This book is dedicated to Mohammad, Tamer, Edward-Omi and future generations who continue to struggle against the excesses of sovereign power. CONTRIBUTORS Professor Simon Mabon is Chair in International Politics at Lancaster University, where he directs the Richardson Institute. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Leeds and is the director of the SEPAD project, funded by Carnegie Corporation, which looks at the position and contestation of sectarian identities within the contemporary Middle East (www .sepad .org .uk). Mabon is the author of a number of books on the contemporary Middle East including Houses Built on Sand: Sectarianism, Revolution and Violence in the Middle East (2020), Saudi Arabia and Iran: Soft Power Rivalry in the Middle East (2013) and The Struggle for Supremacy: Saudi Arabia and Iran (forthcoming). He has published in a range of Middle East and international relations journals including Review of International Studies, Middle East Journal, Middle East Policy, British Journal of Middle East Studies, Politics, Religion and Ideology and Third World Quarterly. He is the co-editor of a major new Middle Eastern book series. In 2016–17 Mabon served as academic advisor to the House of Lords International Relations committee report into the UK’s relations with the Middle East. He regularly consults with governmental agencies and for international news outlets including the BBC, CNN, CNBC, Sky, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiyya, France 24, Deutsche Welle and others. He tweets @profmabon. Dr Staci Strobl is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin- Platteville. She is the author of Sectarian Order in Bahrain: The Social and Colonial Origins of Criminal Justice (2018). In 2009, she won the Radzinowicz Memorial Prize for her work in the British Journal of Criminology on the criminalization of female domestic workers in Bahrain. Her main area of specialization is criminal justice as it relates to issues of gender, race, ethnicity and religious identity in the Arabian Gulf. In 2019, she and two colleagues won the paper of the year award for the Division of White Collar and Corporate Crime, American Society of Criminal Justice, for their research on coastal land loss and state-corporate crime in Louisiana (United States). Dr Edith Szanto is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama in the Department of Religion. Formerly, she was an associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. Dr Szanto received her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto in 2012. She is the author of ‘Sayyida Zaynab in the State of Exception: Shi‘i Sainthood as “Qualified Life” in Contemporary Syria’, which was published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies in 2012. Since then, she has authored x Contributors a number of articles and chapters on Islam, women and nationalism in Syria, Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. Dr Lucia Ardovini is a Lecturer in International Relations at Lancaster University. Lucia’s research has been focusing on current trajectories of Islamist movements across the MENA region, with a special focus on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. In particular, she is tracing the organization’s restructuring process following the 2013 coup, examining its repercussions on ideology, identity and organizational structures. She is the author of Surviving Repression: the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood after the 2013 coup (Manchester University Press, 2022). Dr Sanaa Al-Sarghali is an assistant professor of Constitutional Law at An-Najah National University. She is the First Palestinian female to obtain a PhD in constitutional law from UK, the UNESCO Chair holder on Human Rights, Democracy and Peace since 2020 and the director of the Constitutional Studies Center at An-Najah National University. In 2018, she was elected chairwoman of Women Media and Development “TAM” and in 2019, she was appointed by the Palestinian National Council as the 9th member of the Palestinian Constitutional Drafting Committee. Al-Sarghali holds a Ph.D. in Constitutional Law from Lancaster University, an LLM in Law from Durham University in UK, and a BA in Law from An-Najah National University-Palestine. In 2018 She received the “Outstanding Alumni Award” from Lancaster University. Alsarghali has received various prestigious fellowships such as Kathleen Fitzpatrick Fellowship from the University of Melbourne. She is a fellow with SEPAD at Richardson Institute for Political Studies in the UK where her research focuses on constitutional identity, political sectarianism and power sharing in the Middle East and North Africa region. Her research in Palestine covers semi-presidential system’s application and the future design of the Palestinian constitution. Ana Maria Kumarasamy is a PhD candidate in Politics at Lancaster University. Her research interest centres around environmental insecurities, urban spaces and sovereignty in Lebanon. She is currently a PhD fellow at SEPAD (the Sectarianism, Proxies and De-sectarianisation) project and has previously worked as a coordinator at the Richardson Institute. Dr Madonna Kalousian has recently received her PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her thesis is a study of Lebanese civil war and post-civil war literature, and her current research focuses on questions of violence, citizenship and surveillance in contemporary Syrian and Lebanese literature. She is the author of a number of articles and book chapters on literature, politics and the visual arts in the Levant. Adel Ruished is a PhD postgraduate researcher in Politics and International Relations at PPR Department, Lancaster University, UK. His current research is Contributors xi concerned with Israeli–Palestinian political conflict with special focus on the City of East Jerusalem. More fundamentally, he is looking at the impact of contending political programmes on the daily life of Palestinian Jerusalemites post-Oslo peace accord. Currently he is conducting his filed work and data collection in East Jerusalem. He presented his research findings at CLT conference at Warwick University in Coventry in 2017, BRISMES conferences in London and Leeds in 2018 and 2019, as well as WOCMES conference in Seville, Spain, in 2018 and SEPAD workshop at Lancaster University in 2019. He also published several short articles at ‘Ya Quds’, al-Quds University Academic Newsletter of 2019, and the SEPAD report ‘Urban Spaces and Sectarian Contestation’ in 2020. Adel holds a Master’s degree in Global Politics from the ‘Government Department’ at the LSE. He has served for twenty years as administrative director for Jerusalem Campus at al-Quds University. Professor John Nagle is at School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on social movements, divided cities, and conflict and peace building. He has published a number of books and articles in leading international journals. FOREWORD GIORGIO AGAMBEN WITH ARAB EYES Sari Hnafi1 Giorgio Agamben (2015). The State of Exception: The Permissible Man Translated by Nasser Ismail. Cairo: Orbits for Research and Publication, pp. 3–15 At the beginning of 2002, I was living in Ramallah in the West Bank and I was writing with my pen the daily violations of the Zionist entity in the Palestinian territories, and there was always a mystery that baffled me: Why is this entity keen to use the law to violate the law, while many dictatorial Arab countries have been characterized by violations of the rights of their citizens without even being concerned with the use of the legal framework? Perhaps my early acquaintance with Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s book (homo sacer) represented an important theoretical breakthrough to solve this mystery. Inspired by the German philosopher Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben deeply understood how the sovereign could declare the state of exception, to form a system that does not compromise the law that he has established through the constitution but by suspending this law. According to Agamben, The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule. The situation created in the exception has the peculiar characteristic that it cannot be defined either as a situation of fact or as a situation of right, but instead institutes a paradoxical threshold of indistinction between the two. (Agamben, 1998: 18) Thus, the function of the law becomes fluctuating between exclusion and inclusion, because the authority does not operate only according to unilateral exclusion logic. Hence, what is inside or outside any group does not exclude one of the other, rather they overlap in an ambiguous manner. As such, according to Agamben, the state of exception has become the norm, forging a threshold between democracy and authoritarianism. Moreover, the state of exception not only content to increasingly appear as a method of rule or as an exceptional measure but also emerges as component paradigm of the judicial system. In developing the concepts of the ‘‘biopolitics’’ and ‘bare life’, Agamben demonstrates how sovereignty carries with it ‘‘power over life’’ through the rule of exception, Foreword xiii wherein it is considered an authority above the law that constitutes it and the protector for implementing it. I had the honour to be one of the pioneers who utilized Agamben’s thought to dismantle the technology of Israeli control over Palestinian territories (Hanafi, 2004, 2009, 2012), as well as to disclose codes of Arab despotism (Hanafi, 2010), and subsequently some Arabic writings began to emerge using the Agambian theoretical framework. And in 2007, I proposed organizing a conference on the state of exception and the exception resistance in the Arab world (Hanafi, 2010), which was organized by the Arab Society for Sociology and the Center for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut, attempting to assess the amount of Arabic writings that have used Agamben’s thought and to encourage similar studies. Perhaps what attracted many Arab and foreign researchers to Agamben was not only his thought, which revealed some flaws of modern democratic systems, but also the ethics of this philosopher. In fact, Agamben refused an offer to be visiting professor in the United States, because the government of this country had imposed the system of fingerprinting for foreigners, which Agamben considered this measure similar to human being’s control over animals. And when I invited him to deliver the opening speech of the aforementioned conference, he also expressed his desire to visit Palestine through Jordan, whereupon he asked me many questions, among them was how is it possible not to meet any Israeli on his way to Palestine. Why is the state of exception thought considered a basic theoretical framework for understanding authority mechanisms in the Arab region? There are four forms (repertories) of the state of exception as authority mechanism in the Arab region: The first form, which is the most clear and common, is the state of emergency. In countries such as Syria, Jordan, Algeria and Egypt, the emergency law was still, for a long time, a hanging sword over people’s necks there, through which people are treated differently according to the degree of their loyalty to the ruling elite. The second form of the state of exception is when a ruler not only suspends laws and regulations but also regularly creates new classifications. According to such new classifications, the government becomes exempted from some obligations and duties, and/or abstract undesirable groups some of their rights. Agamben’s vision of sovereignty is based on strategic and situational exercise of power, wherein it responds to crises and challenges through invoking normative political exceptions, since the entire law is situational and discretionary. For instance, in Egypt and Jordan the election law is often amended after each election, to block way for specific political and social forces to power, while enable other forces to gain access. The third form of the state of exception occurs when a law is issued involving a rule for its suspension without determining the context. It is important to mention that suspending the rule does not mean its cancellation, since xiv Foreword established ambiguous zone is not separate from judicial system (at least, this is the allegation). The fourth and last form of the state of exception is when bureaucracy governs society more than laws and regulations. In this case, rational rules often disappear from the bureaucracy and instead its decisions become unpredictable. Accordingly, some of these forms of the state of exception made young Tunisians, Egyptians, Syrians, Bahrainis and Yemenis feel transformed into permissible beings, that are, starved and isolated bodies. Indeed, such forms stripped them of the political subjectivity and the right to belong to political currents or parties which the regime included in forbidden circle. Arguably, when the ruler became the sole decision-maker in implementing or suspending the law, and in granting or depriving Arab human being decent and just life, his apparatuses violated this human being through economic plundering and police bullying and detention, torture and liquidation, without fair accountability. In this context, Mohsen Bouazizi, the Tunisian sociologist, wrote about Tunisian youth’s silent expressions to confirm indifference to public affairs, departure from politics and complete drowning in private affair (Bouazizi, 2010). However, what Bouazizi did not see was that the son of his city, Sidi Bouzid (Mohamed Bouazizi), had transcended mere indifference, as he separated from social structures to become the engine for social movement. In effect, his body, similar to bodies of many Tunisian youth, was target for oppressive regime of disciplinary power and biopower that aimed at radically erase any abstract form of political activism. With his suicide, Mohamed became actor for resisting this regime where potency is achieved in the moment the body destroys itself. We are in a moment, as Palestinian researcher May al-Jayyousi described it, that resembles the state of Palestinian resistance fighters in occupied Palestinian territories who challenged sovereign authority – this authority who wanted for them to be permissible people where they can be killed without sacrificing them (it is death that has no value) (al-Jayyousi, 2010). Hence, Mohamed Bouazizi and his companions who suicidally died turned into self-sacrificing actors, thereby reversing relationship with the sovereign power. Perhaps what makes the state of exception most obvious is the refugee issue. As Agamben points out, refugees ‘‘represent worrying element in modern nation-state system, and the main reason is that when refugees break line of communication between man and citizen, between nativity and nationality, they place the original story of contemporary sovereignty in face of crisis’’ (Agamben, 1998:131). The irony that what Palestinians in Lebanon are currently experiencing is that they are excluded from rights, but they are included when making laws. They can acquire neither rights of Lebanese who live on their land nor rights of foreigners in Lebanon. By returning to Weber, Lebanon is a sovereign state because its government alone monopolizes within its borders, the right to the legitimate use of force. Yet, refugee camps represent an exception. Despite Lebanese claims to the contrary, the Lebanese law was suspended for practical purposes, wherein it is randomly applied and in rare cases within the camp’s borders. In this sense, camps became ‘‘spaces of exception’’, since residents live ‘‘in a zone of indistinction Foreword xv between inside and outside, between exception and rule, between banned and permitted, wherein concepts of personal right and legal protection no longer carry any meaning’’ (Agamben, 1998: 70). It may be the case that Agamben has not noticed that in order to understand the state of exception somewhere, it is not sufficient to study the ruler or the sovereign in his capacity as one (prime minister, for example). In fact, the sovereign could be multiple. For instance, within the refugee camps in Lebanon there exists a variety of partial sovereignties that constitute actual rulers such as the Lebanese government and semi-fictitious rulers such as Popular Committees, Palestine Liberation Organization including other factions, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and some humanitarian agencies. Paradoxically, all of these sovereignties contribute to consecrating the state of exception and participate in suspending the law, wherein they consented full suspension of sovereign power in the camp for substituting it with ‘‘temporary’’ or ‘emergency’ sovereignties in its place. More importantly, these emergency sovereignties exist in mutual contradiction which instead of establishing order in the camp, they leave it in a state of vacuum, chaos and social emptiness. In effect, each sovereign or ruler, party or agency, enters into competition not for wining loyalty of every Palestinian but to achieve hegemony and gain control over every refugee. In this context, Agamben adds that ‘contrary to modern code which depicts portray political sphere in terms of citizens’ rights, free will and social contracts, it appeared that only bare life truly represents the politician from the sovereignty point of view’’ (Agamben, 1998: 106). Here, refugees turn into individuals of ‘‘bare life’ instead of being political subjectivities participating in managing their society. It is important to mention that when Agamben used the term ‘bare life’ to describe refugees, he was referring to the life of homo sacer (the permissible man), the ambiguous personality that lived in ancient Rome. This permissible man is a cursed or exiled man stripped of his citizenship (thus became ‘‘consecrated’’ to gods) where anyone can kill him without punishment but by virtue of his consecration cannot be sacrificed in religious ritual. Therefore, the life of the permissible man bears no significance to the ruler, he only exists in his biological capacity or in bare life (zoé) as something below the degree of humanity. Hence, this permissible man should be supported with most primitive requirements (i.e with food, water and shelter), and excluded from human natural existence in political life ‘bio’ through deportation or detention. In line with this, Agamben and his students in the field of refugee and forced migration studies say that refugees could be considered living the bare life of the permissible man – as, for example, a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon lives on the margins of the law and is uninvolved in establishing or implementing the law. The Palestinian refugee also has voice neither in the legal formulation of his situation nor in political processes, whether Palestinian or Lebanese, that affect his life. In addition, the Lebanese government refused to assume responsibility for the refugees and assigned management of their lives to the UNRWA agency, knowing that mandate of this agency is limited to providing bare life for the xvi Foreword refugees without defending their interests or even intervening to protect them. Adding to this, concrete walls, barbed wires and military checkpoints encircling each camp identify legal and physical boundaries of the Lebanese state concerning the provision of Palestinian refugees welfare, happiness and even their lives. As such, there is no meaningful evidence of the status of the ‘‘permissible man’’ living in chaotic urban conditions which resemble imprisonment better than the refugee life inside the camp. And Agamben was right when he said that ‘the camp, to the extent that it deprives its inhabitants political status and reduces their entire existence to bare life, becomes an absolute biopolitical space that has been achieved wherein the sovereign is faced only with pure life, without any mediation. And this is what makes from the camp the accurate paradigm of political space, and that’s when politics turns into bio-politics and when citizen is actually confused to the permissible man. (Agamben, 1998: 171) I am very pleased that this book is introducing the thought of Agamben and the state of exception to the Arab reader, and I am also honoured to foreword it. In conclusion, I would like to raise two points of criticism. The first criticism is concerned with how scholars used Agamben’s thought. Agamben is a philosopher concerned with clarifying possible mechanisms that a ruler utilizes for achieving control. He is neither sociologist nor anthropologist, and his thought does not express sociological fact. To begin with, some scholars twisted the neck of reality to suit Agamben’s theory. The various forms of the state of exception do not mean that a ruler can resort to it at any time or place. The fact that Agamben considered the camp as the paradigm for exercising power over people does not mean that it is the only paradigm. As for the second criticism, it is concerned with Agamben’s theory. In fact, Agamben has not paid enough attention to the subjectivity of social actor (agency). While it is true that the sociopolitical action is affected by existing structure, but the social actor also impacts this structure and obliges it to undergo constant restructuring. In fact, Agamben views the camp as a collective detention centre and the actors in it as mere ‘victims-survivors’, similar to his famous book Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archives (Agamben, 1999). Yet, despite ferocity and corruption of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and its use of permanent state of exception and emergency, he was unable to establish a total authoritarian regime. Similarly, the Egyptian state with its million and a half security men and policemen, in addition to 350,000 soldiers and its torture prisons (under its control and international intelligence services), failed in confronting revolutionary youth in Tahrir Square and demonstrations in other cities. It is interesting to note that oppression in Tunisia was the factor of weakness rather than strength, wherein ‘stubborn and strong’’ Ben Ali regime failed in pushing the Tunisian army to crack down demonstrations similar to what the Tunisian police did. On the contrary,