The colonial origins of the ‘permanent state of exception’
Mark Condos
During times of crisis, states have historically drawn upon ‘exceptional’ or emergency powers in order to govern. These typically involve the assumption of new kinds of dictatorial authority, the curtailment of basic civil rights, and a blurring of the ordinary distinctions between executive, legislative, and judicial forms of power.
Today, we can see this in the deployment of new legal, policing, and military powers in the global ‘War on Terror’, as well as in the imposition of severe restrictions imposed by various governments across the world during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Once the crisis has passed, states are meant to surrender these extraordinary powers, and return to a state of normalcy. But what if this state of affairs ceases to be temporary, and instead becomes a permanent feature of how governments operate? For the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, this is no mere hypothetical question, but the reality we now face. For Agamben, we are living in a ‘permanent state of exception’.
Agamben traces the origins of this permanent state of exception to the First World War, which saw an unprecedented number of countries around the world declare states of emergency or siege in order to manage the crises presented by a modern, industrial total war. For Agamben, the First World War opened up the possibility for a radically new form of state power that was fundamentally anti-democratic, authoritarian, and which operated through the mechanisms of a permanent state of emergency.
Agamben’s work is inherently Eurocentric, but if we turn our gaze beyond Europe to the imperial world a very different picture emerges. The unequal nature of European colonial power, premised on racial difference, rendered colonialism an inherently authoritarian and anti-democratic enterprise from the outset. Throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, many of the key features Agamben identifies with the state of exception — the blurring of executive, legislative and judicial powers — were, in fact, integral features of colonial power. Emergency, according to John Reynolds, was thus not something merely episodic or interruptive, but was a ‘technique of governance’ embedded into the everyday functioning of colonial regimes.
British India is a case in point. Throughout my research into the relationship between colonial law and violence in India, I was struck by the ways the British regime privileged security above all else, and regularly resorted to ‘emergency’ measures in order to maintain order and control. These included: declarations of martial law; the use of preventive detention and the suspension of habeas corpus; the enactment of ‘repressive’ legislation; and executive decrees and ordinances that bypassed normal legislative procedures.
Altogether, these techniques of colonial power granted the state a frightening array of draconian powers that could be used to crush armed uprisings, police entire groups or communities deemed ‘criminal’ or threatening to colonial order, and even suppress peaceful political protest. All of these powers operated through the law itself, and because they were constitutive of the ‘normal’ legal and political order in colonial India, I argue it is not particularly helpful to understand them in terms of the ‘state of exception’.
Instead, my work on the relationship between law and emergency in British India aims to reorient our understanding of states of emergency or siege away from the framework of the exception, in order to consider how they may be more usefully considered understood as part of a general approach of maintaining colonial power. The colonial world was organized along an entirely different legal register from that of the metropole, which is why attempts to understand it in terms of the ‘exception’ are less useful than looking at it as a place where new kinds of statecraft and legal innovation were developed.
From this vantage point, we might also turn the mirror back against Europe itself and argue that the reason the First World War is seen as such a turning point in modern statecraft by Agamben and others is because this is the moment when Europe was subjected to some of the authoritarian, anti-democratic laws that colonized states had endured throughout their history.
The blurring between war and peace, between executive, legislative and judicial functions, and the existence of a state of permanent emergency is not something unique to the post-9/11 world, or even the post-First World War global order. It has, in fact, been a distinctive feature of colonial rule for centuries. By de-centering Europe, and focusing instead on developments across the colonial world, we can obtain a very different picture of how authoritarian state power has traditionally operated. This is vital not only to decolonization efforts but also for reinterpreting accepted narratives and norms around Western democratic traditions and the modern state.
Dr Mark Condos is a historian and Lecturer in War Studies and co-Director of the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War, at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
New Voices in Global Security is a collaborative blog series between the School of Security Studies, King’s College London, and International Affairs. Drawing on cutting edge research, the blog series highlights diverse empirical, methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding global security and engages with questions of equality, diversity and inclusion within the discipline. Contributions are based on the New Voices event series — organized and chaired by Dr Amanda Chisholm, School Equality, Diversity and Inclusion lead — which promotes the research of PhD students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) working both within and beyond the School of Security Studies.
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