State-Making and the Suspension of Law in India’s Northeast: The Place of Exception in the Assam-Nagaland Border Dispute

Abstract

Post 9/11, exceptionalism has won popularity to describe the variety of processes resulting from a new security discourse, the war on terror and the treatment of terrorism suspects.1 Indeed, the central case to argue and counterargue the usefulness of the concept of the state of exception is the “modern camp” in Guantanamo Bay.2 Other key cases include the analysis of (illegal) migrants3 and, interrelated, of the securization of border regimes,4 where the discussion on the inside and the outside of the state and the sovereign power seems to be most profound. Little attention has however been awarded to exceptionalism away from this security and terrorism discourse. Moreover, cases are often only used to make a theoretical argument about the state of exception, and the attention to a particular case seems to be little more than a corollary of a theoretical positioning.