The camp logic of suspended rights now generalizes across immigration and security law

Evidence

In their book The Culture of Exception, Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge Lausten take care to clarify that their argument that today the exception is the rule is not an argument that ‘contemporary society is characterized by the cruelty of the concentration camps, although camplike structures are spreading quickly.’ Instead, they argue that ‘the logic of the camps tends to be generalized.’ It is this logic that we see first in the immigrant and refugee as exceptions in immigration law, and second, as homo sacer, in security-certificate hearings since the ‘war on terror’ began. It is a logic that is first and foremost about the power of the sovereign. The zone of non-law into which refugees are plunged is a legally authorized place in which rights are suspended. Simultaneously in the legal order and outside of it, the refugee confirms the terrible power of the state to determine every aspect of his life. When this terrible power unfolds as bureaucracy, when the life of the refugee can depend on a few whispered words about jihad or training camps, then we too must accept the power of the state. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 139

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘logic of the camps’ and ‘homo sacer’ concepts — the zone of non-law inside the legal order where rights are suspended.
• XREF: Directly invokes Agamben’s homo sacer and state of exception, which the reader likely knows from political theory reading. — connects to: Undocumented presence in the United States is a civil, not criminal, offense — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 640