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.

The most disastrous blunder of the age was its refusal to acknowledge what most subalternised cultures and people took for granted: nature does not belong to us; we belong to nature. The reckless destruction of nature ended up threatening the survival of the human species, in the form of recurrent pandemics, extreme weather events, massive numbers of environment refugees, the disappearance of small island states, and environment-related chronic diseases. I argue in this chapter that all the main mechanisms of exclusion and discrimination at work in modern societies – whether class, race or gender – are traceable to the root dualisms between humanity and nature, and between mind/soul and body. The ways in which modern society deals with inferiority are modelled on the ways it deals with nature. If abyssal exclusion means domination by appropriation/violence, nature – including land, rivers and forests as well as people and ways of being and living whose humanity was negated precisely for being part of nature – has been the favoured target of this domination in Western modernity since the sixteenth century. I start by examining old and new contestations of Cartesian dualism, then I illustrate how this contestation has entered the field of law, what it entails and the prospects for the future. The rights of nature are a promising real legal utopia.

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.