Governments strategically withhold information to weaken marginalized groups’ legal resistance.
Evidence
In her more recent work McGoey (2019) offers further examples of such deliberate and exclusionary darkness in which political and legal institutions sequester marginalized groups to quash their resistance. One of her examples is the decision of England’s Court of Appeal to overturn an earlier ruling made by the High Court about the legality for Britain’s Home Office not to have provided information about two thousand children living in the Calais camp and about the reasons for rejecting their application to join family members in the United Kingdom: “The less they are informed, the British government appears to have speculated, the weaker the children’s legal case” (2). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 721
Categorization
- XREF: Concrete case of manufactured ignorance as domination — complements Rumsfeld’s framing and Salecl’s survival-ignorance; contrasts with the book’s finance theme where opacity serves speculators. — connects to: Rule by decree efficiently dominates heterogeneous territories by withholding information.; Withholding chemical data from exposed communities weakens their remedies — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 161
- SEED: Essay angle: ignorance as asymmetric weapon — McGoey’s Calais children case as the cleanest recent example of knowledge deprivation used deliberately by a state, and what it teaches about information asymmetry in markets.
- SHARE: The Court of Appeal overturn over Calais camp children’s information is a sharp, specific legal-battle anecdote for someone interested in refugee law or strategic ignorance.