Led by the sinister Colonel Joll, the Third Bureau captures a number of barbarians, brings them back to town, tortures them, kills some of them, and leaves for the capital in order to prepare a larger campaign.

In the meantime, the Magistrate begins to question the legitimacy of colonialism and personally nurses a barbarian girl who has been left crippled and partly blinded by the Third Bureau's torturers.

Without much possibility of a trial during such emergency circumstances, the Magistrate remains in a locked cellar for an indefinite period, experiencing for the first time a near-complete lack of basic freedoms.

The predominant belief in the town is that the barbarians intend to invade soon, and although the soldiers and many civilians have now departed, the Magistrate helps encourage the remaining townspeople to continue their lives and to prepare for the winter.

The Nobel Prize committee called Waiting for the Barbarians "a political thriller in the tradition of Joseph Conrad, in which the idealist’s naiveté opens the gates to horror".

As Glass told journalists and the Erfurt audience at a matinée, he sees scary parallels between the opera's story and the Iraq War: a military campaign, scenes of torture, talk about threats to the Empire's peace and safety, but no proof.

[6] In October 2018, a movie adaptation[7] directed by Ciro Guerra and featuring Mark Rylance, Robert Pattinson, and Johnny Depp began production in Morocco.