 Good evening everyone and welcome to tonight's event internment as a technology of governance Xinjiang Assam refugee camps and the US prison system. I'm Nathan Hill and I'm Professor of Chinese studies here at Trinity College Dublin and director of the Center for Asian Studies I just want to extend my heartfelt thanks to to Tris the Trinity research in social sciences which is co hosting this event along with the Center for Asian studies and in particular to Maeve who has been brilliantly handling all of the technicalities with charm and grace. Right, so then about tonight's event and I want to just make me clear that make clear that what I'm about to say is just kind of meant as a sort of etiological explanation of you know how we've come to be here tonight and not meant to editorialize or to communicate any particular facts. But I have personally watched over over the last five years as with concern as events have unfolded in Xinjiang and with some consternation as to why they had been so remarked upon. And then quite suddenly, you know, then they began to be remarked upon and, and I am also a little bit confused about that sudden change. And there have been, you know, lots of discussions. Most of them are critical. But that criticism has has to me seemed like it isn't sort of to use a technical term imminent right so like it's it's it seems like it's not really kind of formulated in terms that the Chinese state would understand or recognize. It's also not, you know, to use the contrasting transcendent in the sense that it didn't take a comparative or global or historicized context in mind. And in the course of the pandemic as the news became more aware of developments in Xinjiang. And personally, remarked on what seemed to me in some ways analogous news stories, in particular, the horrific discoveries in Canada related to the residential schools program, looking a little bit further back in there have been of course similar kind of reckonings with the past, even here in Ireland, with regard to the Madeleine Laundry's industrial schools and mother and baby homes. You know, I'm not an expert in Ireland or Canada, neither is anyone here. But we, we do have experts in in what I think are relevant context to consider for thinking about internment as a technology of governance. And to then begin. I want to give you Darren Byler, who is a socio cultural anthropologist at Simon Frazier University, who is teaching and research examines the dispossession of stateless peoples through forms of contemporary capitalism and colonialism in China, Central Asia and Southeast Asia. So you can take it away Darren. Great. It's an honor to be here. And thank you Nathan for organizing this thinking comparatively about these issues is really crucial to understanding the historical moment we're living in and how these things are not unique to one particular space. My research is focused on Xinjiang, the Uyghur autonomous region in Northwest China to space the size of Alaska, massive desert and mountain landscape that's home to around 12 million Uyghurs which is a Turkic Muslim group and another million and a half. And then we have the Kazakh folks, another million Hui people, all Muslim groups who are affected by it by the current systems there. To understand this, why this is happening. We need to go back to the 1990s which is when China was becoming a manufacturer for the world, and really needing access to natural resources infrastructure was built across Xinjiang in order to get access to those resources, oil, natural gas and coal. And then over time, as that infrastructure was put in place, the roads and pipelines. They began to develop industrial farming, quickly cotton farming and tomato farming. And so in a lot of ways Xinjiang with the support of the government became a sort of peripheral colony for for resources needed in the industrial east. It was also part of an open up the Northwest campaign and later an open up the West campaign that was from the state's perspective, set out to do to integrate the Uyghur population with the rest of China. What happened along the way though was that the local institutions in these Uyghur majority areas were really captured by the new populations of people that came to build the infrastructure and develop the resources. They saw themselves really being pushed to the side in particular ways. The earliest forms of violence that appeared were really connected to resource issues to irrigation rights. There was often a discussion of Uyghurness and Islam as as part of that conversation. We look at sort of the material circumstances that people were operating out of it was had more to do with with the resources. In the 2000s this you know state was aware that this was happening and they began a labor transfer program that moved Uyghurs from rural areas to urban centers in the east to work in factories. But there again there was conflict between different groups of migrants between Han migrants and Uyghur migrants which sparked violence. And that in turn led to protests back in the Uyghur region and eventually riots, which brought about the beginning of a police state with, you know, hundreds of thousands of police moving into this space over time didn't happen all right away. And they weren't always there. But it was marked the present so when I started my field work in the region in 2011, there was armed police on pretty much every street corner in the Uyghur majority areas. And there was a lot of arrests of young Uyghurs, particularly young men. The systems that were put in place really began to mirror or echo forms of military science or policing science that was used in other places. Counter insurgency theory was something that that the Chinese police were interested in, and during understanding how you could break up Uyghur networks to begin to control what they saw as a emerging insurgency. Although there isn't really evidence that the Uyghurs were organized in a very systematic way. It was mostly about resource issues. That's the sort of policing science that began to emerge and I'm bringing that into this discussion because that's something that we've seen in many different places around the world how military science comes back home and becomes used in policing. In 2010s sort of information warfare and predictive policing began to emerge, which is something we see happening along with breakthroughs in mass data analysis. Really artificial intelligence being able to sort through mass amounts of data to look for patterns. And in the Uyghur context, this was used to track Uyghur discussions online. It took some time for the for the state to develop these kinds of tools, and they were working mostly with private industry to do it. The 2014 incident in Kunming, where there was large scale violence carried out by a group of Uyghurs, killing over 30 Han people was really a turning point in the sort of political will to develop these kinds of tools. And that incident was referred to as China's 911. And you see almost immediately afterwards that the large tech players like Ali Baba and I fly tech which does voice recognition, so that they would now begin to to really work directly with the with state security to assess terrorist activity online. What's happening though with this assessment is that they're they're really beginning to define what is terrorism or what is extremism in very broad ways. And here they're really drawing on predictive policing ideas or counter and countering violent extremism ideas, which in the UK is referred to as prevent. Without stopping people from being radicalized by preventing them from really accessing or following through on on pious forms of Islamic practice. There's a lot of problems with CVE theory, because it conflates piety or religious practice with violence, when there's not necessarily a correlation. And they told us how the state began to think about it, and they began to assess weaker digital histories, going back to around 2010, looking through the sort of social networks that people had on WeChat, which is a social media app. And that's when they really began to decide or sort through the population decide who is trustworthy or untrustworthy. So the very literature from Xinjiang talks about how they're looking for forms of extremism or terrorism that are quote not serious. And so they can be nipped in the bud. The, the state, you know, invested around $100 billion in security infrastructure, mostly in the surveillance stuff but also in the actual material infrastructure of camps. And the complex to turn to camps really comes out of the, you know, the malice history of the use of camps in the 1960s and 70s. And also in the 1990s in relation to the fallen gong. The next system that they're building they built in Xinjiang is really maybe the first of its type in in China, where it's purpose built very sophisticated, technologically sophisticated system, and it's really meant to target an entire population of an ethnic or several ethnic minorities. And the, the state also prosecuted around 500,000 people in addition to those that were detained, we see that in the, in the state records since 2017. And we also know that several hundred thousand of the people that were initially detained have since been moved into factory spaces that are associated with with the camps. And those that have been sent to factories, hundreds of thousands more of what you could call the able bodied poor have been sent from rural areas to work in factories, without having to go to the camps at all. And these are people that are coming out of what they call the general population or the normal population, not the untrustworthy people. In general what's happened here is a is a really radical transformation a sort of force proletarianization of the weaker population turning them from rural farmers into factory workers. But within a sort of controlled space, because, you know, inside the factories and in camps of course there's lots of technology and surveillance checkpoints, but outside of them there's checkpoints as well. Because they're using quite sophisticated face recognition assessment tools, and also data assessment tools that can plug into people's phones. They're tracking people using GPS and so on. Once you're on a watch list it's very difficult for you to leave the sort of permitted spaces where you're allowed to be. So, it's a sort of form of form of control that that's kind of unprecedented in terms of its technological ability. So part of what's happening here is, in addition to wanting to turn the Uyghurs into workers is that the state is also moving towards what they call the Zhonghua Minzu a national identity that seeks to deemphasize ethnic difference and instead say we should all be Chinese first where we should have a Chinese identity. And one of the ways that they're doing that in the in the Uyghur space is they've hired around 89,000 new teachers since 2017 to work in the public schools. And as you look at through the ads it says quite clearly that to be a teacher to qualify you have to have a high school degree, you need to speak Chinese, you need to have a non religious background and you need to be committed to anti terrorism. So it's, it's a sort of transformation of education system. And I think the state is really thinking that the next generation of Uyghurs and Kazakhs that the young children that are in these schools, that they're the ones that will be fully transformed or reeducated away from the sort of identities that they had before. The story I'm telling here is is a complicated one. And the source of it is complex as well there's not just one factor it's not just that Xi Jinping or Chen Tonghua the leaders of this bit of the Uyghur region and China, you know, have it out for the Uyghurs. It was initially economics that drove this, you know the desire for resources. And then it was, you know, we have this dissatisfied population how should we deal with them, then they turn to global policing theory, and also a good dose of Islamophobia that's coming out of the global war on terror. Then there's tech development that's happening simultaneously. And so, you know tech began to lead in some ways as well. And then there's this policy push to turn the Chinese state into this sort of homogeneous, you know, ethno state. There's of course always concerns about the national economy and maintaining growth. Some of the companies that have moved to Xinjiang are companies that are over capacity in their home regions and so they're needing places to develop. There's also issues having to do with labor in eastern China where labor is leaving China and going to Vietnam, because of rising labor costs. And then on top of all that there's the development initiative, the BRI the Belt and Road Initiative. That is about China's going out into the world and really sort of developing a global position in particularly the developing region. And the the Uighur region because it's right next to Central Asia and South Asia is seen as a sort of key hub in that project. So it's a complex story, but there's a lot of economic and political factors that are coming together Colo at Colo us in here to make it produce what it's the effects that we see. And I'll look forward to hearing from the others and then further conversation. Okay, well, thank you very much for this extremely clear and insightful summary of developments in Xinjiang. Our next speaker is Meyer Suresh, who is a lecturer at SOAS University of London in the School of Law. His research seeks to bring an anthropological perspective to the study of legal processes. He coded the book. The Shifting Scales of Justice the Supreme Court in neoliberal India. But now he has been doing some research, some that he'll be telling us about presently. Thank you for that Nathan and. And thank you to Diane for that really insight present presentation about re horrifying circumstances. I just want to say that the, the my research and I want to preface my kind of my comments on Assam with kind of two big caveats. This is that my, I'm moving into this kind of field of research, and these issues are to internment citizenship, a kind of new research areas for me so I look forward to your questions kind of prompts for further research. And second, I'm kind of aware of bit for the identity, especially questions of who speaks where. So, questions like this are so for especially in place like Assam which is so, which in which politics is so contingent on the idea of outside and inside. So I come across, come to this topic as a person who seeks to highlight kind of human costs of laws that are passed in the name of preserving both national security identity and build off my previous research on kind of ethnographies of terrorism laws in India. So, many of you would have heard might have read a couple of years ago that the Indian state of Assam basically was on the path to D nationalizing or stripping the citizenship of about just under 2 million people 1.9 million people. Through this process called the national register of citizens. I just want to give a kind of a brief history of that context before I go on to questions of detention that the national register of citizens or the NRC has led to. It's about 300 years of history so I'm going to kind of put that down into into very short bit over here a couple of minutes over here. So for those of you don't know Assam kind of is in the northeast of India. It's by far the biggest state in the India's northeast to the north it's bordered by Bhutan, and in the south it's bordered by Bangladesh, and kind of the issues around identity of who's Assamese who's not Assamese kind of go back in the rendering of some historians of the region go back to colonial colonial period when in same 1757 when the area of Bengal that's now Bangladesh and parts of West Bengal were brought into British control. They pushed the border upwards, kind of displacing ethnic Assamese further up north, and kind of settled agriculture in in the areas of what is now Assam. So the first wave of immigrant labor was for the tea plantation that were being set up. And the kind of second wave of migration happened in the later 1800s with the colonial state having this explicit policy of settling Bengalis from Bangladesh, what is now Bangladesh and West Bengal into the plains of Assam to cultivate and there's an 1891 census that estimated about one fourth of Assam's population at the time was migrant in origin. Two further events propelled migration into Assam from what is today Bangladesh, the first being the partition of the subcontinent 1947, which led to an estimated 5 million people entering Assam. And the Bangladesh war of independence and the events proceeding and the genocide proceeding that around 1971, which led to an estimate of 10 million people entering Assam and his neighboring states. So these this kind of protracted lengthy forms of migration. So the story goes, led to exacerbations in anxieties over the loss of Assamese identity. There's been a long running Assam movement, even during the colonial period, but kind of took off in the 60s and 70s with the influx of people from Bangladesh, from what is now Bangladesh. So the Assamese movement kind of took off in the 60s and then kind of demanded the protection of Assamese culture demanded state led protection of Assamese culture and language, and wanted to impose Assamese teaching in those schools, I wanted to have Assamese cultural programming and government business only being conducted in Assamese. The, the high point of the Assam movement was in the 70s just after the Bangladesh war of independence. The Assam movement, as is now known, was spearheaded by an organization called the All Assam Students' Union. And one of the primary aims of ASU, the All Assam Student Union, was the detection and deportation of all foreigners, right. And so this, this idea detection, deportation of all foreigners became a central plank in Assamese politics for a very long time, even to the present day. The Assam, All Assam Students' Union organized general strikes. It organized mass pickets, but the, but the kind of the, the, the, the political fervor that also led to acts of mass violence against ethnic Bengalis and one of the most horrific where, was I think where 2000 ethnic Bengalis were killed in an afternoon in a place called Nehli in rural Assam. So the political disturbance led to an accord being signed between the government of India and the Assam movement and had a number of, of, of kind of points in that in the political agreement. The main point for us today to think about is the agreement that basically mandated that all persons entered after, who entered India, who entered Assam after March 25 1971 were again to be detected and deported by the Indian government. And then the Indian government has kind of gone back and forth on this. It's kind of let the issue simmer a bit. But in the meantime, it's, it's, it's has done taken steps, which have, which have now exacerbated the situation. So the Indian government at the time in the, when the accord was signed in 1985 in the, in the mid 80s. Set up some something called foreigners tribunals. These foreigners tribunals were, were aimed to were aimed at detecting and reporting for people who are less should be foreigners. So the foreigners tribunals were set up in 1985 in Assam, and by some accounts statistics are a bit sketchy over here, but for some by one account, the most third account that I found is that 86 people have been declared as foreigners and currently it is about 86,000 people have been declared as foreigners and currently there are about 83,000 cases pending between before before the foreigners tribunals. Right. And it's the most another thing that the Indian government did was to go through voter roles and allow people to file objections to voter registrations. So wherever there was a person who was a doubtful citizenship, the authorities put a D next to that person's name to indicate that this person was a doubtful voter. And this kind of intersected with the foreigners tribunal process in various ways which we can talk about later on if we come to it. But the most contentious measure that was put in place by the Indian government was something called the National Register of Citizens, which is often known as the NRC. Despite its name, in its current form, it's a register that lists all Indian citizens in the state of Assam. So it's almost as if a question of national citizenship for the state of Assam has been been devolved to the, the government of Assam. So even though the first NRC was conducted of 1951 and there was not much political salience to it at that point. It kind of the NRC kind of kind of simmered in the background with no particular effect on the process till about 2013. So earlier on in 2003 the government started this process of having a national mandated ID card. And this process was associated in all India process, but it acquired a certain salience in Assam which was in Assam is moving still very concerned about Assam is identity. Right. So, in a very complicated court case which I won't get into over here, the Supreme Court mandated that the NRC process begin immediately. Right. So this was a Supreme Court supervised process. And according to the NRC process, every Assam resident who claimed Indian citizenship had to prove that the ancestry in the state predated March 25 1971. So the same date that the Assam that was put in into law in the Assam accord was repeated over here. So the authorities mandated a specified list of documents that we accepted of proof of ancestry. Once you had these documents you submitted them to the authority, and the authority would decide whether these, whether these documents are valid or whether they've been forged or what to do in case of where you don't have documents right. So in a milieu where you know documents that are on authenticity and completeness is always suspect the set of the mad scramble to obtain documents and to figure out a way in which you can that people thought to buttress their validity. In 2018, about 230 3033 million people that submitted the documents in July 2018, the government released a draft NRC, where the list of 4 million people were not included. Those left out of the NRC of the draft NRC will light were allowed to filed objections against include against the exclusion. In August 2019 a final list was published, leaving out the names of 1.9 million people that's about 6% of Assam's population out of the NRC. Those left out of the NRC risk being declared as foreigners, unless they can prove in the foreigners tribunals that they are Indian citizens. And so just a brief word on the process over here. So it's the burden of proof is on the individual proving that you have to is on the individual seeking to claim in citizenship. It's not as if someone is saying you are not an Indian citizen you have to show that you are an Indian citizen, right, which is a much more difficult burden of proof to meet especially in a context where the high literacy documents are suspect documents are incomplete. Right. Um, and the foreigners tribunal process that there's a recent last year, a report by court report court report by Cornell law school and a university in India called National University for Judical Sciences, analyze the form of foreigners tribunal process and then all sorts of due process issues with that with the tribunal process. First amongst which is that the tribunal tribunals are tribunal members are pointed directly by the government. They don't have any judicial training. And there are unconform media reports that that many of these tribunal office have been given informal quotas to figure out how informal quota and how many people declare as foreigners. Right. But the question then arises is what to do with these newly determined illegal immigrants or foreigners. And so the Indian government and the government of Assam has begun constructing detention centers in Assam. Right now, six detention centers are already in operation within jail compounds. And other specific specific jail detention centers are being constructed right now. The one needing completion, it can hold around 3000 people, but obviously to hold 1.9 million people, a whole level of infrastructure needs to be built up a bit over here. And I guess over here that the Assam movement, I movements idea of identity and was not was an ethnic one or religious one. Right. So, hence, for the Assam movement at least both Hindus and Muslims could be authentic Assamese. And the target for both Hindu, Hindu and Muslim Bengalis. Right. I think this nuance is important to remember because it becomes easy to forget, given the way in which the NRC has been used in Indian national politics. The Hindu right wing government has made targeting Muslims, one of its central policies, even if it's unstated. It's it's clearly targeted at Muslims. The present Home Minister has turned all has said that all Bangladeshis read Bengali Muslims as cockroaches and playing that they need to be exterminated. The international government, at least at the local level, pitched the NRC as a way of getting rid of Muslim foreigners and planned in all India wide exercise known as the national population register, which would follow a very similar format. All people within the within all of India who claim Indian citizenship had to prove their citizen, right, and had to prove their citizenship. Obviously, it's an instructed states to begin construction of detention camps in all major cities in order to detain people who had been wrongfully granted Indian citizenship. In its hope in the kind of state in a very dog whistle way was that both the NRC and both and the NPR, the national register of citizens and the national population register would help eliminate if not remove Muslims from the Indian population. However, when the final NRC was published, the Indian national government faced a problem. A high proportion of those excluded from the list for Hindu and to cut a very long complicated story short. The Indian government introduced an amendment to the citizenship citizenship act to enable those Hindus who were excluded to excluded from the NRC to apply for Indian citizenship, but would render Muslims unable to do so. This amendment, which would allow Bengali Hindus who excluded from the NRC to apply for Indian citizenship led to widespread protests in Assam, because remember they did not want Bengalis either Hindu or Muslim to be allowed to end to allow to live in Assam. But I just want to turn briefly, I probably don't have that much time left to the detention centers themselves. The national government has sent mixed messages of issues. At times celebrating the constructions and at times denying that they even exist. So on a day that on one day last year, the home minister basically circulated something called the model detention center manual that's enabling. That was a guidance for state governments to construct on how to construct detention centers. The next day the prime minister said there's no such thing as a detention center in our country. So it's truly some disinformation is going on over here. But turning to the model detention center manual itself. The excerpts are only partial excerpts are available. And in these excerpts, the manual is a pain to distinguish the detention center from a jail, even though there are several existing detention centers that are located within prisons themselves. It emphasizes things like image which houses families. They should lead a normal life within the detention center they should be crashing they should be ways of of employment they should be internet access etc etc etc. But who knows not that we know is actually seen the inside of a newly constructed detention center. Earlier this year that some government decided to rename all detention center as transit camps, and according to one government official, and I'm not really sure how to characterize the statement. And I'm just quoting it. The change of nomenclature is to give a more just and remain looked at the whole thing. The phrase detention center appears like concentration camps. So she's kind of drawing an analogy that everyone had in the heads anyways. But, um, so the question over here for me for, I think is this is quite is this right. Um, so the potentially. So after the 1.9 billion million people right now, who have been stripped of the citizenship in the state of Assam, and potentially all of those 1.9 million people could be detained in these detention centers, right. Um, statistically set a hard to come by, but one estimate puts the number of people who are actually in the detail detention centers right now at 1900. The government's own figure puts that at 379. Some of those people who have been detained in the detention centers have been in there for 10 years or more, and have no foreseeable opportunity of release, because Bangladesh doesn't recognize these people as its citizens. And despite in the Indian government's desire to paint these detention centers as humane. Conditions inside have been described as akin to torture and suicides by detainees often make reports of suicide, but detainees often make the way into popular media. Um, those who remain outside the detention detention center are no less unfree and leave a very precarious life. According to most in part one of the scholars who's worked on this area, people who've been left out of the NRC face a constant threat that they may eventually be tamed indefinitely. So they were no, they are notionally free outside the detention center. They've been stripped of all material benefits of citizenship. They can't vote certain forms of employment certain forms of ownership, and certain welfare welfare benefits from the state have been have been excluded from them simply because they cannot. They are no longer citizens in the eyes of the state and obviously there's a fear even for approaching the state for fear that you may be outed as a person who doubtful citizenship. In the end, maybe I want to just end with several questions prompted by the title of the panel. Um, and it's really this like in the context where the Indian government has been expanding its capacity to take to detain people, it deems as foreigners. And in the context where the Indian state is not shy in detaining people it regularly detains people for 10 years without charge and it's not it's not shy to do it's not shy to do that. Um, but in this context in Assam was detained so few. What does it mean to take think of detention as a as a technique of governance. Um, does it point to the idea that mass detention is a perpetual threat. Um, or mass indefinite detention is a perpetual threat to use against inconvenient populations. Or does ask her think of think, ask us to think of precariousness of life outside the detention center as itself a form of a president. That's a metaphor being used by people who have gone through the NSE process. So to seek to point out, um, the idea of a state that is performing its authority by constructing detention centers, even though people aren't actually detained in them. Um, so I'll end it over this and thank you again to Nathan and Tris and may for inviting me and organizing the session. Thank you buyer for that extremely interesting presentation. And now we turn to our third panelist who is a net Bachman. And that is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Ziegen in the Department of General Sociology. She has been researching refugee camps and border regions in Asia since 2008. And I take this opportunity to congratulate her on her brand new book in 2021 called public camp orders and the power of micro structures. So you can take it away. Thank you so much for having me. I will share my screen. Um, so I will talk about refugee camp governance and the power of micro structures in camp governance systems. So I guess I'm talking about a case that is more of a maximum contrast to the cases of my fellow presenters that are talking about, but still, we are all talking about different forms of internment. In the first part of my presentation. I don't see my presentation anymore. No, I see it. Sorry. I'm giving a quiet general answer to the question of why people who are fleeing their country, or even are fleeing within a country are placed in camps. In the second part of my presentation, I will take a closer look at local phenomena in refugee camps that goes beyond the usual conception of camps, simply as a governance technology produced by states. For example, camps are, or forms of internment different forms of internment are globally widespread instrument and the technology of political rule used by dictatorships, as well as democracies camps are part of a transnational institutional history and shape not only the politics of the 20th century as accentuated by sick one Bowman, but also the international politics of the present, as we can see at the European Union's external borders, but displacement is actually an ongoing challenge in the global south and not in Europe. That's why the majority of refugee camps or refugee settlements are located in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, where according to UNHCR around six to seven million people are accommodated. But they are financed, primarily by Western donors and organized by humanitarian agencies from the United States, European Union and Japan. That is why we need to understand that refugee camps, especially in the global south, are a product of the international community and refugee camps are and remain an international and not only regional or national answer to forced migration flows. The political rationality behind building refugee camps is quite simple camps seem to have or seem to give a somewhat plausible organizational answer to the question of how to deal with mass influxes of people who are fleeing and who are unwanted. It has been assumed that centralized accommodations are less expensive and make it easier to support, but also to regulate and control people. In this way camps enable for example, an administratively efficient model for a delivery bureaucratic acts, but also control. In addition, it is anticipated that the problem of a high number of population seeking temporary protection is thereby contained in a camp bubble in order that these populations do not cause trouble or in a or mitigate transformative changes in the host countries. Moreover, it is presumed that as soon as the situation changes, it will be simpler to organize and enforce the return of these populations and to close the campus again. Moreover, we have to understand that refugees and stateless people, as well as refugee camps are the logical consequence of the global norm of the nation state system, where every person must belong to a territory and a people. The answer has been given already by Hannah Arendt in her popular essay we refugees, as well as her considerations in the origins of totalitarianism. Refugees are perceived as a threat to the normal order of our global nation state system, but at the same time, are the necessary other and support of this order. This ambitious relationship of exclusion and inclusion of the figure of the refugee as well as stateless people is rediscussed by the anthropologist Lisa Marquis and the political scientist Nifsat Sokuk. As a consequence, the attempt by states to order people with political status guarantees the constant creation of refugees as well as stateless people. And yes, this exclusion does of course, often, but not exclusively concern ethnic and religiously constructed groups. I would rather rephrase the statement made in the description of this panel. It mainly concerns, and this is important to understand those groups of people who are in conflict with the state government, the national government of their origin or are characterized by the government as a group of people who are not supposed to be part of their society, or are not wanted to be part of society or the specific state. This argument can certainly be applied to all camp systems or forms of internment. In the second part of my presentation, it is important for me to emphasize, as I do in my book, public camp orders and the power of microstructures, that camps do not function exclusively through a top down government's technology, or that camps can only be described and understood via a state technology or as a technology that results from the national order of things. In order to understand camp governance and camp orders, we need to include in the analysis the possibilities, but above all the necessities of the camp population and other locally present camp actors, such as local wardens do deal with the government's technology. I would like to exemplify the power of microstructures with two selected empirical scenes that I encountered during my field work in Burmese refugee camps in Thailand. The first phenomena is inspired by Irving Hoffman and describes the establishment of what I have called a situational performance of a total institution. In this performance normality, the normal course of public camp life is suspended. The government's takes place as soon as state authorities appear who represent and enforce the service by the book regulations. When they are present, they are hardly any or no people to be seen on the streets. There are no cars or motorbikes driving around the camps, but they have been hidden behind houses and covers. They are located at almost every house on the main road, and the market has been closed. The checkpoints around the camps have become impermeable mobility and economy are virtually non existent. Normally, regardless of this camp governance technology, which is supposed to make the camp impermeable closed and lifeless. There's a lively going on at the market in the shops and at the checkpoints there's a normally a coming and going. This performance of the total institution is on the one hand, of course, part of camp normality, but it is also part of camp governance, and we have to recognize that. Another phenomena that is an expression of powerful local microstructures can be found in what I have called called good organizational reasons for wrong documentation. And this phenomenon, good organizational reasons for wrong or bad documentation, because it makes sense that local authorities local camp authorities falsified documents for higher authorities. To the point of view of humanitarian agencies or state actors, this seems to be cheating or corrupt abuse of aid, but for the maintenance of law and order on the ground, it makes total sense to falsify these documents. And I see this and understand this also as part of camp governance. Empirical phenomena illustrate these microstructures established between local camp actors. These locally established microstructures are not detached from other legal and political rules and regulations by higher authorities. These regulations in which they are established, they're a reaction to other regulations, but they do not always have to be. They can react to rules or camp governance and modify them, but they are also able to establish new camp rules. To describe this, for example, in relation to the legal system of refugee camps, where state law does not have to be relevant for the administration for of justice in camps. So other jurisdictions are relevant to legal practice, because state law or international law are not enforced and practiced. In this context, it is also important to remember that camp governance is often characterized by the fact that is partly highly regulated and partly has totally unregulated areas, at least on the part of the state. At the end of my presentation, I would like to reemphasize the following. In order to study camp governance and camp theory provides already satisfactory tools to grasp camp complexities, highlighting specifically the role of the external environment and the problematic character of camp governance. I should use this camp theory to better understand empirical phenomena, also in context of all kind of systems of internment. And by camp theory, I refer to theoretical approaches, for example, given by Irving Goffman, Michelle Foucault, of course, but also Arnold von Genep, and Victor Turner, and of course also Georgia Agamem and Hannah Arendt. These theoretical approaches, however, tend to underscore powerful camp structures, emphasizing the segregation, containment, exclusion, and exceptional character of camps where people are simply controlled, exposed to all power and domination, and have no or limited agency, or are excluded from law at all. Even though I think we learn a lot from these theories on camp governance, certain aspects are lost from such kind of view. I have tried to make this clear with the scenes I presented and also the concept of powerful micro structures. But we also learn a lot from Foucault, who lays the basis for my argument, so to speak. And I would like to remind or state Foucault's perspectives again. So Foucault's power, and maybe also governance, is the product of all players, and not simply a top down mechanism. He emphasizes that power is being locally achieved, and not binary identifiable so lately with the state institutions, or an apparatus on the one hand, and the oppressed on the other hand. Notably, Foucault underscores not only the complexity and fragmented character of power, but also how power emerges from local arenas of concrete action and practices. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much for for this presentation. And now on to the fourth and final presentation. I would like to introduce Professor Kermit Ryder, who is a professor of law and criminology at UC Irvine. He is in prisons and prisoner rights, and is building an in prison bachelors program in California, and also co founded the organization prison pandemic, a living archive of incarcerated Californians experiences of covert 19. So you can start talking. Thank you. I think this is this has been so wonderful. I've learned so much. And I was thinking that what I would do is just talk a little bit about some of the surprising similarities between what I heard today and what I tend to think about when I hear about things like camps and the Uighurs and these exclusionary practices and policies, and how surprisingly similar they can be to mass incarceration in the United States. Thinking through a few of the similarities so you know I think incarceration in the United States, many people have heard about mass incarceration and they think about the racial oppression and the idea of the new Jim Crow and incarceration in the United States as an extension of slavery in the America is is a commonly accepted idea now. But I think that there are many other ways that are maybe talked about less in the mainstream culture, in which incarceration in the United States is part of a politics of oppression that's kind of part of this global continuity we're talking about for better or worse and in terms of tools and techniques of oppression. So you know people talk about exceptionalism in the United States that you know even though there is a kind of a history of liberalism and and a set and sets of rights and democracy that simultaneously. There's, you know, that that's that's one kind of exceptionalism right these these positive breath of individual specified rights. And then there's also this exceptionalism of the negativity of our system of incarceration in terms of its scale that we have one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, and also its duration that for democracy, people spend tend to spend longer in prison in the United States than in a lot of other places in the world. So I think understanding the system though as not just simply a system of of racialized oppression as people talk about commonly but a system of oppression I want to highlight three different ways in which it operates on one to oppress social movements two to control and oppress labor and three to kind of use risk management as this tool of oppression and sometimes a tool that I think masks what's actually happening in terms of the oppression so and I hope that'll be kind of a place to think about that's where I thought of a lot of residents with what are other speakers seven and also with the pandemic that's raging across the globe and particularly in prisons and camps and in these confined facilities where marginalized populations are being concentrated. So to talk about the first social movements, I think in the United States incarceration and long played a role in repressing various forms of social organizations. And my own expertise is in solitary confinement as a tool of control within prison so in the United States people are sent into solitary confinement. Most often, simply because of something they did wrong within the prison system through a very secret administrative process when I think when my or was talking about how people haven't even been into the detention facilities he's, he's thinking and writing about. That's very common in the United States where solitary confinement is this very hidden practice people often talk about it as a prison within a prison. And the administrative line about it is that it is for people who break prison rules or people who are too dangerous or difficult to manage in the prison system but in practice when we've looked at solitary confinement. It actually seems to control people who don't fit often for reasons of resistance in the prison system and so a lot of my work is about how some of the most secure and restrictive prisons in the United States were built in direct response to social movements and organizing, to African American prisoners in the 1970s and early 1980s in the United States so you know we just celebrated celebrated as perhaps the wrong word but the 50th anniversary of the uprising at Attica, which had, you know, African American prisoners in the United States within prison and similar things happened in California around the same time and in both states we have a crackdown where all of those prisoners who participated who remained inside are placed into solitary confinement like units and ultimately prisons are built to house them over decades. So that's just one example of the the actual physical space of the prison being used to control an attempt often at nonviolent organizing. It's, it is, it isn't contained right when sees this repeat itself over and over again and so I'm just just getting calls from reporters today in the United States because of this these horrific pictures of Haitian immigrants being whipped at the border in Texas that came out this week in the United States. And this question of what kind of oppression is happening to this, this influx of people coming to the border, and it, and it's continuous right sometimes people think of the US immigration system is separate from the mass incarceration system but they're often sharing policies and practices just as many of you described the phenomenon of camps being as Annette was saying the phenomenon of camps being global. I think it's a similar thing here with these institutions and so you know I've written about how in the United States solitary confinement and immigration detention ends up looking a lot like solitary confinement in prisons where you target these groups that look darker African Americans are 12 times as likely to be placed in solitary confinement and immigration detention as as their presence in the general population. And, you know, there are many ways to read that but I think is one trying to control, you know, a sense of these potentially radical potentially organized groups and and trying to control them through these tools. So that's one piece is thinking about social movements thinking about social movements as really interrelated with the question of race and the prison as a physical tool of confinement that shuts those down and isolates people from from communication. You know, I also think of the people on horseback on the border with whips as continuous with solitary confinement right these are solitary confinement is a way of doing that much more secretly and without generating the kind of backlash that we see when we have the images. And in fact it is much harder to see the physical harm of solitary but that in some ways makes it all the more disturbingly destructive. And so I think, you know, I think about a lot of these questions as, you know, not parsing off one practice as extreme and and divisible from all these other practices but thinking them them as kind of this powerful network where the the institutions are in a kind of dialogue with each other reflecting each other in disturbing ways. The second kind of control that comes out in the United States and this this more echoes the conversation about the Uighurs I think but incarceration in the United States I think is also an incredibly powerful tool to control labor. And people often think about this in the United States in terms of prison privatization we have private prisons and so that's a way where we can make money off of the bodies of prisoners and you hear about people in immigration detention being forced to work for cents an hour and and that being compared to slave labor, but I think that often misses the, the kind of bigger picture of the ways in which incarceration in the United States is just completely integrated into our economy, and the ways in which it is oppressing labor so you know, only 10% of our prisons are actually privatized that often gets lost in the conversation, and yet many aspects of even public prisons are privatized so all of the communications all of the labor is privatized, and so that creates all kinds of profit even off of the allegedly publicly run institutions. And then, you know in the United States when you look at unemployment rates. It's kind of distorted by the fact that we have millions of people incarcerated or millions and millions more people under supervision post incarceration that often prevents their employment. And so we have a system that's kind of masking I think the rates of unemployment and the more people we have in prison the lower the unemployment rate looks. So I just think there are many ways to think of prison, not just around racial and social movement oppression but as a tool to control the labor markets, both in generating income through jobs and finances and in a pressing income through making it impossible for some people to work and taking them out of the economy. And then the third piece I want to highlight and this is something I don't know I'd be very curious if people want to talk about it more it's a theme I've been thinking about through covert in particular is the role of risk management in the United States and really trying to grapple with it, because one thing that I have been struck by is that the United States has a tendency to think this is very broad strokes, but to think that all risk can be eliminated and so when I look at our criminal justice policies, I see an attempt to eliminate any possibility of violent crime in the United States to eliminate any possibility of recidivism and so that's how people justify things like 500 year sentences for crimes or life sentences for three really minor crimes right the classic three strikes and your outlaw where you commit three minor thefts and you might be sentenced to prison and for life in the United States. The idea there I think is that we if we design the right policies we can completely and if we design the right institutions that are hard enough and keep people locked in well enough that we can completely eliminate all risk of certain kinds of violent crime or reoffending. And I think it's obviously a very, the idea of eliminating all risk is kind of unimaginable and it's something I've studied prisons in Europe and particularly Scandinavian prisons and it's something that I've been really struck by as a contrast is that systems that seem to be more humane in their policies and to have shorter sentences or to be more rehabilitative tend to have more of an assumption that mistakes will happen and they have to be metabolized in the system and so people will escape from prison people will recommit crimes, even when you work hard to rehabilitate them and you have to accept that risk and not let it drive the entire system. And I've been very struck in the United States that our response to the pandemic has been eerily similar to our response to crime that we think we can eliminate all risk of a virus in our society by making sure that everyone is vaccinated and masked and tested. We've done a bad job of it but in more liberal coastal cities, and, and that if anyone in a school particularly in schools get sick we just shut the school down entirely for two weeks we just, we just shut everything down and I think it's that idea that we can't tolerate that that in some kind of bubbled middle class communities we can't tolerate any risk of crime and we can't tolerate any risk of the virus is is eerily similar. So I've been thinking about that in terms of these global politics and listening to you all talk because I think, you know, on the one hand I think of other other countries in Europe, tolerating a bit more risk in ways that seem healthy. On the other hand I think of a lot of these conversations about eliminating entire social groups trying to get entire groups of people out of a country or on the other side of a border or into a camp or into a detention center feels very similar to this idea of eliminating the brutality of risk and so I'm thinking about, you know, is risk management in the United States just kind of just a veneer for labeling someone as other and, and isolating them getting rid of them putting putting them somewhere else and and trying to do that in the in a total way, and not like the impossibility of that so that's just, I think, I think a lot about the virus in all of these contexts because it feels very integrated in terms of the lived experience in detention in prison and camps where you are at higher risk, but also in terms of the management of these policies that the way we manage these marginalized populations often feels disturbingly similar to to the way we might think about a virus or a health problem and and thinking about, you know, in that analogy, are there, are there provocative questions to be asked or reframings of the ways in which the risk management leads to new forms of oppression. So maybe maybe at least some some synthesis for, I think, less, less detail about very specific aspects of America but just kind of thinking about the ways in which I think our system is more more in dialogue with many of these systems and people people would generally like to think for better or worse. I look forward to the conversation. Thank you very much. Caramed so far there are there are no questions. But I hope that the question box will fill up quickly. But in order to allow it some time to do so. I am going to ask a question of Darren. I'm picking up on two things from Caramed's discussion that do seem parallel between the US and China are the deployment of, let's say confinement for the disciplining of labor and this attempt to eliminate risk and I'm just actually going to just apologize if this is slightly rambling but but a few months ago I had the pleasure of examining a PhD on a minority language of Sichuan, where someone had collected some texts, and one of them was a real story you know from life about a family that had tried or had repaired their roof. And for doing that they need some woods they went and collected some wood that was within their traditional rights to do so. But because of actually environmental protection legislation in China that traditional practice is now frowned upon, and the head of the household was taken to prison and was able to get off pretty lightly with some, some and whatnot but in prison. There were other people who, who, who, who's political connections or who's, who's access to funds was, was less so so were beaten up. And, and it immediately brought to my mind actually the first piece of as far as I know the first piece of journalism of Karl Marx, which is called on the law. The State on the law of the thefts of wood, which was actually you know, his experience of, of, in, in, in, in Germany of landowners, kind of asserting their property rights vis-a-vis traditional rights of peasants to collect wood was actually you know radicalized him. And I thought the irony of you know this officially communist state kind of practicing a form of enclosure that actually is very specifically the form of enclosure that made Karl Marx a Marxist. And, and so I guess, you know, what I'm curious about asking you is, I think that most people have tended to think of what's going on in Xinjiang as quite specific to the we goers, but partly from your presentation. I saw it as, or I was able to see your presentation is discussing it as part of the overall sort of enclosure of peasants in, in, in China. Yeah, that, that, you know, it may be a particularly extreme and particularly sort of nationalized in terms of the we goers being being one of the nationalities form but that kind of I think maybe the broader phenomenon here is, is one of, of, of enclosures in the service of capital accumulation. And I wonder if, if you can just say a word about sort of contextualizing the we goer situation vis-a-vis other sort of styles of enclosure that are fashionable in China today. Sure. That's a great question and a very good point. The lower region is the farthest you can get from Beijing, and it's the land itself and space makes it difficult to access. There's mountains and deserts and all of that and so like the railroad didn't get there until quite recently, and they're still building the railroad there into some areas. So that means that the, you know, process of bringing infrastructure and putting people on the grid is quite recent there and you see that happening in other parts of sort of central to western China like in Sichuan for instance, which is also a site of what they call the open up the west campaign. Oh, sure. I mean what I see in this space is very similar to what Karl Marx saw. It's, you know, capitalist frontier making its primitive accumulation, which is always ongoing, and it's often racialized. It's dispossession or transformation of something that was formerly held in common into something that can be turned into capital. And it's also related to land or the land is of course important and resources on the land are important. It's also labor. And so the labor market across China is a major factor in what's happening in Xinjiang. You know it's very similar to to offshoring labor as we've done in the United States. And if labor costs are too high to make the profits you want or to keep the costs low enough, you need to find a cheaper labor force and in Xinjiang they've they've made one out of this group of peasants who are not integrated with the economy and can be put to work in this way. So, so that's, that's certainly a dynamic that's happening. The comparison to Alaska is I think instructive because they think about if First Nations Native American folks in Alaska were 15 million people, and the state wanted to come and take their land in order to get access to their oil, which they've done. There would have been a response. So, you know, it's a similar kind of frontier making dynamic. It's either the perfect policing, or the, you know, risk management, like that's certainly a factor here. I think there's a fetishization of data and technology in order to assist in that kind of policing and, and I think you see that in the US police departments as well that the turn to Palantir and these other technological tools to predict behavior or to be there kind of on the spot before the or as the crime is happening. Not realizing I think that there's so much bias built into this that the, that the definitions of what count as crime are a huge factor in what determines how crime is assessed. Over 80% of in some cities in the US of black American men have a police file, a digitized police file on record and someone a police officer pulls someone over. So they pull up that police file immediately. And that, you know, goes into their assessment of that person's behavior. So, yeah, the technology placed in service to policing and and to prison management is, is a huge factor in both of these contexts. Okay, thank you. Um, so now there is a question and this is from Mary Gallagher at at UCD. So, she would would like to ask of Annette. Could you say a little bit more about how you, how you see performance agency and, and, and total televisionism or in your, in your terms the total institution, relating to each other in those camps that you have studied and more specifically, who has agency. And is this the agency to perform one thing when someone is looking and something else when when not observed. Thank you very much for this question. Okay. I have to read it again. I'm wondering if Annette could say a little bit about how this sees performance agency and totally turn related to each other in those camps that she studied. I want to describe that the totalitarianism is not something which is just there. People have to perform it. People have to constantly created, and this has to be done. And so agency also refers kind of to the wardens to the people who look after refugees so the agency determined agency is not related to refugees but also to the people who actually run the institution. And the case of refugee camps is special because you have refugee representatives who are elected or named by refugees themselves. And it's different from other total institutions, but still I think this is something we have to be aware of and which is not much discussed, and also not much recognized, especially by camp theory. Another question I hope this answer is enough, and more specifically who has agency yet I mean agency is related not only to the refugees, but to the people who are locally present actually in brand the system. Yeah. Is it allowed also for the panelists to raise questions. Yes, please. I was going to ask for that. Then I would like to ask a question. Namely, for all panelists actually are the phenomena that I described also known in relations to your cases, or is that something very specific or is it something that can only be described for refugee camps. Since there is, I guess, more open as there to help shape or establish camp life. So the performance of duty by the book and the falsification of documents to fit the local circumstance is better so like, just as an example those two examples is that something that you also know from your cases. If I can, I, and that I was really struck by the similarities to that and solitary confinement in the United States in California there's, I think there's, there's been a lot of litigation and so some of the best data it's often completely right. Like, how, how these kinds of things are being defined but people in California could be labeled a gang member by prison guards and then sent to solitary confinement indefinitely until a lawsuit in the early 2000s and increasingly the more and the labeling as a gang member could be done by just any three pieces of evidence so like if you had a tattoo, the kind of book you were reading the kind of letters you might be writing to or people you were socializing with. And it turns out that not only was it just incredibly broad this idea of gang membership that could get you sent in the solitary, but a lot of the information. The prison system would just say well it's confidential we can't tell you because we put other people who told us at risk and it turns out a lot of it never existed, or was false or incorrect. So that that was a striking parallel to me right of where it's really it's really hard to see what's happening but it's something I've written a lot about in the United States is that these prison officials on the ground do have an incredible amount of agency and how they control the laws that define these populations so I thought that was a really interesting parallel. Does anyone else want to address a net question I mean I suppose that both in Xinjiang and in the song. There's, it's, it's not really possible to do ethnographic work inside of the camps. I could, I could respond quickly just based on my interviews with former detainees like. So those things that you mentioned are there I mean the higher level officials come to inspect the camps, you know, fairly regularly. And there's performances that are done for them when they arrive that, you know, cultural performances they do the same for the journalists or diplomats that visited to. And some of the former detainees talk about participating in that and how it was a break from the drudgery of, of normal life. There's also spaces where beatings happen that are off camera. There's in at least one case though a woman was said that they were struck in the head. If they spent too much time on the toilet, because they the bruises wouldn't show there. There's, it seems as though it's going the other way it's not about good camp governance or maybe the people that are doing the beating think it is. But it's really about hiding some of the brutality from people people higher up in command. And so there's that aspect and then falsifying numbers and there's a quota system associated with how many people you should detain. I think in some cases there's there's very likely inflation, because people want to, the local officials want to show how invested they are in the program. And so, you know, they might say they have higher numbers of people detained or people assigned jobs and things like that. So there's a lot of slippage in how all of us done but a lot of it seems to be about maintaining, you know, personal power, rather than about good governance in. Sorry, can I go ahead Nathan. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. So just why you're asking question and I kind of brought up some bits of them of the model detention center guidance that the that the government has put in place has has recommended that states follow while they're building up the detention centers. So it contains stuff like you know, there should be lady wardens to ensure that women have adequate security. There should be proper connections of gas connections to each kitchen. You need to have schools for children crushes for children. There should be things like you know, good, good hygiene good drinking water stuff to, what's the, yeah, to maintain living standards and constitutes with human dignity. So you have stuff like that as well so but you can imagine that when the camps actually become come to exist and come to operation life will be much different. And in terms of this idea of performing. It's interesting because this kind of palace with performing citizenship also, which are constantly looked at looked at a suspect so within, for example in the citizens in the foreigners tribunals. Like I said you had to bring documents to show that you're a foreigner, right. So, I mean, there are some some some petitioners people who came to be Indian citizens will go with all these documents. The judge will say no these are all fake documents I can tell by looking them fake documents. Or that the fact that they have documents themselves indicates or they have adequate documentation indicates that they have there was some dishonesty behind building those documents. That if you are a true Indian citizen what what kind of Indian citizen has this many documents. So that's kind of the logic as well. So in some cases, I mean, another note for speaking to talk about these cases where this one particular judge said, basically looked at having documentation as a form as a as a problem. Because you know, if you have documentation either it's fake, either you bought it off someone else or it's completely fabricated. So, let me just, you know, exhort our audience to to supply us with a few more questions, you're somehow being very shy. But but I'd like to ask a question of my or kind of keeping with what I was talking to Darren about earlier. I didn't touch on the, the sort of economic side of things very much but I assume that in India with with quite were relatively free press I think that the business, the business community would have opined to some extent on what's going on and there, there might be a sense of, of different business interests and how they feel about what's happening in Assam or at the national level is there anything you can say about that. No, actually, when when Darren was speaking earlier and in response to your question I was thinking is an economic or kind of analysis that one can make of Assam. It's almost like a flip version over here was I mean if, if, because what who's being incarcerated is not the natives, but is the perceived to be the outsiders. So, in Assam itself, I think I mean my general sense of speaking to a few people have spoken to is that there's amongst Assamese there's amongst the liberal kind of Assamese there's kind of great ambivalence about the project not simply because on the one hand they're very concerned about this loss of identities, this idea of a loss of an entity can come to very strongly. But kind of the liberal Assamese like you know what are we doing with the Bengali population we can't just, you know, chuck them out. But I think that so the where the kind of protest came was with regard to the Citizenship Amendment Act that's when the big protest happened and across India. And that was that was the first time in which Citizenship was contingent upon one religion. So basically, to apply for a new citizenship from certain countries, you could have to be Hindu, Christian, Jain Sikh, Jain Sikh and Buddhist right, you could not be Muslim. Right. And so that was that was the big kind of the big break that's when the big sit just before the pandemic there were big protests throughout the country around that but the NRC itself hasn't attracted the kind of protest that it's attracted protest in the sense that it's not been efficient enough at eradicating foreigners within Assam. Outside Assam it's a different matter but within Assam itself it's it's it's been about how ineffective it's been. But that I haven't answered your question, which is, I can't think of an economic analysis of it. I need to think of it more deeply. Well, thank you. Anyhow, now I'll just mention that someone had a hand up and and we can't actually the way that things are set up I can't sort of turn to you to speak. So you'll see that there's a question and answer spot. So, so you can please put your questions. It's in the lower right in the question spot, although it looks like there's maybe someone. Oh no that's that's made. Okay, so another question from from Mary and this one to my or. Any sense in which people of, of, let's say mixed ethnic background Bengali plus something else are seen as having a doubtful identity, and which would be which would be contingently rational in a way. The thing is the categories don't map easily onto each other and that's so the social category of Bengali versus Assamese doesn't map on to Indian citizen quite well right quite easily. So, I think socially, you would be seen, there's a big distinction between Bengali and Assamese, and because of the way in which in its society functions I think your father's Bengali would be seen as Bengali. Legally, or in the foreigners tribunals, it's different because there's technically at least there's no, there's no Bengali identity card, or as a non Assamese identity card. So, it's, and that's that that's the kind of the fault line around which the resistance of the inadequacy, the perceived inadequacy of then I see in Assam is based on, because it hasn't done a good enough job of removing the Bengalis. And again, the other layer is, you know, Hindu versus Muslim that the national government is portraying it through. So it's these, there are three sets of categories that don't map well on to each other, and that's where you think the fault lines are just a paraphrase then then it may be the case that the exercise has sort of vindicated the citizenship of, of Assamese differentially, but there is no explicit mechanism by which this happens legally it's, it's kind of, it sort of seeps in through the cracks, kind of. Which is why the date on for the Assam, for the Assam in the Assam accord is a date. It's not who is Assamese Bengali it's if you've come into the state after March 25 1971 then you are an outsider. Okay, so we're, we still don't really have any, maybe everyone is just so, you know, blown away by these great presentations that they're going to have to cogitate for the coming days. But but then I will ask a question of Darren and I sort of apologize to everyone for sort of, you know, pursuing my personal interests, maybe too much here but it's your fault for not asking questions, which is, I've been thinking about that, you know, that let's say the China is in a very different sort of development moment and mature Western countries, and part of that is reflected by the let's say the perceived need or the, or the, let's say, the imminent need to discipline workers in a certain way. And, and then I found myself thinking about that, you know, in the West in the US in particular there was a moment then where, like Taylorism and Fordism were really what you studied if you like went to business school. Yeah, was like you know how to tell, like someone exactly how to cut a piece of metal. Yeah. And, and on the one hand, it seems like that's very much the moment we're in in like data and, and this analytics and that this sort of the sort of effort to to move control down to the sort of physical biological level is there. But on the other hand, in terms of the sort of the sort of superstructure, it feels like, you know, how you train people to discipline labor has moved really far away from that and like business schools are all about just sort of learning how to be a leader and and stuff like that. And, and, and then that means that sort of the China that you know, to the extent that China interacts with with the West in higher education, you have all these people coming back to China who really have the wrong skill set for the, for that for the moment of development that China is at. So, I've been thinking about that, but then it's manifestly the case that it's not a problem, right that they're, they're, they're managing somehow to, to, you know, keep, you know, GDP pretty high and and to enclose their their peasants and so it sounds like this is sort of mean sort of paraphrasing I think what you said is that that that those skills are coming, you know, whereas in the late 19th century early 20th century in the West, they would have come largely from the business community. It really is partly in in kind of. I mean, I forget the words you use but policing studies anti terrorist studies, sort of military policing technologies that that China has been learning those skills in a sort of scientific way does that sound right to you or Yes. I think the war on terror has played out in a lot of different ways and unexpected ways it's built the security surveillance state surveillance systems. In a lot of context in the US and in China partnerships between private enterprise like Amazon, developing face recognition tools and things like that. Those partnerships have really expanded the toolbox of what's available for large technology firms. But I would also add something about a neo Taylorist approach to manufacturing and consumption logistic studies is showing a lot of this. So when you think about, you know, the Amazon warehouse, and how, you know, the, the warehouse workers are monitored, you know, in every way from like wearable devices to times, time signatures and maintaining the rate of, you know, when the order is made when it's delivered, all of that stuff. There's a lot of processing space through time that's coming out of the West at the same time as being built in China so like automation and smart manufacturing is happening in China. And we see that playing out in the factory floor in many places in China, but particularly in the in the Uighur region where surveillance of the body and workers is is really amplified in a new way. So I wouldn't say that it's completely separated from that history of Taylorism and stuff that you're thinking about. And it's bringing me to a question that I'd like to ask of the other panelists, which has to do with detainability, and how it has. And once you, if you can be detained, it has a lot of effects in terms of what labor choices are available to what life is available to you. And in the US we see that happening with undocumented folks being pushed into certain kinds of work. And so I'd love to hear if Kermit has any thoughts on that and I wonder, my or if there's, you know, certain occupations that are available to unfree people that could be put in a camp whose citizenship is suspect, or if they are just fully, you know, excluded from the economy. Is there some jobs that are still there for them is there a place and they just need to know their place kind of out of sight in the gray economy on the margins of society. I don't know about the context of, of Thailand and Myanmar. And what sort of work people are doing there. But if you're outside of the camp but you could be put in a camp. Does that affect, you know, what, what life path is available to you. Okay, so who wants to, this is a great question who wants to address it first. I'll think out loud, unless my or you look like you're thinking. I think the status of, of detainability or, or I framed it in the past as as excludability also is really powerful and I thought about this. I've written with a colleague who looks at deportation and thinking about how placement into solitary confinement is similar to deportation as an as a status of excludability. And I'm really intrigued by this idea of can, as I understand your question, can that status labor, and I, I think that's at least in the US context, some of some of the ideas that that status can't labor right they are just completely like rather than killing them, we just put them into a black hole to the extent we possibly can and part of the point is that there is no valuable labor and so even. In the environment right and with deportation right that we just assume that there's absolutely no labor to be extracted at all. But I think even within the prison context in the United States right we hear about like prison work that happens like there are there are incarcerated people in California who help fight wildfires, and there are people who man call centers but it's work that is often most of the prison work that happens is just managing the prison right like cleaning or delivering mail or cooking. So it feels often like work that's just being created right and the and the workers like the people who man the call centers or the firefighters spin a big issue in California the people who fight fires. They're not allowed to do that work when they leave prison. And in fact there are kind of more like expert professionalized people supervising and doing that work who aren't detainable or excludable. So, in some ways that it more feels to me like, like we're there is like part of the status of the pure excludability is having no labor, and, and that we're, and, and we're making sure there is no possible. It's almost like we're just sort of trying to get rid of the body is excess bodies, rather than even thinking there could be any labor to be extracted but I don't know I'm curious I'm curious what others think it's a really interesting question. Yeah, before we move on. It's like, what I was thinking about is like the people that work in the chicken plants that pick our strawberries, who are pushing to into this, you know, who aren't documented, but like there's certain jobs that are available to them that are actually to our economy, but aren't discussed in that way. And, you know, they're placed in that sort of work path, in large part because they don't have documentation, and could potentially be deported or detained. So that's a little bit of where where I was thinking, not not so much in the prison context, I guess quite as much. You know, it's interesting there because now I'm thinking like some of so when I, when, when I've written about excludability I've said it's created it creates this kind of liminal space where people seek to be not excludable. And I wonder if that's some of like that population of people who do that, that work rate that is necessary like the strawberry picking or the, but, but that isn't necessarily desirable. I think some of it, you know, I think some of the really interesting work happening in the United States now is about the these people the ways in which we strip people of their labor rights. So it would be deportable people but it would also be people with criminal records who through all kinds of legal constructions end up in positions where they have to work in order to not be excluded. They have to take really dangerous illegal work functionally that's like, that's like, truly extractive. And so I think maybe those two things are tied right that we have, we first create a category of total excludability with no work, and then there's a category of these detainable people who can only do subpar work but they kind of rely on the excludable category because they're only doing it to defend themselves to define themselves as not excludable. I don't know, so an idea to play with. So I just feel compelled to mention, you know, anecdotally that, you know, I've been living in the, or had been living in the UK for for a while before moving to Ireland and knew someone who was applying, actually I know a couple of people who applied for asylum there. And the asylum process can drive on for years, you know, three, four years. And you are not allowed to work during that process. And the question of like, well, how do you, you know, how do you kind of succeed in securing your social reproduction during that time is something that the state, you know, has no opinion on, which means that effectively, you know, if your work is dangerous or illegal work is, is, is countenance pretty explicitly, but always with the threat that you know if you happen to be found to be working then you can be immediately deported yeah. So that's sounds relevant to me yeah please Annette. Yeah. I mean, the case in Myanmar Thailand is very different, I would say. I mean, there's a complex also historical and political background of the refugee situation in Thailand with Myanmar, because camp residents belong to actually ethnic groups who live in the borderland area of Myanmar in Thailand. And they are very, very strong networks and relations between camp residents and illegal people. So to say, and Burmese and Thai villagers, politicians, and people. So, as well as between camp residents and residents to Thai cities and Thai and Burmese villages and Burmese cities so there's a very strong network also that is quite independent of what Bangkok and Yangon. I would say the national state policies want them to do. So, they're strong and diverse local political but also business relations that extend the boundaries of the nation state, and which are, which are rooting in historical. Very strong. Yeah, ethnic groups which are. Yeah. And, of course, there's a lot of illegal working practices going on in those areas and along the borders and I also observed that in other border regions in Asia. And that the local border areas are really very different and the practices are very different on what state policies, state politics want people to do. Yeah, so there is of course a lot of illegal working practices. I'm never sure whether people like local people really perceive that as illegal. It is made to be illegal by state politics, or national politics but locally regional it is like a really different story. And so the illegal working practices are business as usual, but also, but also for police officers who are kind of tolerating those local practices. But of course there are also controls, and there are also the people who are put into tension, or they're sent back across the border. But yeah, that's. Yeah, so this is more differentiated picture I think I would like to draw. It is not that clear what is illegal who is illegal to whom. Of course, to the state, they're illegal and to the politics they're illegal national politics but what is going on locally and between the people and between local governance also and local business people. So that's a different story. I just follow up kind of with to ask you for a little bit more detail. I mean, I'm the, it's, yeah, so there, I mean you refer to these sort of ethnic groups of the, of the hills, let's say and I mean I'm more familiar with the Sino Burmese border area but there are these people like the people who are the honey, who, who kind of exist across all, all these states, and, and have traditionally maintained quite strong sense of solidarity across borders. But I have the end, you know, let's say they were relatively open borders. Yeah, although they're very high mountainous region so they might not seem very open to me but if you live there it's quite open. I have the impression that that at least I, you know, I don't know this for sure but that the Chinese state under the ages of, you know, public health in the COVID-19 crisis has actually put some kind of big fence along the Sino Burmese border. It's just taken for granted that in the context of the recent coup d'etat in Burma, that a lot of people would be trying to rapidly leave Burma and I've heard about this on the Indian side actually, and that consequently the neighboring state has found it, let's say, found reason to, to, to try to police that border much more stridently, sort of stridently than it had traditionally and I'm just wondering whether you can comment at all about sort of very recent developments on the, on the, the sort of Burma tie border. I mean the Thai Burmese border is very, very long and it is with mountains and it is like, so I never, I didn't hear about, yeah, practices of the Thai police to more, to be more strict or something like that. I mean, until now, I haven't heard about something like that so I'm, but I'm not, I don't, I'm, yeah, I'm not there at the moment so I can't, you don't know. Okay, well we're slowly running. Oh, look, there's some questions. Oh yeah, okay, so and then this will be the, I think this will be the last picture from the audience and then I'll give people, you know, I don't know whether you want to or not a, an opportunity for a short synthesis before we, you know, part ways. So this is the question, what are examples, I guess it's to anyone, what are examples of where internment has been or is being done well or properly. I guess it's accepted that internment can't always be avoided is research being carried out on how it can be done better. Well, I mean I think that we've spoken quite a lot about research on how it can be done better but I guess the question is, which I was sort of expecting sort of normative or moral one, which is it which I will paraphrase as is there a way that is there any kind of metric that a third party can can decide looking at an internment situation, whether or not it can be called sort of good internment or bad internment. I don't, yeah, and, and maybe rather than asking each of you to answer that sort of personally, you can say whether in the discipline that you're involved in has there been a discussion on that kind of, let's say, the ontological question right of, of, of, of, of moral internment. I mean, I can say a few words to the case of refugee camps, and actually voices are very, very rare that say refugee camps is a good solution, or so actually scholars have shared a very critical perception of refugee camps and the re establishment of camps. So, there are very, very few voices, and even UNHCR, who manages camps worldwide, does not want to build camps and establish camps so I think scholars are quite. Yeah. How to say united in the, and the perception that camps refugee camps are not a solution on long term, maybe on very, very short term, where when you really have to like deal with mass influx of people. This might be a solution but. Yeah, very, very short term only. But this is not the case. So worldwide, I mean the camp, the existence of camps average is around 20 years or even more in the case of Burmese refugee camps it's like more than 3040 years. I don't know the camps in Palestine so this is not realistic that refugee camps are really a short term temporary solution so that's why we should think about different solutions at right at the beginning, when we have maximum mass influx of people. I can't resist saying I want everyone else to answer that but you know I my uncle was born in the Sudetenland, and was put on a train. When he was five years old is one of his first memories is being sprayed by an American soldier for, you know, some kind of delousing or something. And he was just, you know, his family was just given to a family in Potsdam and they said, no, no, no, not any head doesn't pass out, pass out in the south. They said you know here's your refugee family. Please take good care of them. And it's easy to understand why this is not a frequently used solution but it worked extremely well at least in the case of that family they remain very very close. They have two families. And I'm, it does surprise me a little bit more that that's that solution is not contemplated more often but it's easy to understand why we don't need to talk about it. I mean if you, if you accept my argument that camps and prisons are somewhat continuous right as, as places of containment or exclusion and then I, I think at least from the prison perspective. There's certainly an active conversation about abolition and whether prisons are necessary in the United States and increasingly associated with the good question of policing, right and whether police are, and I think I think the, the, the dialogue around policing has put abolition more on the public consciousness than it was before and made it made it more of a central debate. And I, and I personally think that much like a refugee camp and I think the extent to which we accept prisons as potentially humane or, or could be made good. As far as there's a sort of acceptance in human rights that a refugee camp can't is a little bit disturbing because I think in a lot of ways they're extremely similar. But I think, on the other hand, there's a much, maybe a more robust history and debate in criminology and prison history and law about how to make a prison humane, and whether that's an ethical project and and I guess I the most helpful framework I to think about it is that you know there are there are going to be short term context in which people need to be detained and we do have prisons and they are terrible and they're not going to we're not going to wave a magic wand and they're not going to go away and so there's this question of how you think about the interim and which for me I think about the interim, in terms of trying to do things that that don't reinforce the system and make it easier to build it up and rather kind of break the system down and, and make it easier to to shrink it or eliminate it and so you know, I think about, you know, for instance, like, I don't want to give prison officials a lot of money to educate prisoners I want to give universities money to educate prisoners just as one very small example right in terms of just like literally thinking about how you allocate resources. And similarly right with Nathan's example right it's about diffusing these these marginalized groups back into the community exactly as you were saying with a family that stays with another family and so how do you, how do you direct resources to build up that possibility in in the interim of having no camps or having no prisons. But I think the idea of like setting standards for a good prison potentially in something that reinforces the the or setting standards for good campus I mean it reinforces the necessity of it and makes it seem okay and so that that process itself is potentially troubling. I mean, now I'm going to really I sort of apologize for editorialized but in preparing this event. A lot of people sort of said like oh you know I would say oh we're going to have to talk about this talk about this. And then, and then most of you said, well yeah fine but but we need prisons. Right. And even even though quite far left and that sort of, let's say, historically that surprised me because like, and someone I've read on this is Emma Goldman is like a feminist anarchist from from the 19th century she has a, you know, a very well thought through discussion of like yeah there will be murderers. Yeah, but that doesn't mean I have to be present. Yeah, it depends on what the overall structure of social relations are like. Yeah, which is it sounds like what you're saying. Okay, so maybe Darren you have. You can, you can try and make a crack at this sort of deal, the ontological question, or or offer any other kind of overall synthesis, if you want. Sure. Well I think I'm in agreement with with the other panelists that, you know, internment and imprisonment is not a good solution to problems in society. You know, I think, you know, the first step should be, you know, demilitarization should be decolonization and anti racism. You know, moving for building for social justice those sorts of things. But right in the interim what do we do. Well I mean one of the things I see in camps and prisons in China and everywhere else is a process of dehumanization of prisoners and detainees. You know, bringing the human back into it and, and building more just prisons I think is is the way to go I mean I've, I've, when I teach about prisons and in college classrooms like students are they ask that question well what should we do. You know abolition is, is something we can talk about and, and should. But I think, you know the sort of research that that you're likely doing Kermit and Scandinavia is usually where I go and, and I show them what those prisons look like, where there's a much stronger emphasis on rehabilitation, where, you know, the, the ratio of guards to prisoners or detainees is much lower, much less securitized. So they taught sort of how to live or given a pathway to live and to learn trades and things like that. And they're not, or at least in the in the presentations I've seen not dehumanize in such an extreme way. So I think being intentional about that in prison management is is is useful in the short term. But yeah, in general I would say intermittent imprisonment, not a good solution. You know, you'll, you'll have the final word basically. Yeah, just generally I agree. I think I don't know we have answering what's a good question. What's a good prison without having kind of linkers on to see kind of the, the ways in which prisons are dehumanizing and the ways in which they are political that they target certain populations. I don't think there is a good, good prison. I mean there is an answer given in kind of like management prison management I'm sure you have to have certain square meters per person or whatever but we know that prison they're always overcrowded anyways. The bigger prisons which kind of exacerbates the problem. But I mean it's, it's, I think what Dan said about humanizing an interim I think is important to think about. And I don't think I have an answer to the precise question of what's a good prison. So I'm a little curious though because you're a lawyer right so so there must be an answer right there. There is a human rights and yeah okay which is you know you can't be you have to have regularity you have to have be able to have communication. You have to, you know have, you know proper sanitary conditions you have to write to access to education so that's a human rights answer right. And what's the mechanism for that human rights answer being sort of enshrined, for example, in India. In India you just have to go to court and get it, get it enforced. So for example, like you'd have, for example, I know people who have been given from my previous research on terrorism trials who weren't given access to writing materials. They have to go to court and say okay I need a pen and paper. I need to be able to send stuff, or you go to your trial judge and say, I need to meet my family, at least once a week stuff like that. I know other jurisdictions have things like Ombudsman other mechanisms to kind of ensure prison fairness, but any system like that just kind of breaks down into think, at least a system that I know kind of break down forms of brutality and dehumanization. Okay, well, let me thank everyone who has attended. Oh, yes, fine, yes, yes. Because I think we have to differentiate then also who is interned. And of course, if certain people are in internment and then we haven't human rights answer, it's totally correct. But in the context of people fleeing fighting fleeing from conflict and fleeing from violence. I don't think that a human rights answer is enough. I think we should avoid camps or all kind of in terms forms of internment when we talk about people who are fleeing from violence. So I'm not sure if the humanitarian or human rights answer is in that specific case is is enough. I mean, are you thinking kind of because of I mean to speak very sort of because I think we need to think and we need to establish and think about different solutions we need different solutions and we cannot say we don't have other solutions so we use camps, you know, so we have to really avoid the camp solution, not only avoid but to really say this is not a solution and think about other solutions. I guess what what I'm confused by is is your, you're saying that people freeing from fleeing from violence is a special case and I don't, I don't, let's say, I don't necessarily disagree but sort of, you know, in a psalm or what not no one's fleeing from violence but I don't think that necessarily like prima facie doesn't mean that a human rights solution is more appropriate. I just don't want to say that generally forms of internment are not a solution, maybe for specific phenomena for specific social. I don't know. Maybe some kind of solution that is, I don't know, properly with a human rights answer. But for refugee camps, I don't see that. Yeah, okay, I see that's clear. Okay, well then I will go back to my perfunctory, you know, sort of shutting things down. So I've already thank the audience. I will thank each of our panelists I certainly felt like this was extremely informative and enjoyable and a different kind of conversation on some of these issues than than I've been hearing so I'm very grateful to all of you for making that possible. And then I also just want to again, thank Maeve who has been, you know, silently and secretly keeping this all running smoothly. So, with that, and we're already over time actually that's funny, I guess, time goes quickly. So then, you know, we can stop there and maybe, you know, have a little round of applause for our speakers.