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Paper short abstract

This paper compares contemporary prisons in Niger and Tokugawa-period Japan to analyze delegated authority to incarcerated people as a technology of government. It questions resource-deficit explanations and examines delegation as a mode of power structuring obedience and internal hierarchies.

Paper long abstract

This paper compares two carceral configurations distant in both time and space: contemporary prisons in Niger and the Kodenmacho prison in Tokugawa-period (early modern) Japan. Drawing on ethnographic research on Niger and on the historiography of punishment in early modern Japan, it examines forms of prison govenrment based on the delegation of authority to incarcerated people.

Rather than treating such arrangements mainly as pragmatic responses to limited resources or staff shortages, the paper approaches delegation as a technology of power in its own right. In both settings, prison order relies on selected incarcerated people entrusted with organizing everyday life, relaying information, and enforcing internal discipline. These mechanisms produce internal hierarchies and differentiated regimes of privileges and sanctions through which obedience is manufactured and authority exercised at a distance. Far from signaling a simple retreat of the state, they actively organize relations of power and responsibility within the prison.

By bringing together these “unlikely” cases, the paper uses comparison to raise broader questions about delegated authority as a political rationality of carceral government, and to move beyond Western-centered and resource-deficit explanations.