samizdat

The “securitisation” of civil society has spread beyond America as other states have invoked the generalised “war on terrorism” to legitimise their own suppressions, suspensions and exceptions (Diken & Laustsen, 2002; Jasuriya, 2002). This too is the colonial present, because these spacings are all mirror images of the “wild zones” of the colonial imagination. “The national security state”, Susan Buck- Morss (2002:14) notes, “is called into existence with the sovereign pronouncement of a ‘state of emergency’ and generates a wild zone of power, barbaric and violent, operating without democratic oversight, in order to combat an ‘enemy’ that threatens the existence not merely and not mainly of its citizens, but of its sovereignty”. After September 11, many commentators proclaimed, “we are all New Yorkers”. Perhaps – in this sense at least – we are all potentially Palestinians too.