State of Perpetual Emergency: Law, Militarization and State Preservation in the United States

Abstract

This project scrutinizes the law and its relation to violence. It reassesses the parameters for discerning a state of emergency. It investigates state violence, crisis production and enemy designation, to elucidate implicit and coded state violence enacted in African American communities in the contemporary US. Specifically, this text considers states of emergency that are not exceptions to the rule, but rather integral to the ideology behind, and the formation of, the rule (i.e. the legal, economic, educational and political institutions of the nation).