Chapter One - Necropolitical Law

Summary

Chapter 1 applies Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to define necropolitical law as the norms, practices, and relations of enmity that justify and legitimize discounting life through killing, as well as through the diminishing of socially and politically empowered life. Mapping the co-constitutions of racialized discounted lives within the domestic terrain of the United States, as well as in global sites of the long War on Terror, the chapter’s provocation is that law – notions of authority, legitimacy, and community – is at work in effecting the nationally and globally discounted lives of the long War on Terror. Chapter 1 also supplies the contours for the book’s methodology and epistemology: law as culture; an interpretive sociolegal reading for law attentive to law’s archive and law’s violence; a normative commitment to rule of law’s scrutiny and restraint of power; and a suspicion of the roles of spectacle, affect, and publicity in displacing rule-of-law’s commitments to power’s accountability and to law as public thing.