International Relations and States of Exception: Margins, Peripheries and Excluded Bodies

Critically but sympathetically interrogating Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the logic of sovereign power, this volume draws attention to the multiple zones of exclusion in and through which contemporary international politics constitutes itself.
Beginning from the margins and peripheries of world politics, this book emphasises the colonial processes through which contemporary "third world" spaces of exception have been shaped and particular bodies made susceptible to the conditions of "bare life". The authors contend that these bodies inhabit a variety of spaces or "zones of indistinction" that include political detainees, refugees, asylum-seekers, poor migrants, sweatshop workers, and unassimilated indigenous populations. These are the "expendable bodies" that the territorial and market-driven logic of current international relations simultaneously produces, polices and excludes. Focussing on the locally and socio-historically specific ways that sovereign power works, the individual chapters provide the volume with a wide geographical reach. Drawing on diverse approaches, this text constitutes an important intervention in critical international relations, providing grounded theory and sophisticated analyses of how contemporary international relations works through the production of ‘exceptions’.
Bringing together a range of internationally-renowned scholars, International Relations and States of Exception will be of vital interest to students and scholars of International Relations, Critical Theory and Postcolonial Studies.

Shampa Biswas is Associate Professor of Politics and Director of Global Studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, U.S.A. Dr. Biswas has worked and published extensively in the areas of postcolonial international relations, critical security studies and the politics of development.

Sheila Nair is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University, USA. Dr. Nair co-edited the volume, Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class (Routledge 2002). She has also written and published on postcolonial human rights and protest movements, nationalism, and Malaysian politics among other topics.

1.International relations and "states of exception Shampa Biswas and Sheila Nair 2. Uncivil zones: terror and territoriality in the geopolitical shadowlands Suvendrini Perera 3. Geopolitical articulations: global terrorism, Southern Thailand Carlo Bonura 4. Dystopic geographies of empire Prem Kumar Rajaram 5. Sovereignty, security, and migrants: making bare life Sheila Nair 6. Imperceptible naked-lives: constructing a theoretical space to account for non-statist subjectivities Decha Tangseefa 7. Marginal life: the production of the undocumented and (il)legality at the US-Mexican border Marie Woodling 8. Biopower as a supplement to sovereign power: prison camps, war, and the production of excluded bodies Halit Mustafa Tagma 9. Economies of blackness circuit: ecologies and bodies of disaster and accumulation Anna Agathangelou 10. Ec(h)o-tourism and the whisper of the state: the "greening" of indigenous politics Elizabeth Shannon Wheatley