticized, and provoked a retort from the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy that had he listened to Agamben’s advice not to have a heart operation 30 years ago, he would now be dead.
Agamben is hardly the only person to have underestimated the threat posed by the coronavirus in recent months. As more governments pass emergency laws to deal with the pandemic, in some cases including draconian surveillance measures and the establishment of segregated quarantine camps , it is right to ask where these might lead, and whether states will be willing to give up their new powers once the immediate danger to public health has passed. However, that should not obscure the fact that some emergencies are real: In these situations, the most important question is whether societies can respond to them without permanently destroying people’s rights.
Concentration camps are uniquely dangerous spaces. Their effects may vary considerably, from the horror of Auschwitz to the more mundane misery that Arendt experienced in Gurs, but the people caught up in them almost always end up being treated as less than human. And if the political and technological innovations of the late 19th century made them possible, does the 21st century make them any more likely?
In 2014, the Chinese government launched an initiative it called the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism , focused on Xinjiang. In the English-speaking world, details of the program remained scarce until 2017, when reports started to filter through that thousands of people from Xinjiang’s ethnic Uighur population, most of whom are Muslims, were being detained. The following year, researchers who trawled through Chinese government procurement documents and satellite imagery pointed to the existence of a vast, newly constructed complex of internment camps, which they estimated had the capacity to hold anywhere between several hundred thousand and 1.5 million people. Former inmates have given testimony to journalists and researchers that they were forced into “education” programs, made to eat pork and drink alcohol, and given compulsory sterilization and abortions.
This is just one example of how globalization and technology have added a new dimension to an old problem.
China has a long history of running camps — the political “re-education” program launched by Mao Zedong (毛澤東) in the 1950s was one of the world’s most extensive gulag networks — but the latest crackdown has new features. First, the Xinjiang camps are backed up by state-of-the-art digital surveillance methods provided by leaders in the global tech industry: a computerized CCTV network developed by a state-run defense manufacturer, designed to “apply the ideas of military cybersystems to civilian public security,” which tracks individuals and analyzes their behavior to anticipate potential crime; a tracking app that visitors to Xinjiang are obliged to install on their smartphones ; DNA analysis equipment partly supplied by US biotech firms. Second, China has justified its crackdown to the rest of the world by adopting the same rhetoric that the US and its allies used after 9/11.
In 2014, the Chinese Communist Party launched its so-called “people’s war on terror” in Xinjiang. China’s methods may be extreme, but it is by no means the first country to have introduced policies that subject Muslims to collective suspicion and punishment, in response to violent Islamic fundamentalist groups.
What else could tempt states to open camps? In her 2014 book Expulsion, the sociologist Saskia Sassen argues that the particular form of globalization the world has experienced in recent decades — driven by a new form of laissez-faire economics — has unleashed a dangerous new dynamic that excludes large numbers of people from economic and social life. The global shift to “privatizations, deregulation and open borders for some” has brutally punished the vulnerable and accelerated environmental destruction.
In richer countries, Sassen argues, this leads to low-income workers being forced out of established welfare and healthcare programs into more punitive systems (such as the UK’s universal credit scheme ), the impoverishment of sections of the middle class through austerity policies, and more and more people being locked up in prison. In poorer parts of the world, this means mass displacement and the warehousing of migrants as they try to move elsewhere.
One result of these global pressures has been the rise of political movements that promise to shore up national, religious or ethnic identities. However, identities are ambiguous, and when governments start using the tools of state power to reinforce the line between insider and outsider, there are always large numbers of people who get caught in between. In India, the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been trying to reshape the country along Hindu nationalist lines, undermining the secular and pluralist principles that have held sway since independence.
The emerging camps in Assam, a northeastern state on the border with Bangladesh, are a result: they target thousands of mainly Muslim residents who may have lived in India for decades, but because they originally came from across the border in Bangladesh — a legacy of partition — have never been registered as citizens.
The understandable response when confronted with injustice is to look for someone to blame. It is easier to do so when oppression is perpetrated by villainous leaders, or in other people’s societies. However, particularly in liberal democracies, the chains of responsibility can be complex. Who, for instance, is responsible for the arbitrary imprisonment, torture and slave-labor conditions that migrants and refugees in Libya are subjected to? The immediate answer seems fairly simple: the state officials and local militias, some linked to trafficking networks, who run the detention centers. Thousands of people, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, are imprisoned in a network of these centers where they are regularly subjected to starvation, disease, torture, rape, and forced labor.
However, the reason those detention centers exist is because a range of European governments have been trying to get Libya to act as a block on unwanted migration across the Mediterranean for almost 20 years. The system was built with European support, both from national governments and at EU level — first through agreements with the government of Muammar Qaddafi, then, as the country collapsed after he was overthrown by a NATO-backed uprising , a patchwork of arrangements with state officials and local militias.
There is no shortage of information about what happens in Libyan detention centers — and European governments frequently profess their horror at the atrocities committed there. Yet the system persists, because those governments broadly agree that the goal of limiting migration is more important than dismantling Libya’s detention system. The political consensus in most European countries, including the UK, is that limiting unwanted migration is a reasonable and desirable aim, and large numbers of their citizens have voted in support of it.
When Bauman turned his attention to camps in the 1990s, he argued that what characterizes violence in our age is distance — not just the physical or geographical distance that technology allows, but the social and psychological distance produced by complex systems in which it seems everybody and nobody is complicit. This, for Bauman, works on three levels. First, actions are carried out by “a long chain of performers”, in which people are both givers and takers of orders. Second, everybody involved has a specific, focused job to perform. And third, the people affected hardly ever appear fully human to those within the system. “Modernity did not make people more cruel, it only invented a way in which cruel things could be done by non-cruel people,” Bauman wrote.
This is part one of a two-part article. Part two is to run tomorrow.
Daniel Trilling is a British journalist, editor and author. He was the editor of New Humanist magazine from 2013 to last year.
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