Camps legally exclude inmates from rule of law

Evidence

In this book I offer two interlinked arguments about the contemporary context of the ‘war on terror.’ First, race thinking, the denial of a common bond of humanity between people of European descent and those who are not, remains a defining feature of the world order. Second, this ‘colour-lined’ world is one increasingly governed by the logic of the exception and the camps of abandoned or ‘rightless’ people it creates. The camp, created as a state of exception, is a place where, paradoxically, the law has determined that the rule of law does not apply. Since there is no common bond of humanity between the camp’s inmates and those outside, there is no common law. For those marked as outside humanity, law reserves the space of the exception. I argue in this book that the abandonment of populations, an abandonment configured as emergency, is accomplished as a racial project. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 32

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘camp’ as a legal space where law itself has ruled law does not apply — the paradox central to Agamben’s state of exception, here reworked as inherently racial.
• XREF: Echoes Agamben’s state of exception and connects to this reader’s material on pre-state legal institutions where outsiders lacked standing (Milgrom).