Juridical Humanity

The police invention of humanity: Notes on the “thin blue line”

“…By narrating police as always in opposition to an original scene of predatory violence— the urban jungle as state of nature —TBL authorizes racialized state violence in the name of humanity: police-as-prerequisite for making and preserving the human species. A critique of TBL, then, encourages a critique less on how the ideology of law claims to make the human possible, what Samera Esmeir (2012) calls juridical humanity , and more on what we might call police humanity : a story about the police project as the invention of humanity . Of course, legal reasoning certainly plays an important role in all things police, but it is the notion of police as a prerogative violence over and above law, but licensed through law, that TBL expresses so clearly.…”

Un-signing Geneva: legal pragmatics in the management of asylum

“…Esmeir rejects the juxtaposition that colonialism destroys and dehumanises while law regenerates and restores. Instead, locating the production of the human subject within the law itself, she examines how law functions as a vehicle of violence and domination (Esmeir, 2012, p. 8). Her work demonstrates how the human emerged as a juridical category: ‘an effect and outcome of modern law that sought to humanize Egyptians by declaring them subjects of the rule of law’ (Esmeir, 2012, p. 4).…”

“…Instead, locating the production of the human subject within the law itself, she examines how law functions as a vehicle of violence and domination (Esmeir, 2012, p. 8). Her work demonstrates how the human emerged as a juridical category: ‘an effect and outcome of modern law that sought to humanize Egyptians by declaring them subjects of the rule of law’ (Esmeir, 2012, p. 4). We can argue in the humanitarian present that Western states are doing the same thing with non-liberal subjects as they come into liberal democratic countries in the Global North.…”

“…This is not to say that law is merely a technology of neo-imperialism or neocolonialism. Rather, as explained by Esmeir in the context of modern law in the time of colonialism, ‘extreme violent measures were the vehicle for the production of a sphere of idealized juridical humanity; idealized humanity produced its own violence in order to safeguard the authority of its ideals’ (Esmeir, 2012, p. 282). Returning to the act, we can say that the criminalisation of the refugee enabled the production of the ‘real’ refugee.…”

On the ambivalent politics of human rights

“…The first question is directly addressed by Perugini and Gordon, who argue that the relationship between human rights and domination is not “accidental” but rather the result of a historical constellation (2015: 21). Human rights treaties and conventions adopted after the end of World War II articulate what they call, following Samera Esmeir (2012), “ an international juridical humanity ,” and stipulate self-determination as one of the conditions of acquiring human rights (Perugini and Gordon, 2015: 29–30, emphasis in the original). Within this configuration, the human rights framework is supposed to establish normative constraints on the sovereign state, but it also ends up providing legitimacy to the state by upholding it as the guarantor of human rights in the international order (Perugini and Gordon, 2015: 28, 128–129).…”