In this chapter, I argue that during the period of historical colonialism, colonial law consisted of two bodies of law separated by an abyssal line. When speaking of colonial law, one has to have in mind the law issued or accepted by the colonial power to apply in the colonies and govern their relations with the metropolitan centre. In this sense, colonial law consisted of two bodies of law. The first was the set of legislation (court decisions and administrative measures) emanating from the metropolitan government or colonial administration, to be applied in the colonies and in their relations with the metropolitan government. The second referred to laws and regulations that specifically applied to those sectors of native populations that were not “civilised” (the vast majority) or, in other words, those that had not been assimilated into European values, culture, manners and tastes. Both offered striking contrasts with the body of law that applied on metropolitan soil. The crucial topics that separated metropolitan and colonial law: a racial property regime; labour as a branch of criminal law; extreme punitive justice; formal or informal systems of apartheid grounded in settler or white supremacy; suppression or instrumental manipulative recognition of indigenous law. These topics show that metropolitan and colonial legality were (are) the two sides of modern abyssal law.

In this and the following chapters I analyse the history of abyssal exclusions brought about by modern state law. I define lawfare as any performance in the name of law (a declaration, norm, sentence, official action or omission) premised on the extreme strangeness of the addressee or target, either because the latter is not fully human (the stranger as a subhuman being) or because its actions must be sanctioned without the normative constraints of the rule of law (the stranger as an internal or external enemy). The long journey of lawfare is the long journey of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. It has undergone multiple metamorphoses and reincarnations since the sixteenth century. From colonial law to imperial law, from the penal law of the enemy to the criminalisation of protest, and from the war on corruption to the war on migration, the abyssal exclusion of targeted social groups has been carried out by lawfare. In every instance, modern domination has found ways of separating humanity from subhumanity, friend from enemy, and non-abyssal social exclusion from abyssal exclusion. There is no reason to believe that new metamorphoses will not appear. The abyssal line is the most resilient and most fundamental structure of Western domination. Only successful struggles against capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy will bring about the progressive dislocation of the abyssal line through sustained interruptions of the institutions upon which Western domination reproduces itself, namely the state and the law.

In the following chapters, I analyse several attempts to interrupt the abyssal nature of the modern state emerging from my previous research on sociology of law. I try to identify the reasons why most of such attempts failed. In this chapter, I analyse some of the most salient features of the state and the legal system in Mozambique proposing the concept of heterogeneous state to highlight the breakdown of the modern equation between the unity of the state and the unity of its legal and administrative operation. The centrality of legal pluralism is analysed in light of an empirical research focused on community courts and traditional authorities. I use the concept of legal hybridisation with the purpose of showing the porosity of the boundaries of the different legal orders and cultures in Mozambique and the deep cross-fertilisations or cross-contaminations among them. Special attention is given to the multicultural plurality resulting from the interaction between modern law and traditional law, the latter conceived of as an alternative modernity.

There is today so much inequality, discrimination, and uncertainty concerning the future that the lives of most people in the world are dominated by fear rather than by hope. However, people cannot afford to be so pessimistic, given that their struggle for survival, an urgent and inescapable everyday task, is at stake. Their struggle will be all the more successful, and their revolt all the more likely to attract followers, if more and more people come to the realization that the hopeless fear of powerless majorities stems from the fearless hope of powerful minorities. This epochal condition endows our time with an atmosphere of monstrosity, i.e. the unpredictable and uninsurable risk to avert vulnerability, the almost incommensurable power differences between oppressors and oppressed, and systemic impunity. Monsters present themselves as specifically disturbing threats, while at the same time constituting realms within which there is room for manoeuvre and resistance. This chapter identifies seven such threats.

Modern law is abyssal law, meaning that there is a law of the oppressors and a law of the oppressed. The abyssal line both produces (and is a product of) the incommensurability between the two social orders and the invisibility of this duality. From the point of view of the epistemologies of the South, modern law operates as a juridical barbarism that remains invisible due to the false universality of the legal order of metropolitan sociability (regulation/emancipation). Contemporary theories of justice are as abyssal as the law they found. They rely on fictions that take the absence of the abyssal line to be reality. Their universality is as false as the universality of metropolitan sociability. Post-abyssal law is possible, on condition that the regulation/emancipation and appropriation/violence duality is overcome and, with it, the coexistence of the law of the oppressors and the law of the oppressed. In sum, post-abyssal law is possible once the abyssal line has been eliminated. In keeping with the preceding analysis, this will only be possible if capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy vanish as modes of domination and are not replaced by other, milder or harsher, modes of domination. This conception refers to a theoretical possibility, but is it a real-life possibility? Can we imagine such a society or the social struggles that would accomplish it? What would this society look like?