5. The wide world of camps

Abstract

Concentration camps constitute a worldwide phenomenon that has developed over time as different states and regimes have learned from others in other parts of the world. ‘The wide world of camps’ considers some of the less well-known settings: the American internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II; Franco’s camps during and after the Spanish Civil War; Britain’s use of camps for Jewish displaced persons in Cyprus; the colonial powers’ camps during the wars of decolonization in Algeria, Malaya, and Kenya; the Chinese Maoist camps; the Khmer Rouge’s camps in Cambodia in the 1970s; the camps during the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s; and the contemporary camp system in North Korea.