Colonial sovereignty operates outside legal and institutional rules of warfare

Evidence

For all the above reasons, the sovereign right to kill is not subject to any rule in the colonies. In the colonies, the sovereign might kill at any time or in any manner. Colonial warfare is not subject to legal and institutional rules. It is not a legally codified activity. Instead, colonial terror constantly intertwines with colonially generated fantasies of wilderness and death and fictions to create the effect of the real. Peace is not necessarily the natural outcome of a colonial war. In fact, the distinction between war and peace does not avail. Colonial wars are conceived of as the expression of an absolute hostility that sets the conqueror against an absolute enemy. All manifestations of war and hostility that had been marginalized by a European legal imaginary find a place to reemerge in the colonies. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 84

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the colonial exception: the sovereign right to kill ungoverned by any rule, where the war/peace distinction collapses.
• XREF: Connects to Agamben’s state of exception and Schmittian sovereignty assumed by the Islamophobia field’s critical vocabulary. — connects to: Colonization is fundamentally violence and plunder, not a civilizing mission — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 12; Colonial sovereignty means power exercised outside the law, with peace as endless war. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 74; Colonial rule operates by suspending judicial order — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 79 (+7 more)

Related

• Colonial sovereignty means power exercised outside the law, with peace as endless war. (similarity 0.89)
• Colonial rule operates by suspending judicial order (similarity 0.85)
• European sovereignty legitimated states by domesticating and rationalizing war within borders. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial violence stood inside the law, not outside it (similarity 0.81)
• War drives the regular mechanisms of power beneath the law (similarity 0.81)
• War exercises sovereignty through the right to kill. (similarity 0.79)
• War can invert from disruption of law into law’s governing principle (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Forbidden weapons were deemed acceptable in colonial wars but not between equals #exemplifies (0.90)
• Colonial powers impose a double moral standard demanding restraint only from the colonized #exemplifies (0.80)
• War can invert from disruption of law into law’s governing principle #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179
• State sovereignty is defined and limited by existing international rules. #qualifies (0.75) — HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Clarendon Law…, 522
• State sovereignty is constituted by the nation-state system, not prior to it #qualifies (0.72) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 172