Contemporary empire operates through legal suspension of law in camps.

Evidence

It is now widely argued that today’s empire is most distinguished by the proliferation of camps and by the culture of exception that underpins the eviction of increasing numbers of people from political community. Camps range from those whose inmates are ‘terror’ suspects wearing black hoods (as the cover of this book shows) to those of asylum seekers and their children, facilities hidden away in the deserts of Australia or the suburbs of Texas and Toronto, camps for migrant workers on the Niagara peninsula where workers live in barrack-like surroundings and do not have freedom of movement, and conventional prisons whose inmates nevertheless do not enjoy prisoners’ rights and spend long periods in solitary confinement. Camps may even extend to an entire state, as several have argued of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. All such spaces are distinguished by a legally authorized suspension of law and the creation of communities of people without ‘the right to have rights,’ as Hannah Arendt put it long ago when describing the impact of the First World War and the creation of large groups of people who were homeless, stateless, and ‘rightless.’ Camps are places where the rules of the world cease to apply. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 33

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the camp as a legally authorized suspension of law creating ‘the rightless’ — Arendt’s term is the load-bearing concept.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’ from The Origins of Totalitarianism, and to Agamben’s state of exception framework.