The project changed, shifted terrain, expanded and contracted over the six or seven years of research that went into it. It ended up becoming a project about the way imprisonment, incarceration, and mass confinement have been central to the counterinsurgencies conducted by superior powers that claim adherence to liberal principles and precepts.
So I started with Israeli practices of confinement in Lebanon and Palestine and US detention and incarceration practices in its War on Terror and started going back in history. With each layer of history of confinement that I excavated, I felt like had to go back deeper. In the end, the subsoil of the project turned out to be the Boer War, and the contemporaneous Spanish War on Cuba, and their concentration camps. The two or three wars that ended up mattering a great deal were the ones that today’s counterinsurgents themselves claim as the originary wars. For the US, it always goes back to the British Emergency in Malaya, the Algerian War of Independence, and of course the Vietnam War. For the Israelis, so much is an echo of the various British counterinsurgencies in Palestine, primarily in the 1930s against the Palestinian Arab Revolt, but also against Jewish insurgents in the 1940s. (Laleh Khalili) More here.