Today I finished writing a long article I’ve been working on for a while, about the role of large-scale incarcerations in colonial counter-insurgency campaigns… Well, that was was sort of what it ended up being about. It started out as something slightly different, but in this case (unlike most others) my writing process was a fairly intuitive one, so I just sort of followed the narrative where it led me, and learned a lot in the process.
Yes, I’m sure you’re all really eager to find out about my writing process. (Irony alert.)
Well, along the way, I wrote quite a lot about the anti-Mau Mau campaign in Kenya. I borrowed acouple of Bill’s books about French counter-insurgency strategies in Algeria. I talked a bit with a friend about Dutch counter-insurgency strategies in Indonesia. (Did you know that when the Japanese invaded Indonesia during World War 2, the Dutch administrators of an entire detention camp called Boven Digul escaped to Australia– and took their Indonesian prisoners with them? What an interesting episode.)
Anyway, the main thing I wanted to put up here is this link to a really fascinating article titled Patterns of frontier genocide 1803
2 thoughts on “Counter-insurgencies and large-scale incarceration”
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When it comes to modern ‘counter-insurgency’, somebody ought to look the ‘early adapters’ — Spain in Cuba, and England in South Africa — both pioneers in modern concentration camp theory and practice.
The description you quote of colonial counterinsurgency followed by concentration camps reminds me of the strategy of Indonesian rulers in East Timor, especially at the end. I may be showing ignorance here, but from the little I know, the paradigm seems to fit.