Chapter 1 lays out the reasoning behind the book and its investigative schema, drawing links with interpretations of incarceration familiar to the discipline. The chapter’s central argument is that the Pacific War’s imperial border contestations were inscribed in those national populations who were alienated or disenfranchised by new hostilities, and that camps treated as border facilities became places for testing cultural boundaries, advancing programs of assimilation but also of prisoner defiance, dissidence and cultural recovery. Case studies are viewed comparatively in order to gain an understanding of the differing physical makeup of each camp environment in the various national sites explored.