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.

This chapter follows the globalization and radicalization of the policies on enemy aliens that occurred in the last two years of the war. In 1917, the conflict became truly global with the entrance of the Americas (the United States, Brazil and Cuba) and Asia (the independent states of China and Siam, and the Philippines as a US dependency). At the same time, Russia and Romania exited the conflict, signing disadvantageous peace agreements with Germany. All the states that joined the war in 1917 drew up policies against enemy aliens, notwithstanding the enormous differences in the numbers of such people within their territories. The chapter analyzes the policies against enemy aliens in the United States, in Brazil, in China and Siam, and compares them with the evolution of the war in Europe where radicalization transformed all foreigners into enemies and also affected neutral countries. The chapter concentrates in particular on a series of new developments that concerned property rights. On the eve of the end of the conflict, property rights were no longer safe in any of the belligerent countries and were actually in pieces in many places.