Revisiting the idea of legalized lawlessness
Revisiting the idea of legalized lawlessness
Journal: Discover Global Society. Discover Global Society is a transdisciplinary, open access journal publishing societal research on all areas of modern global society and its challenges. More on the journal can be found here.
Date of Publication: July 27, 2026.
Author: Tinto Thalonikkara Devassy. Devassy is with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Indore.
The article can be found here, and a PDF can be downloaded from the same page.
Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash.
Abstract: To diagnose present-day legalized lawlessness as the normalization of the exception as a stable political form rather than as a temporary measure, the article draws on the account of sovereignty presented by Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of ‘bare life’ and the camp, and Hannah Arendt’s critique of bureaucracy and thoughtlessness. It argues the government today produces places in which law is still officially in force but used to wield discretionary power and maintain impunity. The exception becomes ordinary not solely through the suspension of sovereign power, but through bureaucracy that removes judgement, relocates responsibility, and obscures the political visibility of injury. Drawing on literatures on structural and slow violence, the article shows how harm becomes ordinary as an environment of exposure that deepens democratic exhaustion and depoliticized subjectivity. What follows introduces responsibility without redemption as an ethical-political orientation that operates within conditions of implication, vulnerability, and routinized exception to support judgment and accountability.
Why ISSE Is Recommending This Article: This article speaks directly to one of the central questions animating ISSE’s work: what happens when the exception ceases to look exceptional? Its particular contribution is to move beyond the classical image of a sovereign openly suspending the law and instead examine how exceptional power can migrate into bureaucratic routines, administrative discretion, security practices, and formally legal procedures. By bringing Schmitt, Agamben, and Arendt into conversation, the article offers a powerful framework for understanding how extraordinary authority can become durable precisely because it is rendered ordinary, technical, and institutionally diffuse. That insight is especially important for the study of contemporary emergency governance, where the most consequential transformations may occur not through spectacular declarations of emergency, but through the gradual normalization of powers and practices that blur the line between ordinary legality and exception.
