The politics of encampment: Pathways to government use of concentration camps

Systems of concentration camps have been administered by governments on every inhabited continent and across more than 150 cases since their first modern use in Cuba in 1896. Although each system takes on unique features, all involve substantial logistical, financial, and reputational costs. Why, then, do governments adopt such costly institutions of repression? While many existing explanations rightly emphasize domestic threat dynamics like civil wars, dissent, and regime type; we argue that decisions to adopt concentration camps are driven, in addition, by diffusion processes, whereby governments learn from regional, colonial, institutional, and ideological peers. Using new global data on concentration camp systems from 1896 to 2018, we evaluate these diffusion dynamics and uncover a striking temporal divide. While regional and ideological networks consistently predict camp adoption throughout the period of study, diffusion within ideological and institutional networks is limited to the post-1945 period. These findings suggest that concentration camps spread not solely in response to domestic crises but also through the development of historically contingent, transnational repertoires of repression.