The Gate, Internment camp at Huyton, near Liverpool.

Signed and dated lower right. See also 78.1689

Tackling the terrorists: the experience of internment without trial in Northern Ireland

In August 1971, the devolved Stormont administration in Northern Ireland introduced internment without trial of those suspected of involvement in IRA terrorism. Ever since, the policy has been regarded as an abject failure. This article will reassess many of the key questions about internment: why did the Northern Ireland government introduce it when it did? Why did the Westminster government agree to a measure without parallel in British peacetime history? Why did it fail, when it had worked before? Was internment always doomed, or only because it was badly implemented? What was the alternative? How does the liberal democratic state defend itself against violent subversion without itself resorting to brutality and violence? This article is based on archival research in Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and on interviews with former internees, politicians and civil servants, and former members of the security forces. It suggests that internment was a relatively humane and honest policy and might, in different circumstances, have spared Northern Ireland thirty years of murder and mayhem.

The Copenhagen principles on the handling of detainees: implications for the procedural regulation of internment

The Copenhagen Principles on the Handling of Detainees in International Military Operations were released in October 2012 after a five-year long process involving states and certain organizations. The Principles address a number of issues concerning the handling and transfer of detainees. They apply in military operations conducted by states abroad in the context of non-international armed conflicts and peace operations. This article focuses on those principles that address the procedural regulation of internment (ie preventive, security detention), as it is here that the current law is particularly unclear. On the one hand, the treaty provisions applicable in non-international armed conflicts contain no rules on the procedural regulation of internment, in comparison with the law of international armed conflict. On the other hand, the relevant rules under international human rights law (IHRL) appear derogable in such situations. This article demonstrates that the approach taken to this issue in the Copenhagen Principles is one which essentially draws on the procedural rules applicable to civilian internment in the international armed conflicts. These rules adopt standards that are lower than those under IHRL. Reference is then made to other recent practice, which illustrates that the Copenhagen Principles do not apply in a legal vacuum. In particular, two recent judicial developments highlight the continued relevance of human rights law and domestic law, respectively, in regulating detention operations in the context of international military operations. Compliance with the Copenhagen Principles may not, therefore, be sufficient for detention to be lawful.

A cultural battlefront in the total war : theatre in Australian internment camps

In 1943, at the Berlin Sportspalast, Joseph Goebbels made his infamous speech on 'total war', appealing to the crowd to represent Germany as a nation and asking them whether they wanted a war 'more total and radical' than had been previously imagined. In Australia in 1944, the idea of this 'total war' struck a resonance with German civilians interned in Tatura, Victoria. Writing to protest a planned release of internees, these Camp 3 internees claimed an involvement in the 'total war', arguing that any release from the camp would necessitate working towards the 'total destruction of the political, economical and cultural existence of the German Reich and the German nation.' A curious, and important, part of their argument was that such a release would mean that their 'cultural life would be endangered.' It is precisely this 'cultural life' within internment that I wish to examine in this paper.

Blurring the lines : how Japanese American internment camps re-defined art and religion's relationship

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor during WWII, anyone of Japanese descent living on the West Coast was placed in internment camps scattered throughout the country. Life inside the camps included many different activities to make life as normal as possible. This study will focus on two intersecting day-to-day activities in particular, the practice of religion within the camps, as well as the creation of art. Art created in the camps was influenced by multiple religious traditions. An analysis of artworks created by professional and amateur artists, interviews and an examination of existing scholarship demonstrates that internment camps created a unique environment for the creation of art. The values of internees reflected the seamless coexistence of Christianity, Buddhism and Shinto in internment camp art.

In Ruhleben, letters from a prisoner to his mother, with an account of the "university" life, classes, sports, good, accommodation, etc., of the internment camp of British prisoners,

Mode of access: Internet.

On my keeping and in theirs, a record of experiences on the run, in Derry Gaol, and in Ballykinlar Internment Camp.

Mode of access: Internet.

New evidence on Stobs internment camp 1914-1919

Paper on the Scottish internment camp for German citizens and on the development of its intense cultural activities.

‘Enemy aliens’ in wartime:civilian internment in South Africa during World War I

This article explores the previously neglected history of civilian internment in South Africa during World War I. German, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish nationals were classified as ‘enemy aliens’. They included mostly male immigrants, but also several hundred women and children deported from Sub-Saharan colonial contact zones. The main camp was Fort Napier in Pietermaritzburg, holding around 2,500. Based on sources in South African, German and British archives, this multi-perspectival enquiry highlights the salience of the South African case and integrates it into wider theoretical questions and arguments. The policy of civilian internment was rolled out comprehensively throughout the British Empire. Not least lessons learnt from the South African War (1900-1902), when Britain had been widely criticised for harsh conditions in its camps, led to relatively humane prisoner treatment. Another mitigating factor were the pro-German sympathies of the Afrikaner population. Nevertheless, suffering occurred through isolation and deportation. Remembering the First World War mainly as a ‘’soldiers’ war’ on the Western Front generates too narrow a picture. Widening the lens on civilians of both sexes in overseas territories supports notions of war totalisation.

It's just an old apron : aprons, artefacts and art - representations of personal and private 'her-stories', as public histories

This paper examines art and artefact in the representation and recollection of deeply personal WWII women’s experiences as POW’s under the Japanese. This kind of treatment of internees in the Tjideng Women and Children’s internment camp (and others) in Batavia under the Japanese in WWII, stands in stark and brutal contrast to the idyllic life lived by many families up to that time in what was then known as the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). The deprivation and brutality of the Japanese incarceration of these women and children evoked responses - not military, but certainly militant, if muted. Representations of those responses – as both art and artefact - may be found in the most unlikely places and unexpected forms - and are still being unearthed to this day. However close we might personally be to these artists and artisans, can we, as observers from a distance, ever truly comprehend through spoken or written words alone, the day-today realities of those extraordinary times?