Introducing internment in August 1971 broke ancient prohibitions against detention without trial and forcible confessions, and incited a fervent reaction across Northern Ireland. Rather than viewing internment in isolation, this chapter evaluates the implications of Prime Minister Heath granting the army permission to wage war against the IRA. The wartime mindset began to take hold because initial operations appeared to be successful. Even as the Provisionals escalated their violence, soldiers retained some sympathy for the Catholic population, and thought of their own approach as discriminate. An arms amnesty, searches and arrests provided plentiful statistical evidence to feed the optimistic mood. Improvements to the military intelligence system gave credence to General Tuzo’s wish for gradual, low-key attrition of the IRA, especially targeting the Provisional leadership. This chapter argues the turn towards repression built slowly, and derived as much from the nature of British common law, Britain’s global commitments and London’s calculations about blame politics, as it did from fears of a loyalist backlash. The growing hurt done to those adjacent to the targets of the military failed to register as meaningful enough to force any major re-think in strategy.

Part Two: “Ostracism/Initiation,” examines twentieth-century Japanese immigrants and their descendants in relation to structural anti-Blackness and its instantiation in a nationwide system of racial segregation and anti-Black violence. Entering the U.S. in the wake of Chinese exclusion, the Japanese inherited the mantle of the Asiatic/Mongolian, much to their dismay. Despite the pointed burdens associated this label, they discovered that the constitutive not-Blackness of the Asiatic/Mongolian also enabled their qualified and uneven advancement and mobility in an anti-Black order. This remained true even during the turbulent, traumatic events of the Second World War. The wartime internment of Japanese Americans constituted not only the extreme limit of their ostracism, but also, as others have noted, their symbolic initiation into the nation. As the Cold War unfolded, accounts of Japanese Americans as an ascendant “model minority” were just one symptom of how they came to be weaponized against the Black freedom struggle and in defense of the U.S. state and racial capitalism. Like the Chinese before them, Japanese Americans deployed their not-Blackness to their advantage in their efforts to achieve residential mobility, educational success, occupational advancement, and social assimilation in the postwar era.

Chapter three measures the political influences of ‘new’ and ‘old’ Irish nationalisms in Britain from the aftermath of the 1916 Rising to the aftermath of the 1918 general election. It profiles the political languages and cultures of ‘Irish-Ireland’ nationalism in British centres: Gaelic League-Sinn Féin-I.S.D.L.; charts the decline of the Irish Parliamentary Party’s British political influence; and evaluates the impact of the 1918 Representation of the People Act on Irish political representation in Britain. While advanced Irish nationalist associations were central to the organisation of relief campaigns for interned rebels in British centres, the 1916 Rising, this chapter submits, did not fundamentally change Irish nationalist politics in Britain. Conflicted over Redmond’s earlier refusal to join the British Cabinet, the Irish Party was instead debilitated by the absence of political leadership, and a post-war political manifesto, in Britain. While the Irish Party in Ireland was decisively defeated by Sinn Féin at the 1918 general election, the Irish Party in Britain was effectively displaced by the Labour Party. The ‘victory’ of Sinn Féin in Britain was predicated less on the democratic legitimacy of Dáil Éireann and more on its recognisable post-war mandate: an Irish Self-Determination League.

In Chapter 4, the second vantage point of the book is introduced, that of the German citizen. It describes a record of how average men and women, from different backgrounds and living in different occupied territories, experienced the campaign to eradicate Nazism; how it impacted their daily lives and what they felt about it. Journal entries, private letters, newspapers, memoirs, and interviews chronicle much of the everyday denazification experience. An examination of on-the-ground activities reveals that the ideological cleanse was tethered to employment, and hence, political screening. If a shared denazification experience existed, it was the completion of Fragebögen. This chapter also shows that the consequences of denazification were more severe than what is often suggested. The form had the potential of permanently altering one’s material security, as well as professional and community status. Going through political screening was emotionally exhausting. This chapter includes a detailed case study of denazification experiences in Hersfeld (Hesse), a seemingly typical German district in the US occupation zone.

Chapter 4 documents and analyzes China’s domestic policies aimed at countering Uyghur violence. We discuss the broad securitization of Xinjiang, including budgets and the forces involved. Drawing on the best available data on Uyghur-related political violence and China’s public security expenditure in Xinjiang, we present the first rigorous assessment of the feedback loop of violence and repression in Xinjiang. We demonstrate that government repression is not systematically followed by increased Uyghur violence and that increased security expenditures are excessive and inefficient, especially in the long run. This chapter also traces the recent strategic shift in China’s policies from postattack securitization toward actively and forcibly promoting ethnic mingling and “de-extremification.” While this policy reorientation has been attributed to Beijing’s intolerance of instability, our analysis shows that it is a result of a more complex set of competing priorities within the Chinese government.

Continuing the chronology, Chapter 6 focuses on World War II, and the year immediately leading up to it. It focuses on the extensive investments in cloaking and “Indianization,” and how these efforts failed to protect German companies from renewed expropriation once the war broke out. Despite intense planning, the war put a temporary end to German firms’ efforts in India. However, corporate diplomacy still mattered. German businesses had a plan for dealing with internment in India and were better able to cope with this challenge. They also reflected back on their experiences with the rise of nationalist movements in the interwar period and synthesized their learnings into a new strategy for competing in “markets with strong nationalist movements,” including India. These formerly or currently dependent territories were identified as having similar goals, ambitions, and needs, which German decision-makers planned to address using a unified strategy; one that only emerged slowly out of several decades of engagement with different types of nationalism around the globe.

World War I sanctioned the economic rivalry between Germany and Great Britain by officially declaring the Germans political “enemies.” This created new lines of distinction in India, when the newly defined enemies were shunned from social clubs and saw their assets expropriated. German businessmen were rounded up in internment camps, supervised by Indian soldiers – a fact that challenged the (perceived) cohesion of the group of “white Western Europeans” in India. While many Indian nationalists supported Britain during the war, some took the war as an opportunity for rebellion and found support for their revolutionary aspirations in Germany. While the Indo-German conspiracy schemes during the war yielded few immediate results, they had a number of longer-term consequences, such as Germans and Indians openly reflecting on their joint interests and complementary ambitions, nationalistic Indians physically settling (and remaining) in Berlin to collaborate with German political and economic leaders, and the launch of targeted publications promoting the Indo-German alliance.

Building on findings presented earlier in this book, this chapter has a two-fold aim. First, it explores the reasons why non-State armed groups (NSAGs) actually detain, challenging some common misconceptions about how these entities operate in conflict settings, and suggesting new lines of inquiry. Second, it considers these findings and discusses the legal grounds necessary for these non-State actors to deprive individuals of their liberty in conflict settings or, to put it differently, to ensure that the actions of NSAGs in this regard are not manifestly unlawful. This chapter (and the book more broadly) is of the view that NSAGs need to enact their own normative authority to guarantee the respect of individuals’ safeguards, including the principle of legality. Given the lack of an explicit legal basis to deprive individuals of their liberty in international law, in particular in treaty and customary international humanitarian law, it is submitted that NSAGs’ ‘laws’ and regulations, which result from their law-making (or law-adapting) activities, are the only legal tools that may actually serve for this purpose.

Having analysed the place that non-State armed groups (NSAGs) occupy within the international legal architecture and the reasons why they are (and should be) bound by the obligations contained therein, this chapter focuses on how international law responds to some of their detention activities in non-international armed conflicts (NIACs). It explores, in particular, the possible legal basis that these non-State actors can rely upon to deprive individuals of the liberty, focusing on NSAGs’ law-making and ‘law-adapting’ activities. By relying on a ‘legal pluralistic’ approach to international law and on the principle of equality of belligerents under IHL, this chapter argues that NSAGs’ ‘laws’ can provide a valid legal basis for their activities in NIACs.

Chapter 22 builds on its preceding chapter, discussing “security detention,” confinement without criminal charges for security reasons during armed conflicts or other situations of violence. This is presumably the fate of most, if not all, of the forty remaining Guantánamo detainees. The chapter compares security detention with other forms of wartime internment, including World War II Swiss internment of US and German aircrews. Law, LOAC or otherwise, authorizing internment during non-international armed conflicts is sparse but authorities (such as this textbook) point to a 2014 UK case, and the criticism that followed its resolution, as pointing the way to LOAC (Sections III and IV of 1949 Geneva Convention IV) that would allow and control security detention. Much of the chapter describes present-day US security detention policy. A difficulty is squaring LOAC with security detention beyond the conclusion of hostilities. Surprisingly, however, the US Supreme Court has a lon, if not unanimous, record of approving security detention well past the end of hostilities. Those cases suggest that current Guantánamo detainees are probably going to age and die in place.

This chapter uncovers how the 1947 Partition of India shapes South Asian America in particular, and Asian America more generally. Engaging with recent Asian American studies of war and displacement, it situates Partition in its wider history of decolonization and the emergent Cold War from 1930 to 1970, to show how it constitutively shapes South Asian American literature about the circuits of travel, migration, internment, and displacement that link Asia and Asian America. In this period, South Asian writers and critics like Santha Rama Rau circulated back and forth between the USA, England, and Asia, and produced writing that reflected on race relations in the USA and under empire; the traumatic mass migrations of 1947; and the geopolitical and ideological conflicts linked to the Cold War that shaped decolonization in Asia. Daiya traces the linkages between the 1947 Partition and subsequent border conflicts and war in South Asia, including Tibetan refugees’ exile in India, the little-discussed 1962 war between India and China, and Chinese-Indians’ ensuing, traumatic internment. This chapter shows how inter-Asia solidarities and conflicts, along with US involvement, shaped South Asia in this period of radical transformation and realignment in Asia, and for Asian America.

This chapter explores the role of environmental change and the emergence of ecocritical critique in Asian American literatures from 1930 to 1965. From the development of industrialized agriculture to the deployment of military technologies like the atomic bomb and Agent Orange, the environmental changes wrought by technological advances in war, commerce, and communication during this period played a key role in driving and directing migrations within and across the Pacific both in this era and in the decades to come. By considering the roles that terraqueous environments and ecologies have played in shaping critical debates over nation, empire, and race, this chapter posits that an ecocritical approach to Asian American studies can demonstrate how mid-twentieth-century attitudes toward the regulation and legislation of US land and sea territories reflects or refracts implicit beliefs about the state of nature, the natural boundary of the state, and who (or what) might belong within it.

The cultures implicated in the government’s wartime displacement of Japanese Americans should be recognized as including many immigrant laborer communities, both Japanese and non-Japanese, both in the USA and beyond its southern border, as well as before, during and even long after World War II. The economic dispossession and social reformation of Japanese communities in the USA was, for example, coordinated with the wartime deportation and military strategy applied to Japanese laborers in South America, and both processes were in turn the beneficiaries of the government’s Depression-era removal of Mexican migrant laborers in the Southwest in an attempt to constrict that community’s economic opportunities. The internment was, thus, not a glitch in the steady protocols of democracy for immigrants in the USA, much less one that was un-anticipated, nor is it one whose violent logic has yet been exhausted. The study of the cultures of internment, thus extended, opens up a horizon of political and historical possibilities only just beginning to be accounted for in scholarly research and creative expression.

This chapter opens the third section of the book on the aftermath of the war. It addresses the end of the war and its many legacies. It starts with the armistice, and then considers the discussion about enemy aliens during the peace conference; it also explores the treaties that ended the war and their consequences for aliens, citizenship and property rights. It continues with the signing of all the final treaties, the emptying of the concentration camps and the lifting of the provisions on foreign movements, the agreement that regulated restitution or liquidation of assets, and the final exchange of populations. The chapter covers the period up to the late 1920s and deals with the transition from the state of emergency to peace, the resumption of naturalization procedures, new rules on borders and migration, new citizenship regimes that emerged from the war in both victorious and defeated countries as well as in the new successor states, and mass denaturalization and statelessness as a consequence of the emergence of new political regimes (such as the Soviet Union) or population exchange. It investigates the impact of special legislation on alien and enemy aliens on policies of migration control and explores the debate among jurists about the many violations of the conventions and human rights and the failed attempts at writing a new convention on enemy aliens.

This chapter focuses firstly on the expansion of internment and confinement between 1915 and the beginning of 1917 in Europe and outside it. It traces the differences among the various belligerents in the treatment of enemy aliens, the living conditions in the camps, and the national, gender and generational composition of the inmates. It also concentrates on the one hand on the popular pressure in support of the wholesale internment of enemy aliens and, on the other, on the broadening of the humanitarian activities pursued by international non-governmental organization such as the International Committee of the Red Cross that actively promoted the exchange of prisoners of war and civilian internees. The second part of the chapter addresses the spread of a nationalistic economic discourse that boosted the intensification of the economic war and the attack on enemy aliens' property with the creation of new state bureaucracies and the beginning of the liquidation of sequestered assets. The chapter shows how the capacity of the state to enforce such policies was continuously put to the test by the effect of the war on politics and by its military evolution.