Colonial administrations circumscribed legal rights by framing race and religion as civilizational boundaries.

Evidence

The decision reflected the power of ideas of colonial difference within the administration, which increasingly saw race and religion as marking fundamental civilizational boundaries. Legal protections of subjects’ rights had to be circumscribed in the colonial context, where imperial security ultimately rested on rule by force. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 99

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the emergency-jurisprudence literature (Nasser Hussain) and to Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject argument that late colonialism split citizens from subjects.
• SEED: Angle: how “rule of law” rhetoric and rule-by-force practice coexisted in empire — a piece on legal legitimacy as imperial cover.