Webinar: Internment as a Technology of Governance: Xinjiang, Assam, refugee camps, and the US prison system
Wednesday 22 September from 6-8pm.
This panel discussion considers the question of why and when governments forcibly confine those who live under their control. When is internment used to suppress wages and thereby contribute to economic growth? When is internment pursued despite being economically irrational? Why is internment so frequently meted out against specific ethnic or religious groups? What are the risks and benefits of internment as a technology of governance?
Although China's setting up of 'vocational education and training centers' in Xinjiang received little notice abroad from 2017 to 2019, since the outbreak of Covid-19 the Chinese state's use of internment has been very frequently discussed. Nonetheless, this increased discussion has generally failed to contextualize the Xinjiang case against the backdrop of internment as a technology. India's Assam state is also currently engaged in an internment and here also a de-nationalization process, which parallels the Xinjiang case in so far as it is targeted against a Muslim minority group. Although many voices criticize the political use of internment from a human rights perspective, these voices are less prominent in relation to the internment of refugees by the UN. Finally, to understand the particularities of internment as a governance technology it is useful to contrast internment with incarceration, with a look at the US, frequently referred to as a 'carceral state' in particular in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
Participants: Darren Byler (Simon Fraser University), Mayur Suresh (SOAS, University of London), Annett Bochmann (Siegen), Keramet Reiter (UC Irvine)
Darren Byler is a sociocultural anthropologist at Simon Fraser University whose teaching and research examines the dispossession of stateless populations through forms of contemporary capitalism and colonialism in China, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia.
Mayur Suresh is a lecturer at SOAS, University of London, in the School of Law. His research seeks to bring an anthropological perspective to the study of legal processes. He co-edited The shifting scales of justice: The Supreme Court in Neoliberal India (2014) and is currently completing a book based on his doctoral dissertation 'Terrorist' lives in Delhi's courts: An ethnography of the legal worlds of terrorism trials.'
Annett Bochmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Siegen in the Department of General Sociology in Germany. She has been researching refugee camps and border regions in Asia since 2008. In 2021 she published her book Public Camp Orders and the Power of Microstructures with Rowman & Littlefield.
Keramet Reiter is professor of law and criminology at U.C. Irvine. She studies prisons and prisoners rights, is building an in-prison bachelor's program in California, and co-founded PrisonPandemic: a living archive of incarcerated Californian's experiences of COVID-19.