States authorize violence against people cast outside the political community

Evidence

If it is hard to distinguish contemporary state-of-exception measures from the ongoing management of racial populations, this is only because the exception inheres in several legal and bureaucratic structures. The immigrant and refugee, for example, have long been considered exceptions in the eyes of the law, and the legal and administrative mechanisms that limit their rights have been used to great advantage since the ‘war on terror’ began. … Violence is easily authorized against those who do not belong. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 399

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Agamben’s state of exception and to the broader literature on indefinite detention and racialized immigration regimes the reader has encountered elsewhere. — connects to: Racialized regimes license privatized citizen violence against targeted groups. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1826
• SEED: Angle: treaty immigrant exception mechanisms as the legal scaffolding that the war on terror simply re-used rather than invented — the ‘already-there’ infrastructure of the exception.