Everyday sovereign exclusion: conceptualising police violence and deaths in custody as a racial production of homo sacer

ABSTRACT

Although Giorgio Agamben figures prominently in research examining sovereign state-based exclusion, his theories are marked by two commonly identified limitations. The absolute nature of Agamben's conceptualization of exclusion diminishes meaningful minority resistance, and his disembedded account of excised peoples as homo sacer hides the common racial basis of sovereign violence. Consequently, this article draws on the work of Achille Mbembé and Alexander G. Weheliye to reframe Agamben's sovereign exclusion as an everyday and contested process that is inseparable from the racial production of minorities. This reconceptualised framework is used to demonstrate how police violence towards Black Americans in the United States of America and the death of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in custody in Australia is orientated towards the production of political communities. I argue that these cases of racial exclusion treat Bla(c)k people as homo sacer to define the colonial sovereign-state polities of the US and Australia in covert racial terms.

KEYWORDS:

• Agamben
• deaths in custody
• police violence
• homo sacer
• race
• exclusion
• sovereignty
• camps

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term Blak is used to describe the racial category of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians in this article. This follows a growing convention among Aboriginal leaders of dropping the ‘c’ to take ownership of the term and give it a specific Indigenous Australian character, as well as to break the connection between skin tone and Blak identity (Latimore 2021; Hazel 2018).

2 Race is not just produced through the politics of ‘racial taxonomy’, but also ‘through a multiplicity of different practices—gestures, sayings, tastes, ways of walking, religious convictions, opinions, and so forth’ (Desmond and Emirbayer 2009, 336). Thus, while it is not a focus of this article, it is important to acknowledge that people can contribute to how their racial classifications are made.

3 While I suggest that contemporary racial exclusion is less legislatively based, examples of legislated exclusion remain, such as Australia's Northern Territory Emergency Response (see Watson 2009).

4 There is little data on national police violence in the US making racial bias in US policing difficult to prove and leading to conflicting scholarly accounts on the subject. This article follows research identifying racial bias, including that of Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo (2020) who argue that studies denying racial bias fail to acknowledge the limitations and bias of publicly available data (see Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo 2020; Butler 2018; Buehler 2017; Fryer 2019).

5 The Indigenous Deaths in custody statistics and coroner's reports come from a joint research project by Guardian Australia and the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology, Sydney (see Evershed, Allam, and Wahlquist 2020; Evershed et al. 2021).

6 This article examines the sovereign exclusion of Bla(c)k populations, but the insidious production of a white polity could likely also be identified in the sovereign treatment of other racial minorities. For example, Everuss’s (2020a, 2020b) research identifies the racial exclusion of asylum seekers in Australia in order to define the modern Australian polity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Louis Everuss

Louis Everuss is a Research Associate and Coordinator at the UniSA Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, University of South Australia, where he also teaches across the sociology programme. Dr Everuss’ primary research interests are located in the sociological study of mobilities, sovereignty, migration, globalization, political and media communication and climate change. His work has studied how systems of mobility are incorporated into representations of sovereign outsiders, and how public opinions of climate change are impacted by national context.