This chapter examines how a shared experience of isolation during the Second World War clouded a sense of the future for civilian internees. It focuses on how various historical processes collapsed into the spacetime of confinement for most working-age Italian men in Egypt. British authorities had planned a complete shutdown of the Italian community during Italy’s 1935 Ethiopia campaign, when they perceived the large-scale participation in fascist institutions as a ’fifth column’ threat to their authority in Egypt. After June 1940, Anglo-Egyptian authorities closed Italian institutions, froze bank accounts, restricted movement, and forbade the signing of contracts with Italian nationals. Italian institutional life, which had become central to the population during the after 1919 was abruptly brought to a halt. While the buttressing of the Italian population collapsed during the war, many of its political structures remained intact. In this chapter, the camp is seen as a temporal isolation chamber, one that delimited the horizons of the internees during the war and then moulded a shared experience that would inform their relationship with the post-fascist Italian state after the war.

The Prologue to Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet discusses the importance of camps and villages to human migration and habitation of Earth and to the agricultural revolution. It differentiates the kinds of larger-scale actions we could take as residents of smaller habitats from those we could take in cities. It notes that while those smaller settlements existed long before cities and continued to exist beyond the influence of acts enabled by cities for many millennia, virtually all camps and villages have been incorporated into the Urban Planet’s realms of action, habitat, impact, and consequence today.

The chapter discusses the founding of the Polish War Crimes Office, the ways in which the War Crime Office engaged with the UNWCC, and the Charge Files that it submitted. It is argued that the Polish War Crimes Office developed Charge Files in a strategic and organised manner. It was able to do this due to the continuous flow of intelligence from the Polish Underground State. It is also maintained that, through contributions to legal debates within the UNWCC and through submitted Charge Files, the Polish War Crimes Office helped to expand understanding of the idea of ‘war crimes’.

Chapter Three, ‘At Camp’, explores how military camps produced new tensions as the men began to observe and interact with troops from other part of the empire and among the Allied forces. Colourful descriptions of the ‘Empire united in arms’ elided the asymmetries of power and inter-colonial competition at stake in the militarised setting.  The struggle to achieve status within an envisioned hierarchy of colonial races manifested in how the men wrote about those they met and how they represented themselves – in their uniform, fitness and soldierly bearing – in these spaces. Military sports days and leisure activities afforded new opportunities away from the battlefield to prove martial manliness, creating physical spectacles captured in official photography of the pageantry of the British Empire at war. The chapter thinks, too, about how these camp spaces encouraged curiosity about the new people the men were meeting and how they recounted moments of intimate and human connection that ran parallel to more antagonistic constructions of identity.

Chapter 7 looks at humanitarian projects assisting migrants in the Moroccan borderlands. I argue that the fast violence pervading the border allows us to see the inclusionary-exclusionary stance of the aid apparatus in a clearer light. It shows that aid sustains the rise of a silent, threatened apparatus of emergency relief. Donor-funded projects providing humanitarian assistance to migrants enter a symbiotic relation with border violence. Although abuses against migrants perpetually trigger humanitarian intervention, NGOs and IOs engage in a form of “minimal biopolitics”, that mitigates migrants’ death without fully investing in life.

The reception of asylum seekers in Europe is a highly debated topic: while national governments oversee the implementation of reception conditions, European member states are bound by European directives on minimum standards. Asylum seekers in collective reception facilities should be provided with at least a minimum of reception standards, including housing, food, material reception standards, and legal assistance. However, reception practices not only largely differ across member states but also constantly draw boundaries between asylum seekers and the host society through geographical, architectural, and bureaucratic measures. Using case studies from Austria and Italy, this contribution investigates how, on the one hand, certain (minimum) standards are applied in relation to restrictive integration claims and discourses and how, on the other hand, resources (e.g. for integration measures or housing) are strictly bound to exclusive structures that complicate the inclusive partaking of refugees in host societies. It highlights the mechanisms whereby national reception practices amplify the ‘othering’ of migrants in the context of asylum seeking.

The British government’s role in feeding British prisoners of war (POWs) during World War I are the subject of Chapter 4. It investigates the widespread uncertainty around whether British POWs were starving in the German camps and the troubling questions this raised about whom was ultimately responsible for their maintenance. This stimulated debate about how to provision them adequately within international agreements, how to evaluate objectively what constituted a sound diet, and what food was culturally acceptable to prisoners and their governments. This chapter argues that throughout the war the British government often made surprisingly impractical and costly decisions around the provisioning of their own POWs. Its agencies often acceded to the requests of combatant and civilian prisoners who manipulated charitable food aid and called on their government to supplement their rations with British food products. Far from following recent advances in the nutritional sciences, such as the identification of calories and the nutritive components of food, this chapter reveals that the British state privileged these demands for familiar, comforting foods. This chapter reveals that the state’s actions can only be explained by unpacking shared, cultural meanings around food that were far from irrelevant in the context of the war.

Demonstrates that music was a vital part of the daily routines of those interned in prisoner of war camps. The forming of orchestras and theatrical revues were a popular way of passing the time and maintaining morale, but in many cases musical activities were used by prisoners of war to conceal attempts to escape. This chapter will give examples of how prisoners of war used music as a means of keeping up their morale to stave off feelings of ‘mouldiness,’ later identified as barbed wire disease.

Chapter 4 examines the sites and functions of the camps and the treatment and conditions to which internees were subjected. It shows that there were more camps than often believed, especially in the west, and that although most had a Nazi past only a minority were former concentration camps. It shows that the camps served multiple functions (including holding SMT convicts) and operated under changing authority, especially in the US zone with a shift to German administration in 1946 and the Soviet zone with subordination to the Gulag in 1948. The chapter shows that after initial similarities in internees’ isolation, poor conditions, and rough treatment, crucial differences emerged between the western and the Soviet zones. Soviet internees remained isolated from the outside world, had limited opportunities for work or other meaningful activity, and remained inadequately accommodated, clothed, and most importantly fed. As a result, over 40,000 died from starvation and related diseases and were buried in mass graves. Soviet authorities’ failure to stop the mass dying stands in contrast to the western powers’ effective responses to early malnutrition. Nevertheless, the chapter argues that the western camps were not always the transparent, peaceful sites of re-education they are sometimes taken for.