Monster terrorist figures justify suspending fundamental rights and normal legal limits

Evidence

It is useful to bear in mind both Rai’s and Debrix’s point that monster terrorists enable us to believe in “democracy in the time of monsters,’ a time when we need states of exception and the authority to suspend fundamental rights, invade, and drop bombs on their heads for their own good. Monster figures legitimize new regimes of citizenship and security where we become accustomed to state violence as a warranted part of the social order, the transformation Agamben described as that from the state of exception to the camp. Without monster terrorists, states of exception would not be justified and states would confront the threat of terrorism within the law. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 125

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Agamben’s state-of-exception-to-camp transformation, which the reader has encountered in legal theory.