Extremely loud and incredibly close: Criminal terrorism and exceptional legislation in Italy

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Abstract

The configuration of state sovereignty has been historically constituted through a spatial distinction between an inside—the space of domesticity—and an outside—the space of anarchy and war. Yet, post-9/11, scholars have raised our attention to how the Global War on Terror has increasingly blurred this spatial division. This chapter, however, analyses the overlap between these two dimensions by placing them inside a longer historical trajectory. Through an investigation of Italian state responses to the Sicilian mafia, this chapter shows how the logic of war has been inscribed into the logic of domestic security since the Italian unification in the nineteenth century. By adopting a legal-historical perspective, this analysis exposes that the exceptionality of this inscription shows itself to be a process of normalization that led to a progressive militarization of security discourses and practices. Analysing exceptionalism from this ‘decentred position’ does not imply reducing the importance of post-9/11 exceptionalism, nor does it deny its increasingly pervasive nature. It requires us, however, to frame it within a long-term historical and institutional framework to capture its emergence and conditions of possibility.

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APA

Rossi, N. (2020). Extremely loud and incredibly close: Criminal terrorism and exceptional legislation in Italy. In Law, Security and the State of Perpetual Emergency (pp. 107–132). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44959-9_5

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