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Abstract
This article reflects on the spatiality of the “War on Terror”. It argues that the “War on Terror” is a discourse that identifies the exceptional, i.e. terror, in order to normalize spaces and subjects. Since these standards (norm/ exception) presuppose an order, it relies on Schmitt’s concept of nomos in order to theorize how the spatial dynamics of the “War on Terror” are connected to an order that enables life and law to be shaped accordingly. The concept of nomos is read in tandem with Kafka’s concept of the wall, in order to tone down the aspects of decisiveness and totality associated with the concept of nomos. The empirical focus of the discussion is on the northwestern tribal belt of Pakistan.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks are due to William Walters for his feedback at every stage of this study. I am also grateful to the editor and the anonymous reviewers of Space and Polity for their comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Commenting on the Military Order of November 2001 (US, Citation2001) that extended indefinite detention of ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantánamo Bay, Agamben discerns a ‘state of exception’ (Ausnahmezustand) signifying ‘pure de facto rule … entirely removed from the law’ (Agamben Citation2005, pp. 3–4). Hardt and Negri (Citation2000) see a global civil where the ‘border place no longer exists’ (p. 83), and where the enemy is moralized and theologized (p. 13). Derrida finds ‘a critical reading of Schmitt very useful’, albeit for him the ‘violence unleashed’ in the wake of ‘September 11’ is ‘not the result of “war” … [because] the identification of enemy’ remains difficult (Derrida, Citation2003, pp. 100–101; original emphasis).
2 Despite a certain ‘enchantment with words’ (Dean, Citation2006, p. 9) and its ‘contested etymology’ (Brown, Citation2010, p. 45), Schmitt's philological appropriation of nomos remains of utility in a twofold manner. First, it allows one to conceptualize the mapping of the world. Second, it allows one to understand the way life corresponds to that mapping. This article, therefore, appropriates nomos as a conceptual tool with which one can construct a ‘paradigm … in order to understand its historical structure’ (Agamben & Ulrich, Citation2004, p. 610).
3 ‘The properly legal notion of “territory” is a creation of the modern age’ (Heller-Roazen, Citation2009, p. 164).
4 This was a corollary of funding and assisting separate groups during Afghan Jihad, which at that moment served the interest of preventing a single stakeholder to negotiate with CIA and ISI and to establish its writ afterwards when the war was done with (Mamdani, Citation2004, p. 130), but which later propelled bloody intergroup rivalries as the war ended (Ahady, Citation1995, p. 626), the result of which for the overall territorial order was more troublesome as the newly formed Taliban emerged victorious. Instead of finding a paradoxical ‘recoding’ of the mujahidin as terrorists, one can rationalize such policy shifts in the light of the changing dynamics of global order.
5 Thus, Mullah Zaeef, Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan (the latter being one of the three countries to recognize the former) was not given ‘diplomatic immunity’ when the US-led occupation of Afghanistan took place in 2002, and was arrested from his place in Islamabad. Soon afterwards, he ended up blindfolded and naked at the American navel battleship USS Bataan, on his own account (Zaeef, Citation2006).
6 It is here that one can read maps that congeal walls as governmental mentality (Foucault, Citation2007, p. 107). Weizman (Citation2002) notes: ‘Attempting to represent reality, [maps] not only mirror but also shape the thing they represent … as much as describing the world, they create it’.
7 There is now an extensive theorization on the nomos of the sky and the politics of verticality (Adey, Whitehead & Williams, Citation2011; Saint-Amour, Citation2011; Sloterdijk, Citation2009; Virilio, Citation1989). Similarly, there is a host of literature presently that is intent on gathering knowledge of how daily life changes under drones (Amnesty, Citation2013; LUD, Citation2012).
8 This answers the reason why Jews as pariahs lost every identity in Nazi camps but that of being Jews, but ‘terrorists’ in the ‘War on Terror’ reach ‘maximum indeterminacy’ (Agamben, Citation2005, p. 4; Butler, Citation2004).
9 In 1893, the British mission led by Mortimer Durand met the Afghan Ameer and finalized an approximately 2650 kms long ‘border’. This ‘Durand Line’ begins in the Pamir Mountains in the north, moves southwest, and ends near the Helmand River. Curzon referred to this arrangement as a ‘threefold frontier’ (Curzon, Citation1907, p. 4). The first frontier was the directly administered territory of the Raj. The second was indirectly administered territory of the tribes. The third was the buffered territory of Afghanistan. Pakistan, as the ‘successor state’ of the Raj, inherited both Durand Line and the peculiar administrative status of the tribal belt. At various points, such as Chaman and Chitral, the ‘border’ has almost been inexistent for the tribes living on either side. In a certain sense, one may discern here an ‘“in-between” space transcending the geopolitical boundary that divides the constitutive nation-states’ (Dear, Citation2013, p. 71). An important reason why the tribal belt was presently disclosed as having – for The Economist – ‘semi-autonomous anarchy’ (2007) was that the Durand Line failed to act as a wall, as an interstate border.
10 As a seasoned imperialist, Curzon fully appreciated the problem of land-appropriation, law and order. He is noted to have remarked on Waziristan: ‘Not until the military steamroller has passed over that country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine’ (Howell, Citation1931, p. 106).
11 Therefore, the strategy of letting ‘the “facts” speak and hence simulate an objectivity … [in fact depends on] the questions asked’ (Gadamer, Citation2003, p. 301).
12 To explain, Schmitt quotes Lorenz von Stein (Schmitt, Citation2007, p. 47): ‘As soon as constitution is attacked, the battle must then be waged outside the constitution and the law’ (Stein, Citation1921, p. 494). While reading Benjamin, Derrida notes this overlap in the German Gewalt which besides violence means ‘legitimate power, authority, and public force’ (Derrida, Citation1992, p. 6). Similarly, Weber's definition of the state as having the monopoly of legitimate physical violence (das Monopol legitimer physischer Gewaltsamkeit) captures the relationship between law, violence, and legitimacy (Weber, Citation1919).
13 In this regard, Kennedy notes that American courts have ‘also, on occasion, argued that the Constitution protects rights even when it does not explicitly enact them as law’ (Kennedy, Citation2002, p. 194).
14 A New York Times’ article reports that ‘unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent, all military-age males in a strike zone are counted as combatants, according to several administration officials’ (NYT, Citation2012).
15 Concerning the creation of the colonial category of ‘customary law’, Chanock observes that ‘customary law, far from being a survival, was created by changes and conflicts … and was neither customary nor British’ (Chanock, Citation1985, pp. 3–4, 57).
16 Thus, drone attacks are precisely the legal and conceptual limit of Jirga system because of two reasons. First, Jirga matches action and accountability. In case of drones’ ‘kill-chain’ (Gregory, Citation2011; Herbert, Citation2003) this seems impossible: Is it the drone operator operating from anywhere, the gadget itself, local informants, American military machine, the US/Pakistani state, President of the US, American taxpayers and voters? Second, its decisions remain enshrined within logics that obviously stand in contrast to the ‘rule of law’ – and thus cannot be heard ‘globally’. In this sense, the 2013 judgement of Peshawar High Court on drones is important on three counts (PHC, Citation2013). First, it bares a tribal individual off his affiliations and presents him as a ‘human’. Second, it invokes the sovereign power with which this human is intimately connected as he makes claims upon and contrary to it. Third, through this, the judgement claims the territory for international law, since: (a) there are humans that are there; (b) there are human rights that are to be juridically guaranteed by a specific state and (c) there is violation of those juridical rights in the process, along with a violation of sovereignty of that rights’ guaranteeing state.