Necropolitical Law and the Mother of All Bombs

This presentation draws on Discounting Life: Necropolitical Law, Culture, and the Long War on Terror (2022). In Discounting Life, I depart from doctrinal law’s dominant frameworks for thinking about sovereignty, law, and exception by foregrounding Achille Mbembe’s crucial contribution to thinking on the state of exception. Mbembe’s Necropolitics illuminates the large-scale discounting of life that is inherent to the state of exception by understanding sovereignty, not according to the legal fictions of nation-state sovereignty but instead in terms of the visceral and totalizing power and capacity of the sovereign to dictate who is able to live and who must die.
Applying Mbembe’s argument on how the long durée for racialized, imperialized violence finds its contemporary expression in the long War on Terror, and grounding analysis in texts, images, and events, Discounting Life shows how images, narrative, affect, and political myth do the work of law; authorizing and legitimizing the discounting of some lives so that others – implicitly, American nationals – may live. To illustrate this argument, this presentation focuses on the April 2017 deployment in Afghanistan of the US military’s most powerful non-nuclear weapon, the Massive Air Ordinance Blast (MOAB), popularly known as the Mother of All Bombs. The bombing, the secrecy surrounding it, the shock-and-awe media celebrations in the aftermath are all part of the cultivation of global audiences as spectator-consumers fascinated with the annihilatory killing technologies unleashed by contemporary US militarized imperialism. This sociolegal-cultural fabric scripts and fuels necropolitical law’s discounting of life. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to excavate the workings of necropolitical law and interrogating the US state's justifications for the counterterror project, this book's temporal arc, the long War on Terror, illuminates the profound continuities and many guises for racialized, imperial violence informing the contemporary discounting of life.

Please contact burchill@allard.ubc.ca for a Zoom link.

Speaker

Jothie Rajah is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Her research lies at the intersections of law, language, and power. She obtained her Law degree from the National University of Singapore and her Ph.D in Law was awarded by Melbourne Law School. Her first book, Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore (2012, Cambridge University Press), has been translated into Chinese. Her research articles have been widely published in peer reviewed journals, edited collections, and legal handbooks. Her latest book, Discounting Life: Necropolitical Law, Culture, and the Long War on Terror, analyzes the cultural and media framing for the discounting of life that is such a troubling constant in the ongoing war on terror.