Labor camp | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

A labor camp (or labour camp, see spelling differences) or work camp is a detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons (especially prison farms). Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators. Convention no. 105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO), adopted internationally on 27 June 1957, abolished camps of forced labor. In the 20th century, a new category of labor camps developed for the imprisonment of millions of people who were not criminals per se, but political opponents (real or imagined) and various so-called undesirables under communist and fascist regimes. Some of those camps were dubbed "reeducation facilities" for political coercion, but most others served as backbones of industry and agriculture for the benefit of the state, especially in times of war. Early-modern states could exploit condemned dissidents and those of suspect political or religious ideology by combining prison and useful work in manning their galleys. This became the sentence of many Christian captives in the Ottoman Empire and of Calvinists (Huguenots) in pre-Revolutionary France. Forced labour camps in Communist Albania The Allies of World War II operated a number of work camps after the war. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, it was agreed that German forced labor was to be utilized as reparations. The majority of the camps were in the Soviet Union, but more than one million Germans were forced to work in French coal-mines and British agriculture, as well as 500,000 in US-run Military Labor Service Units in occupied Germany itself. See Forced labor of Germans after World War II. Forced labour camps in Communist Bulgaria According to the New Statesman, Burmese military government operated, from 1962 to 2011, about 91 labour camps for political prisoners. The anti-communist Kuomintang operated various camps between 1938 and 1949, including the Northwestern Youth Labor Camp for young activists and students.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (2)

Related concepts (19)

Related courses (1)

Related lectures (4)

Politics of Accommodation: Fascist and Soviet Youth Camps

Compares the architectural and ideological aspects of fascist and Soviet youth camps.

Slavery and Migration HUM-446: Governing global migration I

Delves into modern slavery characteristics, governance, trafficking definitions, UN statistics, local slavery, and historical slavery-migration association.

Georges Perec: Life and Works AR-365: Theory and architectural culture

Explores Georges Perec's innovative literary style and his fascination with everyday life, urban spaces, and human existence.

AR-518: The origins of modern domestic space

The course is part of a three-year trajectory dedicated to a comprehensive history of domestic space and its relationship with urban form from its prehistoric origins to Neoliberal times.

‘Monsieur, I have a wife and child, a house and a garden, et alors?’

Sila Karatas

Marshall Plan, officially operated from 1948 to 1952 for reconstruction and development in Europe and non-European countries such as Turkey and Switzerland, marks the Cold War economy-political and foreign policy of the US. Referred by its bureaucrats as “ ...

2023

Regulation of adenylyl cyclase 5 in striatal neurons confers the ability to detect coincident neuromodulatory signals

Ursula Röthlisberger, Siri Camee van Keulen, Daniele Narzi, Paolo Carloni

Author summary Adenylyl cyclases (ACs) are enzymes that can translate extracellular signals into the intracellular molecule cAMP, which is thus a 2nd messenger of extracellular events. The brain expresses nine membrane-bound AC variants, and AC5 is the dom ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2019

Penal labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour which prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts.

Katorga (ка́торга; from medieval and modern Greek: katergon, κάτεργον, "galley") was a system of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (see Katorga labor in the Soviet Union). Prisoners were sent to remote penal colonies in vast uninhabited areas of Siberia and the Russian Far East where voluntary settlers and workers were never available in sufficient numbers. The prisoners had to perform forced labor under harsh conditions.

Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, violence including death or other forms of extreme hardship to either themselves or members of their families. Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery, penal labour and the corresponding institutions, such as debt slavery, serfdom, corvée and labour camps.