This workshop aims to critically rethink the concept of internment in its various forms,1 tracing its development from colonial practices to today’s ‘detention archipelagos’ in migration regimes.

Rationales, institutions, and techniques of both individual and collective internments were prominent features of European modernity (e.g., Foucault, 1972 and 1975), of Europe’s colonialism, and of Western colonialism more broadly. These rationales and techniques were also turned against populations within colonial cores. Indeed, some argue that colonies often served as laboratories for violence and for social and political control (e.g., Césaire, 2006; Arendt, 1951), dating back to the Renaissance and the parallel Spanish-Portuguese invasions of the Americas (Mignolo, 1995). More recently, in the interwar period of the 20th century, Francoist Spain and Salazarist Portugal began deploying internment practices against domestic political enemies and socially ‘undesirable’ groups. These practices were also employed by early colonial Italy, which consistently resorted to the deportation and internment of opponents in penal colonies on islands in Southern Italy (Di Pasquale, 2018) and throughout Libya (Ahmida, 2021). Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany later adapted and expanded these methods, ultimately developing them into one of World War II’s most notorious features:
concentration and extermination camps.

What is less well-known is that internment also featured in European policies and practices after 1945, long after the horrifying nature and consequences of earlier practices had come to light, both in colonial and internal European contexts.
In recent years, key EU member states and the EU have adopted strategies to manage asylum, refugees, and (im)migration through confinement in areas as removed as possible from European population centres, legal frameworks, and – geographically – from Europe’s mainland. This contemporary use of locations beyond Europe’s borders, evocative of the old overseas presidios (such as migrant “centres” in Libya or Tunisia), makes these practices and these people invisible to national laws and public opinion in Europe.