Emergency laws that suspend the rule of law are core to neoliberal governance

Evidence

Legal measures that suspend rights in the interests of national security have been variously described as state-of-exception, state-of-emergency, war measures or state-of-siege measures. Whether they are found in immigration provisions, as are Canadian security certificates, whereby detainees are not entitled to see all the evidence against them, or in anti-terrorism acts, they share the paradox that they are laws that suspend the rule of law. … As Aihwa Ong argues, at the heart of neoliberalism is the idea and the practice of the exception, the notion that the government has the right to do anything in the interest of governance. Capital constructs spaces of exception, and a graduated or variegated sovereignty – where, for example, corporations have the right to suspend the law – is the hallmark of neoliberalism. Exceptions operate with varying regimes of in carceration, imprisoning some in migrant worker camps or domestic worker zones and confining others within gated communities but removing all such communities from the reach of the law. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 44

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Agamben’s state of exception and Foucault’s biopolitics, which the introduction is building toward; also echoes Milgrom’s work on extralegal regimes as parallel systems of governance. — connects to: Crisis lets neoliberal officials arrogate sovereign power to define emergencies — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 945; Neoliberals exploit emergency exceptions to bypass democratic accountability. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 980
• SEED: Angles: the gated community and the migrant camp as two ends of one exception regime — how capital’s ‘spaces of exception’ enclose rich and poor alike but to opposite effects.