States of Exception

Costas Douzinas, Professor of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

• Contents: Introduction: the sense of an ending PART I STATES OF EXCEPTION, STATES OF NECESSITY 1 Biopolitics, rights, subjects 2 States of exception, states of necessity 3 Protest and resistance in the pandemic 4 A theory of resistance 5 Refugees: politics, law, ethics PART II CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON HUMAN RIGHTS 6 Human rights in history 7 Law, morality, politics 8 Neolegalism 9 Cosmopolitanism and just wars 10 The desire called utopia Index

‘A tour de force. Costas Douzinas brings his unique critical acumen and extraordinary erudition to bear on his first-hand experience—as a founder of critical legal studies in the UK and an MP in Greece’s Syriza parliament in the 2010s—of the grinding dissolution of public autonomy in the relentless advance of global neoliberalism. Douzinas coins the term “neolegalism” for the curious legal architecture that has spread from interwar Vienna, wartime London, postwar Chicago and Cold War Santiago to its thorough globalisation in the “polycrisis” of the 2020s. Neolegalism, in Douzinas’s account, combines the brutal authoritarianism of a strong-arm state, stoking a cowed general public, with the freedoms of a market order for transnational plutocrats, with a growing subclass of homeless refugees caught in-between. Its normalisation is symbolised in the Covid-19 regime, premised on ‘necessity’ rather than exception. Required reading to understand our current predicament.’