State of Exception, Law and Economy: A socio-legal approach to the economic of exception in an era of crisis
The central theme of the workshop was the development of a fresh
socio-legal understanding of the relationship between the economy, law
and state power in the 21st century. The theoretical point of departure
for the workshop was the concept of the state of exception. The concept
was developed by a number of leading philosophers, political theorists
and legal theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and
latterly, Giorgio Agamben, in ways that allow us to understand the
philosophical and legal premises of political state power. The workshop
brought together scholars to apply the concept of the state of exception
to an advanced understanding of colonial and economic state
power. Participants in the workshop were therefore asked to conduct case
studies that explicitly applied the concept of the state of exception
to colonial and economic relationships. The workshop heard papers on
the following topics: Exceptionality in war; the colonial relationship
between the US and Puerto Rico; the racial and gender dimensions of
biopolitics; the corporation as a structure of exception; the
enforcement of corporate liability in Finland; resistance in PIGS
countries as part of the financial crisis; the use of the Investor-State
Dispute Settlement process; British colonialism and exceptional legal
power; debt colonialism; the militarisation and impoverishment of
communities in Colombia; and the state of exception in Palestine. This
was the first meeting of the participants in this workshop. We plan to
meet again as a ‘network’, and for this purpose we have established an
International Research Collaborative within the Law and Society
Association that we hope will enable us to develop our theoretical
approach – bringing colonial and economic power to the concept of the
state of exception - as a key reference point in socio-legal approaches
to understanding the legal basis for political and economic power.
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