Chapter 2 demonstrates how the 2001 Patriot Act is necropolitical. As legislation, the Patriot Act takes on the authorizing, legitimizing resonances of the state. Debated and passed through Congress and the Senate, the Act emerges from processes of domestic legislation to enact this law’s global reach, in part through UN Security Council Resolutions. Additionally, the opening lines of the Patriot Act legislate necropolitical law’s planetary jurisdiction: the Act’s purpose is “[t]o deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world.” Necropolitical law’s dynamics of deception are immediately apparent in the naming of the Patriot Act, a naming that imports spectacle, the closures of meanings for “patriot” in war contexts, as well as the compound meanings of patriot as a peculiarly American keyword. The Patriot Act shows how legal illegibility is part of necropolitical law’s deception, operating through law as publicity to undo law as public thing. In 2022, we find ourselves in legal landscapes still conditioned by the Act. Chapter 2 traces the Patriot Act’s role in normalizing and consolidating necropolitical law’s planetary jurisdiction for the discounting of life in the unending long War on Terror.

Chapter 1 applies Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to define necropolitical law as the norms, practices, and relations of enmity that justify and legitimize discounting life through killing, as well as through the diminishing of socially and politically empowered life. Mapping the co-constitutions of racialized discounted lives within the domestic terrain of the United States, as well as in global sites of the long War on Terror, the chapter’s provocation is that law – notions of authority, legitimacy, and community – is at work in effecting the nationally and globally discounted lives of the long War on Terror. Chapter 1 also supplies the contours for the book’s methodology and epistemology: law as culture; an interpretive sociolegal reading for law attentive to law’s archive and law’s violence; a normative commitment to rule of law’s scrutiny and restraint of power; and a suspicion of the roles of spectacle, affect, and publicity in displacing rule-of-law’s commitments to power’s accountability and to law as public thing.

Chapter 7 concludes this book with an analysis of two key speeches delivered by President Biden on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden’s speeches served, yet again, to co-constitute nation/empire, the familial and the political, deploying these co-constitutions to authorize and legitimize American imperial violence. In the process, Biden re-articulated to necropolitical law, relying on political myth to ground his narratives of authority, legitimacy, and community. With myth doing the work of law, imperial violence directed at distant, racialized Others reconstituted America as a community of power

Chapter 6 analyzes the April 2017 deployment in Afghanistan of the US military’s most powerful nonnuclear weapon, the Massive Air Ordinance Blast (MOAB). The bombing, the secrecy surrounding it, and the shock-and-awe media celebrations in the aftermath are all part of the cultivation of global audiences as spectator-consumers fascinated with the annihilatory killing technologies unleased by contemporary US militarized imperialism, which fuel necropolitical law’s discounting of life. Necropolitically, the MOAB strike illustrates “innovations in the technology of murder … [that] aim at disposing of a large number of victims in a relatively short span of time” (Mbembe 2003: 19).

Chapter 3 analyzes President Obama’s announcement on the killing of bin Laden to reveal the way discounting life is authorized and legitimized through extrajudicial, extraterritorial killing. Specifically, Obama’s celebratory narrative of the killing as a nation-healing, nation-securing achievement codes vengeance as “justice,” normalizes US imperialism, implicitly justifies “collateral damage,” and remakes the parameters of legitimate state conduct in relation to terrorism. Attending to how Obama’s announcement used image, narrative, political myth, and sound to manufacture necropolitical law’s authority, legitimacy, norms, and community, Chapter 3 argues that we are interpellated by the official announcement, not as liberal legality’s empowered citizenry but as docile spectator-subjects. Chapter 3 also shows how the announcement, in avoiding the category “law,” enables a lawyer-president-commander-in-chief to invest the category “justice” with a range of meanings that contradict liberal legality, in that they invite us, as subjects, to acquiesce in state secrecy and in necropolitical law’s extraterritorial, extrajudicial violence.

Chapter 5 analyzes Eye in the Sky, a 2016 film on drone warfare, to illuminate popular culture’s role in scripting us into being as spectator-consumers while legitimizing the counterterror state’s discounting of life through necropolitical law. The gripping plot, stellar performances, and dazzling displays of technology distract us from, first, the de-democratizing and dehumanizing concealments and erasures that accompany drone warfare and, second, the remaking of lawful authority through a dramatization of the (highly contested) principle of international law known as “the responsibility to protect.” In the process, the film renders visible a particular set of actors, narratives, and questions, while concealing and erasing others, thereby legitimizing drone warfare and valorizing its actors, institutions, practices, and technologies. As text, Eye in the Sky is an instance of the “cultural sensibility … in which killing the enemy of the state is an extension of play” (Mbembe 2019: 73). Given the official secrecy accompanying drone warfare and the film’s convincing incorporation of “fact” into its “fiction,” Eye in the Sky amounts to a compelling representation of the necessity of drone warfare as enacted by lawful military actors with the aim of securing civilians worldwide.

Chapter 4 shows how the October 2019 killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became a platform for President Trump’s visual and verbal consolidations of necropolitical law. Announcing the killing at a press conference held at the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, Trump positioned himself in front of a portrait of America’s first president, George Washington, visually asserting Trump’s lineage in an always already necropolitical state, built, as it is, on the racialized pillars of territorial appropriation, genocide, and slavery. With the many flags of the US armed forces flanking Trump like an honor guard, the visuals of Trump’s announcement encode the two bodies of president/commander-in-chief, foregrounding the military as a key actor in the state’s implementation of necropolitical law. Chapter 4 shows how Trump used the occasion, first, to deepen the necropolitical separations animating necropolitical law and, second, to stage himself as the White, male, militarized hero central to spectacles of imperialism. Chapter 4 demonstrates how normalizing the necropolitics of imperialism past and present fosters the discounting of life legitimized by necropolitical law.

In keeping with Jessup’s project of constructively contesting legal doctrinal understandings of law, this chapter analyses the Situation Room Photograph to illustrate transnational law as drama. The metaphor of law as drama inheres in Jessup’s text. Yoking Jessup’s turn to drama with anthropologist Victor Turner’s notion of social drama, this chapter shows how, as a text of transnational law, the Situation Room photograph illuminates the normalizing and legitimizing of the national security state, even as gestures and representations of law associated with liberal democracy thread through the image.