CIAO DATE: 9/07
Culture and Conflict: Volume 56 (Winter 2005)
Didier Bigo and Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet discuss Northern Ireland as the experience of a democracy in which politicians have infringed the State’s legal frame in the name of an exceptional situation of violence. The authors thereby present Northern Ireland as a metaphor to understand the relationship between discourses in situations of exception and surveillance, and control military practices bringing a war like atmosphere to the country. Therefore, isn’t Northern Ireland the early experience of suspicion, widening the scope of population and territory to be controlled, of time to be anticipated and finally of arbitrary coercion (murder or torture)? If the British policies in Northern Ireland are not the American global policies post 11-09, nor are they their origin or model. But one can nevertheless read this American policy through Northern Ireland as the economy of suspicion and derogation, where the logic of the subordination of national legal procedures to security imperatives does almost always lead to what one will later call « abuses ».