Conference: Law, Politics and the Challenge of Exceptionalism post-9/11

5-6 May 2006

Strand, London WC2R 2LS

Conference organised as part of the Challenge research programme

The war in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, suspensions of human rights have all reactivated a discourse about the state of exception.

The exception has however informed two different approaches to what is going on in the ‘war on terror’: on the one hand the exception was interpreted as the negation and suspension of law and on the other the exception could be seen as indicative of political practices as constitutive of law. This conference attempts to question the separation of law and politics that leads to a critique of exceptional practices in the name of the ‘rule of law’ or to a critique of law in the name of politics.

If law is ‘that which we cannot not want’, as Gayatri Spivak has described liberalism, how are we to resist its limits? How can the relation between law and politics be thought without falling back upon a politics of exceptional decisionism or upon a non-critical endorsement of the ‘rule of law’? These theoretical questions are implicated in our practical engagement with issues of racism, migration, human rights and war post-9/11. The conference will bring together (legal) practitioners and academics to discuss the theoretical and practical stakes of the limits of law and the limits of politics under a ‘state of exception’.

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Law, Politics and the Challenge of Exceptionalism post-9/11