Politics of the Exception: Towards a Political Theory of the State(s) of Exception

States of exception have proliferated across the world over the past two decades. This poses unique challenges for democracy and the rule of law. Contemporary analyses continue to rely almost exclusively on the theoretical resources developed by legal scholars such as Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, that either reduce the state of exception to the law or sovereignty and thus depoliticize it and obscure its different political forms and their contents. This research project contributes a distinctly political theory of the state(s) of exception. It takes the form of an immanent critique and development of Schmitt’s theory of the state of exception, that detotalizes his account of sovereign power and thereby recovers and reinscribes the underlying political dynamics within it. This facilitates the differentiation and analysis of three different political forms of the exception, as well as their implications for democracy and the rule of law.