Colonial emergency law institutionalized violence as moral instruction rather than aberration.

Evidence

Dyer himself explained his behaviour as duty – the duty to teach the natives a lesson or, in his words, ‘to produce a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view.’ The killing would have gone on, Dyer asserted, until the lesson was learnt. Only the lack of bullets stopped it. Dyer, Hussain comments, ‘unabashedly links the performativity of violence to the project of moral education,’ understanding completely that martial law’s purpose was none other than the reconstitution of the authority of the state and the inscription of obedience on the bodies of the colonized. Through emergency, colonial law provided for its own failure, a practice born out of the need to set up a political system that both maintained the rule of law and was able to respond to the exigencies of the colonial situation, one that was rife with ‘dissent’ and ‘disobedience.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 50

Categorization

• XREF: Extends chapter-6 claim that colonial martial law used mass violence as moral education of the colonized, confirming pattern here with the Dyer case.