States of Exception and Their Targets: Racialized Groups, Activists, and the Civilian Population

On November 13, 2015, the most deadly attacks in France since the Second World War took place. A murderous hostage taking in a Parisian concert hall (Le Bataclan), a series of shootings in the streets of Paris, and suicide attacks outside the Stade de France in Saint-Denis resulted in the deaths of 131 people. Subsequent to these attacks, a state of emergency was declared in France,¹ authorizing an exceptional regime of a kind that was completely invented in the Algerian colonial context.² "The state of emergency was an immediate, powerful, and ef ective response to protect our fellow citizens, to stop fanatical individuals, criminals who want to attack our country, its values; to attack our democracy," said Prime Minister Manuel Valls a week later.³

Authorizing administrative searches without judicial control, day or night, house arrest, or even the prohibition of demonstrations, this state of emergency was quickly denounced for its excesses and inef ciency. However, it was extended several times until November 2017,⁴ when some of its provisions became part of ordinary law.⁵ What in the past was temporary, has therefore become the norm, detached from the immediate postattack situation to become permanent. Above all, the state of emergency has resulted in the intensified repression of two categories of the population: activists and people of Muslim faith. More than four hundred French Muslims have referred complaints to the legal staf of the Collective against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) for discrimination.⁷

This situation is neither unique to France nor unprecedented. Since 9/11, the terrorist threat has been publicly associated with Islam as an ideology, as a mode of religious identification, as a way of life, a practice.⁸ For example, the UK Home Ofce Minister Hazel Blears said in 2005 that members of the Muslim community should expect to be arrested by the police. In France, this formula "terrorist = Muslim" is older and goes back at least to the 1990s, when there was a radicalization of antiterrorism following the creation of a new of ense: criminal association in connection with a terrorist enterprise. As part of an increasingly preventive and proactive strategy (creating its own targets), this of ense favors arbitrary and mass arrests. It notably gave rise to the largest French antiterrorism trial, the Chalabi trial, in which, at the beginning of 1998, 138 people were judged in the same court, sometimes only for having a copy of the Quran at home.⁹ The recent state of emergency has thus continued this criminalization of Muslim practices, in the context of a media and political instrumentalization of the "fear of Islam," an Islamophobia radicalized by the attacks of September 11, 2001, as evidenced by the increase in physical attacks and verbal insults.¹⁰

The French state of emergency therefore had two characteristics: it became partly permanent, and it mainly targeted individuals who had no connection with terrorist networks. To understand this situation, we must go beyond the murderous and tragic events of November 2015. We must try to understand how exceptional measures or dispositifs emerge in Western democracies and, more important, how the exception gradually contaminates common law and modifies its initial targets. While many legal theorists, philosophers, historians, and sociologists have conceptualized the state of exception, from Carl Schmitt to Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin, I would like to discuss the thesis of the "permanent state of emergency" developed by Giorgio Agamben. In his book State of Exception, the Italian philosopher shows how the exception normalizes and becomes commonplace in contemporary regimes. He then describes how the "state of exception in which we live has become the rule" and takes the form of a "sustainable practice of government."¹¹ However interesting it may be, this thesis of a permanent state of exception is nevertheless underpinned by too unified and totalizing a vision of the emergency, and it conceals one of the essential problems linked to the state of emergency: targeting, profiling, and dif erentiation. Who is targeted by the exception? Why? What does this targeting tell us about the nature of the exception...