The state’s legitimacy rests on classifying the stateless as scarcely human.

Evidence

The state rested in part on the conviction that civilized human beings lived in and were nourished by state systems, while those who did not and were not were assigned a primitive “tribal” status or worse, and, being “stupid” like nature, were thereby deemed for all purposes and intents to be “scarcely human.” This ideological formation not only sustained the practices and discourses of the colonial state, but also, needless to say, rested squarely, as Europe’s theories of race to no lesser extent did, upon the Distinction. From this “original position,” from this constructed formation, most everything else followed. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 222

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the civilizational binary that Morrison and other theorists of dehumanization identify in Western colonial ideology; also resonates with the distinction apparatus in Said’s Orientalism itself.
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense causal claim: the state-form’s ideological self-justification requires degrading non-state peoples to ‘scarcely human,’ which then licenses colonial violence as civilization-bearing.