The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the Philippines, 1896–1907

Rethinking the camp: On spatial technologies of power and resistance

“…Although camps were allegedly established to provide humanitarian relief, the encampment of the civilian population was in fact the result of a military spatial strategy. For Hyslop (2011), this would explain why, for instance, in the Cuban camps the attention was not so much on the protection of the civilians (see also Smith and Stucki, 2011). The Spanish army lacked any knowledge on how to run such camps, leaving the population contained there with no protection or support and exposed to a high rate of mortality.…”

“…Barbed wire and enclosed spaces were in fact used as means to repress, fight and ‘domesticate’ native subjects who were not treated as individual human beings but rather as objects to govern, manage, separate and enclose (Diken and Laustsen, 2005: 40–3). Other scholars have, however, identified the origin of the modern camp with the Cuban concentration camps that appeared during the Spanish-American War in 1895–8 and with the parallel establishment of concentration camps by the British during the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902) as forerunners of totalitarian camps and all present-day camp-like structures (among others, Agamben, 1998; Gilroy, 2004; also Hyslop, 2011; Moshenska and Myers, 2011; Smith and Stucki, 2011). Although through different paths of analysis, all these authors see in these colonial camps the emergence of a combination of calculation rationalities and spatial concentration as strategies to govern populations – as individuals and as masses (Minca, 2015a).…”

“…This article thus assumes that institutional camps are specific geographical formations, having emerged as a modern spatial political technology first in the European colonies (see, among others, Arendt, 1968; Diken and Laustsen, 2005; Hyslop, 2011; Smith and Stucki, 2011; Wolf, 2016; Zimmerer, 2016), and then on European soil to separate, segregate and manage specific populations or groups of individuals (Agier and Lecadet, 2014). These camps are often ‘spaces of exception’ where certain subjects are contained and temporarily ‘fixed in place’, but also where they are re-qualified, re-classified, and translated into a biopolitical mass.…”

"'n Droewige laslap op die voos kombers van onreg": 'n Statistiese analise van konsentrasie-kampbewoners

“…2 Net in die afgelope dekade is feitlik elke aspek van kamplewe en -herinnering ondersoek: kinders in die kampe (Duff 2014), onderrigstelsels Riedi 2005), kampgetuienisse (Dampier 2005;Siebold 2011), swart kampbewoners (Wessels & Wohlberg 2005;Kessler 2012), kampsiektes (Cirillo 2014), die kampe in beeld (Godby 2006), die voorgeskiedenis van konsentrasiekampe (Smith & Stucki 2011;Hyslop 2011), en kampgeskiedskrywing en -herinnering (Stanley 2005;Stanley & Dampier 2005;Van Heyningen 2008;Pretorius 2010;. En hierdie indrukwekkende navorsingsrekord bou alreeds op meer as ʼn eeu se bevindinge (Wessels 2010).…”

Empires and Colonial Incarceration in the Twentieth Century

“…One of most contentious issues, the establishment of penal colonies and concentration camps on African soil, resulted in a debate which has concerned itself with political change and armed conflict from the late nineteenth century to the end of empire. Establishing linkages between metropolitan and African contexts, it has above all centred on the case of colonial South Africa as well as camps in former German South West Africa, current Namibia, and Kenya (Kessler 1999;Elkins 2005;Erichsen 2005;Heyningen 2009Heyningen , 2013Hyslop 2011;Smith and Stucki 2011;Dedering 2012;Forth 2013;Kössler 2015) and French Algeria (Cornaton 1998;LeSueur 2001;Thénault 2005Thénault , 2012Klose 2013;André 2018). Italian internment camps in Libya and Ethiopia (Walston 1997;Lenci 2004;LaBanca 2005), penal colonies in the Belgian Congo (Hunt 2016) and prison camps and forced relocation in former Portuguese Africa (Tavares 2006;Barros 2009;Lopes 2010;Mester 2016;Cruz and Curto 2017) have also become the subject of historiographical research over the last two decades.…”