Short Abstract

Colonial concentrationary repertoires reshaped civilian lives across twentieth-century Africa. This panel explores counterinsurgency-driven incarceration, deportation and their afterlives through comparative and transimperial approaches centred on African perspectives and experiences.

Long Abstract

Colonial concentrationary repertoires served multiple and shifting purposes across twentieth-century Africa. Beyond detention and state-sanctioned punishment in counterinsurgency, they were integral to civilian resettlement schemes and functioned as technologies of population control and colonial governance. Yet the perspectives and experiences of internees and deportees have rarely been examined through comparative, transimperial and interdisciplinary frameworks.

This panel invites contributions exploring counterinsurgency-driven incarceration and deportation, and their afterlives from African perspectives. It seeks to reconsider colonial violence, wartime governance and their enduring legacies by comparing practices and experiences of confinement and deportation across different imperial contexts, identifying both shared logics of colonial confinement and the historical specificities of distinct colonial settings.

Special emphasis is placed on the lived experiences of those subjected to confinement and deportation, as well as on the African auxiliaries and camp staff through whom concentrationary regimes were often administered, mediated and contested. Papers are invited to analyse the diversity of camp populations in terms of geographical origin, ethnicity, gender, age, class, literacy and political affiliation, alongside the social structures, hierarchies and power relations that developed within sites of confinement. Submissions addressing resilience, solidarity, adaptation, creativity and resistance under coercive conditions, particularly the experiences of women and children, are encouraged.

Research on the archival, material, spatial and mnemonic afterlives of colonial concentrationary repertoires—including intelligence and surveillance records, architecture, oral histories, heritage, museums and public memory—is welcome. Such work will support new comparative dialogues on one of the most significant yet fragmented histories of twentieth-century Africa.

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