- Title
- Military intervention as 'police' action?
- Creator
- Dean, Mitchell
- Relation
- The New Police Science: the Police Power in Domestic and International Governance p. 185-206
- Relation
- http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=10151
- Publisher
- Stanford University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2006
- Description
- In a small piece written in 1991, Giorgio Agamben claimed, "One of the least ambiguous lessons learned from the [first] Gulf War is that the concept of sovereignty has been finally introduced into the figure of the police." He then proceeds to discuss the "nonchalance with which the exercise of a particularly devastating jus belli [just war] was disguised as a mere 'police operation.'" Far from eschewing such an idea, the rationales of police have in this situation "to be taken in a rigorous literal sense - particularly those concerning the idea of a new world order .. " Moreover, police operates within the "decision" on the "state of exception," which - following Carl Schmitt - defines the operation of sovereignty. None of this is particularly reassuring, concludes Agamben. He argues that the lack of public documentation of the Holocaust was because the extermination of the Jews was undertaken as a police operation. Further, "The investiture of the sovereign as policeman has another corollary: it makes it necessary to criminalize the adversary .... Such an operation is not obliged to respect any juridical rule and can thus make no distinctions between the civilian population and soldiers, as well as between the people and their criminal sovereign, thereby returning to the most archaic conditions of belligerence".
- Subject
- military intervention; policing; Giorgio Agamben; Gulf War
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/923779
- Identifier
- uon:9818
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780804753920
- Language
- eng
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