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"Extrajudicial, extraterritorial killings of War on Terror adversaries by the U.S. state have become the new normal. Alongside targeted individuals, unnamed and uncounted others are maimed and killed. Despite the absence of law's conventional sites, processes, and actors, the U.S. state celebrates these killings as the realization of "justice." Meanwhile, images, narrative, and affect do the work of law, authorizing and legitimizing the discounting of some lives so that others - implicitly, American nationals - may live. How then, as we live through this unending, globalized war, are we to make sense of law in relation to the valuing of life? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to law to excavate the workings of necropolitical law, and interrogating the U.S. state's justifications for the project of counterterror, 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"--
List of contents
1. Necropolitical law; 2. Necropolitical law's planetary jurisdiction: the USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T act; 3. Necropolitical law remakes justice; 4. The killing of al-Baghdadi; 5. Necropolitical law, necropolitical culture: Eye in the Sky; 6. The mother of all bombs; 7. Necropolitical law and endless war.
About the author
Committed to excavating rule-of-law violations, Jothie Rajah analyses law in context. She is Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Discounting Life shows how war-on-terror legality relies on ostensibly non-legal productions – images, narrative, and affect – to legitimize state violence. Authoritarian Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2012) shows how Singapore's narrative of national vulnerability combines with authoritarian politics to undermine rule-of-law ideals.
Summary
Discounting Life shows how and why the war on terror has become permanent, de-democratizing, and planetary. Demystifying law and showing how news and entertainment media conditions us to be fearful and unquestioning, this book equips readers with the skills necessary to re-value life and re-claim law's ideals and protections.
Foreword
Demonstrates necropolitical law's cultural disseminations to show how, for Americans and the world, life is discounted, undermining rule of law.
