Concentrated Cruelty: New Data on the Global Use of Concentration Camp Systems

• In Event: Exclusionary Politics: Conceptualization, Operationalization, and Measurement

Abstract

Although the Nazi Holocaust provides the most expansive and resonant example of concentration camps in popular commentary and social science research, this technology of mass violence has been a persistent, if not ubiquitous feature of global politics in all decades since the 1890s. From their origins in Spanish Cuba and British Southern Africa, through to recent revelations regarding the detention and abuse of migrants in various locations globally and minoritized Uighurs in camps in Xinjiang, China, governments have used systems of concentration camps to counter real or perceived challenges to their political and territorial authority. Social science research into the use of concentration camp systems has tended to focus narrowly and deeply on individual systems (e.g., Nazi camps during the Holocaust or the Gulag system in Stalin’s USSR). In this paper, we offer both a robust conceptualization of concentration camp systems, as well as an original dataset on 137 camp systems globally between 1896 and 2018. We do so to enable broader comparative research into the origins, conduct, closure, and consequences of such systems. This dataset draws upon original coding of a wide variety of sources, including news media, human rights reporting, and rich, secondary historical accounts of individual cases.

Authors

• Alex Braithwaite, University of Arizona

• Rachel Dawn Van Nostrand, University of Arizona

• Daniel Solomon, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum