Discounting Life
Necropolitical Law, Culture, and the Long War on Terror

Demonstrates necropolitical law's cultural disseminations to show how, for Americans and the world, life is discounted, undermining rule of law.

Jothie Rajah (Author)

9781009074650, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 November 2022

300 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

'This is a phenomenal work of scholarship. Through masterful and deeply original readings of law as expressed in photos, film, texts, and events, Jothie Rajah uncovers the coded law underlying the violence the US has unleashed around the world during its long War on Terror. Rigorous, erudite, and deeply creative, Discounting Life is a truly stunning book.' Leti Volpp, Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law, UC Berkeley

Extrajudicial, extraterritorial killings of War on Terror adversaries by the US 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 US 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 US 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Terrorism law [LNFV], Public international law [LBB], International relations [JPS]