1st Edition

State Violence and the Execution of Law Torture, Black Sites, Drones

By Joseph Pugliese Copyright 2013
    248 Pages
    by Routledge

    248 Pages
    by Routledge

    State Violence and the Execution of Law examines how law plays a fundamental role in enabling state violence and, specifically, specifically, torture, secret imprisonment, and killing-at-a-distance. Analysing the complex ways in which the U.S. government deploys law in order to consolidate and further colonial and imperial relations of power, Joseph Pugliese tracks the networks that enable the diffusion and normalisation of the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence both in the U.S. and transnationally. He demonstrates how these networks of state violence are embedded within key legal institutions (US Department of Justice), military apparatuses (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), civic sites (McCarran airport, Las Vegas), corporations (Boeing), carceral architectures (CIA Salt Pit, Kabul, and Guantánamo), and advanced technologies (unmanned aerial combat vehicles). Law’s violence, it is maintained, is always preoccupied with the body: its torture, extortion or extermination. The exercise of state violence, it is argued, must be considered in situated locations that evidence the enmeshment of the body within geopolitical configurations of bio and necropower. For it is in these locations that law plays a foundational role in enabling and legitimising regimes of racialised violence. Drawing on poststructuralist, feminist, queer, critical legal, whiteness and anti-colonial theories, State Violence and Execution of Law brings into focus the contractual imbrication of the state with arms corporations and the contemporary military-industrial complex.

    Introduction: Anatomies of State Violence and the (In)Execution of Law; Chapter 1: Shadow Archives of Torture: Abu Ghraib and Its U.S. Templates; Chapter 2: State Violence’s Relational Geographies: Guantanamo Bay, Disneyland; Chapter 3: ‘Health in the Balance’: Epidemiologies of State Bio-Terror and Biopolitical Continuums of Medical Torture; Chapter 4: Gratuitous and Instrumental State Violence: Redacted Bodies and Torture in the CIA Salt Pit; Chapter 5: Anomic Violence of Drones and the Prosthetics of Empire; Conclusion: Techno-Necropolitical Futures of State Violence: Robotic War and the Liquidation of ‘Patterns of Life’

    Biography

    Joseph Pugliese is ASsociate Professor at Macquarie University