Detention Camps in Asia: The Conditions of Confinement in Modern Asian History

Why have Asian states - colonial and independent - imprisoned people on a massive scale in detention camps? How have detainees experienced the long months and years of captivity? And what does the creation of camps and the segregation of people in them mean for society as a whole? This ambitious book surveys the systems of detention camps set up in Asia from the beginning of the 20th century in The Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Malaya, Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Timor, Korea and China.

Robert Cribb is Professor of Asian History at the Australian National University. His research focusses on national identity, mass violence, historical geography and environmental politics, especially in Indonesia. He is author (with Sandra Wilson, Beatrice Trefalt and Dean Aszkielowicz) of Japanese War Criminals: the Politics of Justice After the Second World War (2017) and editor of The Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966 (1990).

Christina Twomey is Professor of History and Head of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University. She is the author of The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia (2018), Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War Two (2008) and, with co-author Mark Peel, A History of Australia (2011). She has published extensively on the history of wartime internment, prisoners of war, the photography of atrocity and histories of protection and humanitarianism.

Sandra Wilson is Professor of Japanese History and a Fellow of the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University. She is author of The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, 1931-33 (Routledge, 2002) and, with Robert Cribb, Beatrice Trefalt and Dean Aszkielowicz, Japanese War Criminals: the Politics of Justice After the Second World War (Columbia University Press, 2017). She continues to work with Robert Cribb on war crimes committed by the Japanese military.