Our Love Of Concentration Camps: Agamben, Sri Lanka, And Future Of Education

The war gave the state leverage over time to appropriate the resources of those provinces, to play with demographics, and to militarize the landIf one gave it some thought, a few negligible intervals notwithstanding, all of Sri Lanka’s modern history, from 1971 to the present – has been an evolving concentration camp

- Vihanga Perera

For a young, unstable republic that has seen more years under emergency laws, counter-terrorism and prevention of terrorism acts, white van abductions, charred black roadside pyres and other “deaths without addresses”, Sri Lankan scholarship pays scant heed to what in law and political science is called the “state of exception”. In recent theory, scholars like Giorgio Agamben have led discussions on how modern states foster and maintain conditions to play politics “outside the law” without its – in that sense – being illegal. Agamben, in particular, develops this discussion in, among others, “Homo Sacer” and “The State of Exception”. His scholarship taken over from an academic conversation that comes from the 1920s, to which theorists like Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and – later – Michel Foucault have contributed.