Conceptualising Singapore’s Detention ‘Painscape’: Trauma, Identity and Resilience

This thesis furthers our understanding of the nature and harms of political detention by examining the traumatic legacies of this institution in Singapore. It sets out to problematise established understandings of identity, rehabilitation, and ‘release’. It explores these themes by examining 135 oral history interviews. These testimonies illuminate how pain was, and is, experienced and negotiated by former detainees and those around them at different points of Singapore’s detention chain. I propose that pain experienced during political detention should be conceptualised as a multi-layered continuum of individual and collective experiences that were shaped by participants’ encounters with indefinite detention.