State of Exception, Bio-Political power, Homo Sacer: Camps Sovereign and Indefinite Detention

Nasro Mohamoud

Student Nr: 11006760


 
State of Exception, Bio-Political power, Homo Sacer: Camps Sovereign and Indefinite Detention

Using Agamben’s analyses on the camp, my intention for the following is to discuss the logic and nature of the camps both during the Holocaust and in the present day. I have chosen to refer to Guantanamo Bay and the modern-day sweatshop zones as examples of these biopolitical spaces where individuals are reduced to bare life with no political rights. In support of Agamben’s analyses I will demonstrate how the modern day camp has become normalized, filtering outside the ‘walls’ and into the everyday. As a starting point, it is useful to briefly outline the state of exception and the birth of sovereignty.

Understanding Sovereignty

In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes speculated that people living in a state of nature, that is the condition of humanity before the existence of government, were violent and disorderly towards each other. Hobbes referred to this state as a “war of every man against every man” . Inside a system where order was missing, Hobbes believed that people would rightfully defend themselves in the face of no organized system of rule. Hobbes believed that the implementation of government was essential to remedy this condition. Under this social contract, society was created through an implicit agreement amongst human beings where they would give up certain freedoms to a sovereign power in order to attain particular rights to be in the polis (meaning body of citizens i.e. the right to life). Individuals would therefore obtain more rights through greater amounts of responsibility, altering the terms of the contract as needed.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, two regulatory technologies emerged at the level of controlling the body. The first involved new state procedures such as surveillance and imprisonment in order to apply control over the population. According to Michel Foucault, this disciplinary control was exercised with the basic goal of making a human that could be treated as a docile body (Ready and willing). “This body had to be productive. The technology of discipline developed and was perfected in the workshops, barracks, prisons and hospitals” (Foucault 1980:135). It was during this time that the body became a sight of surveillance in which it could be rationally regulated through systems of classification “in order to socialize them within the emerging new nation state. Bodies tended to be distrusted as sensual and irrational, and thus in need of taming, of disciplinary shaping to new purposes” (Lyon 2001:71).

The second regulatory technology was an extension of the first, where disciplinary power at the level of the body shifted to technology of mass control, involving the knowledge of birth/fertility rates, reproduction and life expectancy became controlled by the state. Foucault called this technology Biopower. Unlike disciplinary power, Biopower works not on the individual level, but on the population as a whole, addressing man as ‘species being’. Biopower is essentially the power to ‘make live’: “Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die” (Foucault 1997) .

At the beginning of his book, Agamben introduces Homo Sacer, the obscure Roman figure who was included in the polis by his very exclusion; that is, his ability to be killed but not sacrificed. It is through this inconsistent ‘inclusive exclusion’ that Agamben says the state of exception is realized, and where “man as a living being presents himself no longer as an object but as the subject of political power (Agamben 1998:9). Agamben takes up Foucault’s ideas on Biopower and on the distinction between bios (citizen) and zoe (homo sacer). He argues that “[t]he realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political realm, and order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible in distinction” (Ibid).

The inconsistent nature of sovereignty is such that the sovereign is both inside and outside the juridical order (Agamben 1998:15). Because the sovereign is he who can declare the state of exception, he must also be outside the law and yet also belong to it, “since it is up to him to decide if the constitution is to be suspended in toto” (Schmitt 1922:13)(Agamben 1998:15). Where exception is a kind of exclusion, the rule is therefore placed outside, or withdrawn from the exception through its suspension. “The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule” (Agamben 1998:18).

The sovereign, in declaring the state of exception, produces what Schmitt would call a ‘borderline concept’ which “creates a boundary of law, an inside and outside, precisely in declaring a state of exception” (Ptacek & Hussain 2000: 500). Therefore, the one who can proclaim the state of exception is sovereign. Ultimately, “the sovereign establishes the distinction between inside and outside: between law and unlaw and between the sovereign and his subjects” (Diken & Lausten 2002: 293). Agamben takes this idea further by explaining the relation of ‘exception’ through a ban, where ban refers to the abandonment of the one who is included through his exclusion. “He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable” (Agamben 1998:28). It is with these ideas on bare life and the sovereign that we turn to the logic of the camp; that space of indeterminate law which is created through the state of exception.

Holocaust & the Camps

Agamben argues that the camp is what arises when the state of exception becomes normalized. They are not born out of ordinary law, but rather arise out of a state of exception and martial law where the rules are suspended. The camp becomes that space where there is no distinction between law and unlaw. Therefore, the people who live inside the walls of the camp exist in a zone of in distinction.

The Nazi concentration camps evolved out of such a state of exception in which ordinary law (ie the Weimar constitution ) was suspended so that Hitler’s Germany could exercise sovereign power over the Jewish population. This ability to suspend law and yet be exempt from it is that inconsistent relation where the sovereign, is both inside and outside of the juridical order. Thus, “the actions of the state, which is responsible for the life of the country and therefore, for the laws obtaining in it, are not subject to the same rules as the acts of the citizens of the country” (Baehr 2003:382). The camp therefore, is that space which arises out of the suspension of laws, where “the norm becomes indistinguishable from the exception” (Agamben 1998:170).

Heinrich Himmler first created the concentration camp for political prisoners at Dachau which was placed outside of the jurisdiction of the Weimar Republic. The Jews were deprived citizenship rights by the Nuremburg laws and were later completely denationalized at the moment of the ‘final solution’ (Agamben 1994, Agamben 2000:41). However, as Agamben says, “what is being excluded in the camp is captured outside, that is, it is included by virtue of its very exclusion” (Agamben 1994) (Agamben 2000:40). The reason why anything and everything is possible (such as mass murder/genocide) within the camps is because the sovereign (i.e. the German Republic) is no longer limited. Only because “the camps constitute a space of exception in which not only is law completely suspended but fact and law are completely confused – is everything in the camps possible” (Agamben 1998:170).

Similarly, while Hannah Arendt saw the concentration camp as the central institution of totalitarian rule, she also supports Agamben by saying “[t]he camps were designed to be the ‘laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified (Arendt 1951:437) (Bergen1998:154). The people in the camp enter a zone of indistinction, where laws for protection disappear and they are no longer citizens with any political rights. In Arendt’s eyes, it was totalitarian terror which deprived the inmates of their individuality and their spontaneity, for “to destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity… and … spontaneity as such, with its incalculability, is the greatest of all obstacles to total domination over man” (Baehr 2003:135/137).

Inside the camp, the victims were dehumanized and bureaucratically regulated to ensure efficiency.
Within the concentration camps, the Jews were stripped of their political status and identity – everything that made them human was taken away so that they were reduced to bodies whose terror lay in being “an abject nothing” (Bergen 1998:142). As Bernstein says: “…the quintessential result of the organization of the camps…the stripping away from the human of any significant intentional relation to the world whilst nonetheless remaining alive; they are pure consequences of the ‘triumph’ of bureaucratic power over life” (2004:6).

Central to Agamben’s analysis is the fact that the camp opens up the space for the creation of bare life, where individuals lose all political identity. Famously, Agamben argues: “In so far as its inhabitants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life, the camp was also the most absolute Bio-political space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation” (Agamben 2000:41). Also, he states that what is essential to ask is not so much how people could commit such horrible crimes, but rather how a political system could so absolutely dehumanize a person “to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime” (Agamben 1996:41).

The bureaucratic system that Agamben alludes to is essentially what Zygmunt Bauman considers the necessary condition which allowed the dehumanization of the victims. Furthermore, he suggests that bureaucracy allowed a kind of social distance which removed any moral responsibility for the Other. This responsibility was worn through the bureaucratic administration of the Jews and resulted in a removal of proximity and a dissolving of morality. He asserts that the Holocaust was an event “which disclosed the weakness and fragility of human nature (of the abhorrence of murder, disinclination to violence, fear of guilty conscience and of responsibility for immoral behaviour) when confronted with the matter-of-fact efficiency of the most cherished among the products of civilization; its technology, its rational criteria of choice, its tendency to subordinate thought and action to the pragmatics of economy and effectiveness” (Bauman 1989:13). On the other hand, where Arendt would argue that the evil of these atrocities was banal in so far as it was a thought-defying result of an administrative duty, she would also say that “such a crime could be committed only by a giant bureaucracy using the resources of government” (Baehr 2003:380). However, Agamben emphasizes the camp as a space in which power meets bare life, arisen out of a state of exception in which ordinary law was suspended so that the bureaucratic execution of millions of innocent people was considered logical: “The bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It itself is the only norm; it is absolutely immanent” (Agamben 1999) (Bernstein 2004:8).

Although my discussion of Agamben’s analysis of the camp was brief, there are a few aspects which need reviewing: 1) the camp is that space which arises out of a state of exception or martial law, 2) the camp comprises a Bio-political space where power is directed at the level of the body (i.e. bare life), 3) the person living within the camp becomes the homo sacer; living in a zone of indistinction where they are subject to the sovereign’s will with the ability to be killed and not sacrificed.

With these ideas in mind, I would like to address Guantanamo Bay and the sweatshop zones as characteristic features of the modern day camp. Although they are contextually different from the
Holocaust, they represent spaces of indistinction which have arisen from suspended law, and where individuals have been reduced to bare life.

Guantanamo Bay Camp

Following the beginning of the military campaign in Afghanistan on 7th October 2001, the United States of America, assisted by its allies, began detaining persons in Afghanistan and elsewhere ‘for reasons related to the conflict’. Since early January 2002, hundreds of people, with nationals of forty nationalities, have been transferred to and held in detention facilities on the United States Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (aka G-Bay or Gitmo) (Von Ness 2003:8). These people have been denied legal counsel as well as the right to be informed of what charges are against them, directly challenging the rights under the Geneva Convention, which would grant the prisoners protection until their status has been determined. Furthermore, these detainees have not even been allowed the title ‘prisoners’ by the Department of Defense. The US has continually defended their position by saying that because the detainees have never been within the territory of the areas in which the US is sovereign, and that these detainees fall outside of the protection of the constitution.

The location of the detention centre on Guantanamo Bay, which the United States authorities claim is beyond US sovereign territory, is an apparent attempt to avoid the application of human rights protections in the United States constitution and access to United States courts. The detainees are referred to as ‘enemy combatants’, which is then relied upon in turn to justify the non-application of the protections of international humanitarian law. They have been held in what has correspondingly been described as a ‘legal black hole’ or ‘legal limbo’.
What we have here is an example of the state of exception in which the US has instituted the Patriot Act permitting detainment of any person being suspected of being involved in terrorist acts. The act specifically removes any legal status of the person under detainment, and this detainment is renewable for as long as these individuals remain a threat, or until, as the rulling administration says, the war on terror is over. However, it is evident that the war on terror may never end, and the fact remains that there are being held within the camps at Guantanamo with no individual rights.

The Patriot Act Agamben says: “What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws”.
Similar to the camps in Nazi Germany, this detainment has arisen out of a state of exception where the inhabitants are reduced to bare life, a place in which Agamben also says: “…power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation” (Agamben 1998:171). Although these people have not been exterminated as in the case of Nazi concentration camps, the indefinite detention of these individuals begs us to ask whether a stateless life reduced to nothing but bodies is worse than being terminated.

The fact that we do not know how many of the detainees are innocent, and as well have not been told why they are being detained is an example of how the state of exception becomes normalized. The sovereign power no longer resides solely within the camp but filters to the wider society resulting in what Hannah Arendt describes as characteristic of totalitarian terror:

“…that it does not shrink but grows as the opposition is reduced… Terror that is directed against neither suspects nor enemies of the regime can turn only to absolutely innocent people who have done nothing wrong and in the literal sense of the word do not know why they are being arrested, sent to … camps, or liquidated” (Bergen 1998:152).

Additionally, the torture accounts from former detainees Ruhal Ahmed calls attention to this kind of terror where individuals are reduced to animal status. This former inmate describes his experience at Guantanamo:

"The camp looked like the Nazi camps that I saw in films ... Lying on the floor of the compound, all night I would hear the screams of others in the rooms above us, as they were tortured and interrogated. My number would be called out, and I would have to go to the gate. They chained me, and put a bag over my head, dragging me off for my own turn. They would force me to my knees for questioning. They would threaten me with more torture."

What we have here in Guantanamo Bay is a disturbing resemblance to the logic of the camps within
Nazi Germany, as people are terrorized and robbed of their very identity. As Agamben says, “Every society […] sets the limits, decides who its homo sacer – the new living dead – will be; extra temporal and extraterritorial thresholds are created in which the human body is separated from its normal political status and abandoned, in a state of exception to the most extreme misfortunes” (Biehl 2001:142).

The extended circumstances in the Guantanamo camps could be seen as a kind of voluntary exception, where the state of exception is not instituted under a period of emergency, but rather could be seen as a ‘willed’ exception. This voluntary exemption “has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones” (Agamben 2005: 2). Therefore, these camps which have arisen out of suspended law, where it “becomes a new exercise of state sovereignty, one that not only takes place outside the law, but through an elaboration of administrative bureaucracies in which officials now not only decide who will be tried, and who will be detained, but also have ultimate say over whether someone may be detained indefinitely or not” (Butler 2004:51). Within the camps, the victims have entered what Agamben says is a “suspended zone”, where they become stateless, no longer human; and to repeat the phrase again: reduced to nothing but bare life. They are “neither living in the sense that a political animal lives, in community and bound by law, nor dead and, therefore, outside the constituting condition of the rule of law” (Butler 2004:67).

This is but one example of the many ways in which the camp has become the norm, where the distinction between and law and un-law are confounded. I now would like to turn the modern day sweatshop as an extension of this idea.

Export Processing Zones (EPZs) Sweatshops (Western Free trade Co-operations) Camps

“[i]f the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there and whatever its denomination and specific topography”(Agamben 1998:174).

It might seem unreasonable at first to compare the modern day sweatshop and the concentration camp. However, the creation of spaces in which power is exercised through suspended laws, where the inability to distinguish between “fact and law, rule and application” (Agamben 1998:173) is where the similarities being to surface.

Many of the corporate owned sweatshops are located in third world countries in areas known as ‘export processing zones’. One such place in particular, called Cavite, in the town of Rosario, is the largest freetrade zone in the Phillipines. Cavite is situated in a six-hundred and eighty two acre area where people produce various toys, electronics, etc. for exportation. It is a walled-in area which is under heavy surveillance, allows few visitors and where workers must show ID cards to get into the gates. Although the products being made are representative of some of the most powerful name brands in the world such as Nike and JC Penny, the factories are windowless, nameless and composed of cheap building materials. Within these zones, law has been suspended. They “exist in a world entirely separate from the host country” (Klein 2000:208) and in an area where there are no export or import duties and often no property taxes. Although Cavite is but one example of the many sweatshops in the world, a common characteristic is the working conditions and rights of the workers. Hours are long (sometimes twenty-four hours shifts), and wages are so low that workers can barely sustain themselves. Bonacich et al. found evidence of various labour schemes where time cards are fictitious or altered, or actual hours are hidden (2000:178). Documented cases of three-day shifts, people sleeping at their machines, not being allowed toilet breaks, and receiving financial penalties if their work is not completed on time, are stories which abound in the factories (Klein 2000: 216).

This is a place where individuals are dehumanized cogs in the machine; a place where individuals have been reported to be injected with amphetamines just so they can ‘keep producing’. “It’s a potent combination. In the dormitories, sleep deprivation, mal-nutrition and homesickness mingle to create an atmosphere of deep disorientation. ‘We are alien in the factories. We are also alien in the boarding house because we all come from faraway provinces,’ … ‘We are strangers here’” (Ibid:221).

Furthermore, many of the factories are built in a state of transience where contracts come and go, and where workers are continuously replaced. “Even if caught [for ignoring labour laws], they are able to close down and reopen under a new name and the authorities are unable to trace them” (Bonacich et al. 2000:222).

These sweatshop zones are representative of a nomadic biopolitical space that exists outside of normal law. The people inside are routinized, dehumanized and regulated through a form of terror along with a constant threat of losing their jobs. The corporations whose products are being made in these countries, hire sub-contractors which removes them of the responsibility and allows for a kind of ‘exception’: “So even the classic Marxist division between workers and owners doesn’t quite work in the zone, since the brand name multinationals have divested the ‘means of production’, to use Marx’s phrase, unwilling to encumber themselves with the responsibilities of actually owning and managing the factories, and employing a labor force” (Marx 2000:226).

Similar to the labour camps in Nazi Germany, the factory workers are reduced to their labour producing bodies with a non-existent job security where they could be replaced in an instant. It is a bureaucratized and highly regulated space infused with the terror of losing one’s job, of being punished and of getting sick and dying from over-work. Here, “[b]are life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being” (Agamben 1998:140).

One further aspect which needs addressing is the presence of fear and terror within the factories. Klein says,

“Fear pervades the zones. The governments are afraid of losing their foreign factories; the factories are afraid of losing their brand-name buyers; and the workers are afraid of losing their unstable jobs. These are factories built not on land but on air” (Klein 2000:206).

Furthermore, although trade unions are legal in the Phillipines, they are not ‘allowed’ in Cavite. “There is a widely understood – if unwritten – “no union, no strike” policy inside the zones. As the sign suggests, workers who do attempt to organize unions in their factories are viewed as troublemakers, and often face threats and intimidation” (Ibid: 213). What's more, pregnant women are also denied hiring at these factories because of the benefits which would have to be paid out. Women applying for jobs in the Mexican factories routinely have to undergo pregnancy tests, and some are even required to have humiliating routine menstrual pad checks. (Ibid:222).The governments often dismiss the illegal wages and terrible working conditions within the zones for they see them as a matter of foreign trade policy, and not a ‘labour rights issue’ (Klein 2000: 211. In addition, “the repeated and emphasized language [of the subcontracting agreements] shows how important maintaining distance is to the manufacturer” (Bonacich et al. 2000:139). This is yet another example of a place where law is suspended, and where the sovereign (i.e. the manufacturer) is both inside and outside, and furthermore exempt from the rule as they are not liable for what goes on within the zones.

Just like the camps at Guantanamo, the barriers around these zones serve to disavow what is happening inside, a way of ignoring the laws which are being tactically removed. Similar to a state of exception, these zones have arisen out of circumstances which have removed responsibility from the companies in areas where laws can be manipulated and suspended. It is a place where “sovereignty becomes that instrument of power by which law is either used tactically or suspended, populations are monitored, detained, regulated, inspected, interrogated, rendered uniform in their action, fully ritualized and exposed to control and regulation in their daily lives” (Butler 2004:97). The ways in which the factory workers are regimented, and controlled at the biological and reproductive level, existing in a space that makes outside and inside indistinguishable, is representation of the camp as a biopolitical paradigm.

“One of the essential characteristics of modern Biopolitics … is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside. Once it crosses over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more and more deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty – nonpolitical life – is immediately transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn” (Agamben1998:131).

Conclusion

The slogan posted above the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay reads--"Honor Bound to Defend Freedom"--is chillingly and ironically reminiscent of another infamous slogan, the one posted above Auschwitz: "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Makes One Free").
When we were young, we all had a tendency to see the world in simplistic terms: the “heroes” always defeated the “villains”. However, as adults, we know these simplistic descriptions of reality are almost never accurate. This discussion attempts to present a complex yet accurate description of the objective reality of this area of sovereign power.

“Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental Biopolitical paradigm of the West” (Agamben 1998:181).

The United States has been in a permanent state of emergency since 1933. Post 9/11 atmosphere has been characterized by heightened ‘alerts’ amongst the population. Anyone of Arab descent was a suspect in the war on terror and anyone professing anti-US sentiment could be arrested for suspicion.
This widespread surveillance imposed upon the population exemplifies Agamben’s argument where the state of exception has become normalized and the camp becomes part of the everyday. As Butler says, “What kind of public culture is being created when a certain ‘indefinite containment’ takes place outside the prison walls, on the subway, in the airports, on the street, in the workplace? (Butler 2004:77). Today, we are seeing more widespread technologies of surveillance, control and regulation of our bodies. The war on terror has since heightened security measures in airports where foreigners (people like me) are routinely fingerprinted and body scanned for identification. “The body has become not only a site of surveillance but a source of surveillance data” (Lyon 2001:81).

We live in a society where the sovereign power to make live and let die is becoming more ordinary. It is evident in places like urban slums where communities of poor dwellers are abandoned, animalized and made ‘socially invisible’ (Biehl 134). These ‘hyper-ghettos’, as Bauman would call them, are “… dumping sites for the surplus, redundant, unemployable and functionless population” (Bauman 2003:81). In these places where the government ‘lets die’ the redundant people, dehumanized bare life becomes the means through which sovereign power is realized. As Biehl says, “… ‘letting die’ is a political action, continuous with the biomedical and political power that ‘makes live’ (2001:138).

In the famous case of Terri Shiavo, where a legal battle ensued over her right to live, the US government intervened and signed a congressional bill that would not allow her husband to take her off life support. This fight over her life at the political and legal level confronts us once again with the sovereign power to ‘make live’. As Foucault says, “the lives and deaths of the subjects become rights only as a result of the will of the sovereign” (2003:240).

In a world where our bodies are regulated, controlled and subject to the will of sovereign power which can make live and let die, we are led to question the nature of what it is to be human. As Judith Butler proffers, “[t]here is no reason to dismiss the term ‘human’, but only a reason to ask how it works, how it forecloses, and what it sometimes opens up. To be human implies many things, one of which is that we are the kinds of beings who must live in a world where clashes of value do and will occur” (Butler 2004:89). Agamben asserts that modern totalitarianism is characterized by the creation of a ‘legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system” (Agamben 2005:2).

Like the Jews and detainees, the people in the camp are eternally always on the outside, even when inside. As he says, the camp is no longer limited in time and space, but has become the new Bio-political example of the West. “The state of exception, which used to be essentially a temporary suspension of the order, becomes now a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by that naked life that increasingly cannot be inscribed into the order” (Agamben 1994) (Agamben 2000:41).The camp thus becomes the norm where a permanent state of exception is implemented, and where the body of homo sacer is left trailing in its wake.











































References
Agamben G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press

------. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books

------. 2000. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: Theory Out of Bounds University of
Minnesota Press

------. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Arendt, 1966. The Origins of Totalitarianism. In Bergen, B. 1998. The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and the ‘The Final Solution’. New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Baehr, P. 2003. The Portable Hannah Arendt. New York: Penguin Books

Bauman, Z. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. New York: Cornell University Press
------. 2003. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Oxford: Polity Press

Baumgold, Deborah. Hobbes's Political Theory. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Bergen, B. 1998. The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and the ‘The Final Solution’. New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Bernstein, J.M. 2004. “Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the Pornography of Horror”. Parallax 10(1):2-16

Biehl, J. 2001. “Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment”. Social Text 19(3):131-149

Bonacich, et al. 2000. Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry. Los Angeles:
University of California Press

Butler, J. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso


Diken, B. & Bagge Lausten, C. “Security Terror and Bare Life”. Space and Culture 5(3):290-307

Foucault, M. 2003. Society Must Be Defended. Bertani, M. & Fontana A. Eds. London: Allen Lane

Klein, N. 2000. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Vintage Canada

Lyon, D. 2001. Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Buckingham, Philadelphia: Open University Press

Ptacek, M. & Hussain, N. 2000. “Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred”. Law & Society Review 34(2):

Von Ness, P. 2003. “Guantanamo Bay Detainees: National Security or Civil Liberty”
http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/vonness.pdf