This volume looks at territories such as reservations, model villages and collective towns as the spatial materialization of forced assimilation and "progress". These disciplinary spaces were created in order to disempower and alter radically the behavior of people who were perceived as ill-suited "to fit" into hegemonic imaginations of "the nation" since the 19th century. Comparing examples from the Americas, Australia, North and East Africa, Central Europe as well as West and Central Asia, the book not only considers the acts and legitimizing narrations of ruling actors, but highlights the agency of the subaltern who are often misrepresented as passive victims of violent assimilation strategies.

Andrea Fischer-Tahir (Dr. phil.), born in 1971, is working as a lecturer for inclusive education at TU Dresden. She has long-standing experience in area studies with a focus on history, sociology and politics in Kurdistan. Her conceptual work involves space production, gender, knowledge, resistance, as well as construction of memory. Sophie Wagenhofer (PhD) is a historian specialized in entangled history with a focus on Europe and North Africa.