Aidan Forth’s Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement is an ambitious account of how the institution of the camp has come to occupy a central role in modern governance. From colonial internment regimes to contemporary detention centers, Forth asks us to consider the camp not as an exceptional or episodic response to crisis, but as a durable and systemic feature of political modernity.
Structured thematically rather than chronologically, the book ranges widely: from the Andaman Islands to Guantánamo, from the concentration camps of the Boer War to contemporary refugee enclaves. What emerges is a powerful through-line: the camp as a tool of spatial and social governance, of reducing political subjects to biological existence, of managing perceived threats to order under the guise of discipline, protection or even care. The carceral spaces surveyed here are distinct in purpose and form, but bound by what Forth calls a “carceral continuum,” a term that both unifies and destabilizes our inherited distinctions between liberal, authoritarian and imperial orders.
The book’s empirical breadth is one of its most impressive features. Forth manages to integrate colonial archives, humanitarian policies and architectural schematics into a coherent, global narrative. Few recent books have attempted to draw such substantive parallels between such diverse cultural and historical contexts.
Still, the analytical lens through which this global history is narrated deserves closer attention. The major regret or criticism that can be made is that the book’s theoretical framework is drawn almost exclusively from Euro-Atlantic critical thought: Foucault’s theories of discipline and biopolitics, Agamben’s “state of exception,” Arendt’s reflections on totalitarianism and Bauman’s readings of modernity and bureaucracy. These serve as the conceptual scaffolding for understanding not only European and North American camps, but also those in China, North Korea and parts of the Global South.
While these thinkers offer powerful insights, the universal application of Western political theory to non-Western contexts raises significant methodological and intellectual concerns. The book offers limited engagement with how confinement has been theorized or practiced from within other traditions. For instance, in analyzing China’s contemporary re-education camps or North Korea’s penal colonies, the book largely translates their logic into Western categories of authoritarianism, biopolitics and surveillance, rather than exploring their internal justifications, cosmologies or historical genealogies.
Confucianism, Islamic legal frameworks or Indigenous governance systems are occasionally mentioned, but rarely treated as theoretical sources in their own right. Political concepts from other countries and civilizations would gain to be engaged with in depth, and not reduced to the role of illustration of the argument. This choice leaves the book open to the charge of epistemic asymmetry: of constructing a global history in which Europe theorizes and the rest of the world illustrates. It is a tension not uncommon in global historiography, but one that Forth’s book could have more directly addressed.
A related issue concerns the moral and political flattening that the book sometimes risks. By placing British refugee camps, Nazi concentration camps and contemporary humanitarian detention centres on a shared continuum, Forth makes a provocative claim about modernity’s spatial politics. And indeed, there are important infrastructural and ideological continuities and sources of inspiration across these sites, but this conceptual boldness occasionally comes at the cost of historical differentiation. Are the genealogical continuities strong enough to justify the rhetorical convergence? A way to engage with these criticisms would be to study archive materials and decision-makers’ discourses from a critical perspective as to engage with this idea and analyse whether decision-makers are consciously or unconsciously putting themselves in a historical continuum.
While Forth anticipates these critiques and is careful not to equate unlike cases, the comparative framing still invites the reader to draw lines that may oversimplify. In particular, the ambiguity of humanitarianism, as both a regime of compassion and control, requires more than structural analogy; it demands attention to ambivalence, contingency and resistance.
This leads to a final concern: the limited treatment of agency. The book’s focus is predominantly institutional and infrastructural: we learn a great deal about architects, planners and states while the confined themselves, however, are more often acted upon than acting. When detainees, prisoners or camp residents appear, it is usually in the form of testimony that reinforces the book’s central claims. Rarely do they emerge as theorists of their own condition, or as subjects engaged in political life within, and against, the architecture of their confinement.
To be clear, these critiques do not diminish the book’s importance. Camps is a deeply researched, eloquently written and intellectually serious work. It provides a powerful conceptual vocabulary for rethinking the spatial logic of modern governance, and it does so with moral urgency. But as with any ambitious synthesis, it opens as many questions as it answers.
