Bare Life, Political Violence, and the Territorial Structure of Britain and Ireland

When civilian deaths from high-altitude bombing are treated as collateral damage, when people are held without charge and abused in pursuit of evidence in a war on terror that sets aside international law and human rights, then, truly some lives are being treated as if they were either not worth living or not worth protecting. This is the world that Giorgio Agamben has described as the “state of exception.” The United States and the United Kingdom are acting in the world as sovereign powers in just the way he described as the exercising of the right to deny to some persons proper political status, reducing them to a sort of “bare life” where their very biological existence continues at the sufferance of the sovereign or its agents. ¹ Exceptional measures threaten to become the norm, yet the forces of colonial hubris and civilizational arrogance now abroad recall earlier times.