Chapter 6 looks at political responses to the MENA migration to Europe from 2011, the most harshly exclusionary case in my study. The migration mixed asylum seekers fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with labor migrants from other MENA states. The chapter tracks Europe’s progression from initially cautious receptiveness of asylum seekers to policies of exclusion of MENA migrants from the continent. It shows that the growing numbers, migrant “mix,” and terrorist attacks by (mostly non-migrant) Islamic extremists in Europe combined to undermine need-based deservingness, empower populist parties and feed xenophobic media. The chapter focuses on the EU’s turn to militarized securitization of its land and sea borders and ‘externalization of borders’ to Turkey and Libya, policies that ended the migration surge by indiscriminate physical exclusion of migrants and asylum seekers. Case studies show the varied effects of and responses to the migration in the five European cases and in Russia, which received much smaller numbers. Responses to the MENA migration brought international migration to the core of Europe’s politics, entrenched populist parties, and showed the failure of the Geneva Convention asylum system in the 21st century.

This chapter foregrounds the subjective experience of asylum seekers like Hassan Ali Djan, who arrived in Munich from Afghanistan via Iran, Turkey, and Greece in 2005. It also presents accessibly the complex history of asylum legislation and practice across time. It points out the continuities amidst the changes: the number of refugees varies, the major countries of origin vary (at one point Bosnia, at another Syria), the escape routes vary (at one point the eastern, at another the middle Mediterranean route), the popularity of destinations changes (at one point Britain, at another Germany). What remains the same is that the causes that rarely allow for a neat separation of “political persecution” from economic, religious, ethnic, and other factors; refugees, who are rarely the oldest, the weakest, and the sick, but rather are young and dynamic; the reliance of refugees on word of mouth and local networks; the role of the traffickers and others who are inextricably part of the economy of refugee migration logistics; rescue, relief, gratitude; and countless traumas and tragedies.

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.

This chapter continues the exploration of the gap between legal theories on the conduct of war and enemy aliens on the one hand and the practice of states at war on the other. It focuses first of all on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 that anticipated the mobilization of the nation-in-arms and examines, in particular, the expulsion of "Germans" from Paris and Strasbourg in the summer of 1870, the consequences of the expulsion and the lively debate among international lawyers it sparked. The chapter continues with an analysis of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878, concentrating on the emergence of a humanitarian discourse in order to legitimize intervention. Then it moves east to take into consideration the treatment of enemy aliens and the accompanying discourses on civilization in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. This chapter also delves into the novelties that occurred in the field of international law and international relations with the signing of the Geneva Convention, the foundation of the Institute of International Law in Brussels, the two Conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907. The final part of the chapter concentrates on the Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 and the atrocities against civilians.

The ICRC was founded in 1863 and, in 1864, the first Geneva convention was created. It states that wounded and sick in armed conflict should receive assistance. They and the medical staff caring for them are protected by the emblem of the Red Cross, meaning that they must not be attacked.

War surgery is a major activity of the ICRC. From 1979, independent hospitals have been set up by the ICRC for wounded from conflict areas such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Sudan, and more than 100 000 wounded have received treatment. Treatment is always free of charge and medical needs are the only reasons for admission, so both soldiers and fighters from different groups are treated.

Expatriate doctors and nurses are civilians, doing missions as volunteers and usually staying between three months and a year. Most come from Europe, but many are from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Many have no previous experience of treating weapon wounds. Basic equipment is provided, but based on the long experience of ICRC, guidelines and treatment protocols have been created with the aim of saving life and limbs and rehabilitating the wounded. Even with these limited resources, hospital mortality is only 2.2–6.4%.

As the military and economic situation deteriorated in Germany, so did the military’s ability to respect the pre-war agreements on the humane treatment of prisoners of war. Shortages worsened throughout 1917 and 1918, causing all social classes to feel the effects of the war in the pits of their stomachs. Tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war in Germany had no option but to rely on whatever their captors could feed them. Conditions were dire, but Germany was able to defray some of the long-term costs of feeding prisoners of war by granting some of them access to humanitarian aid from the Red Cross. The food situation at Karlsruhe had become so desperate in 1917 that British officers imprisoned there were offered 30 pfennigs a day to forgo the German-supplied rations so that they could be used to feed starving civilians.

Not all captured Australians survived the tumult of battle. After the 7th Brigade’s failed attack on the Windmill at Pozières on 28 July 1916, a German officer approached an Australian Lewis gunner nursing a bullet wound to his leg. ‘You are the Machine Gunner?’ asked the officer. ‘Yes, sir,’ the man replied. Without hesitation, the officer drew his automatic pistol and shot the man through the heart and the head, killing him instantly. ‘That’s the way to deal with English swine.’