Summary
The permanent emergency law of Northern Ireland, in force 1922-1972 in David Lloyd’s account, into which Britain’s Irish Coercion Acts survived along with various forms of legalised discrimination, affirming and institutionalising the settler colonial nature of the state despite its pretensions to democratic status (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.14 / printed p.72).
Details
- Its predecessor regime, as Lloyd quotes the civil rights activist named in the main text as Michael Farrell (note 31 names him Michael O’Farrell): ‘In Ireland, from 1800-1921, the British Government brought in 105 Coercion Acts dealing with Ireland. That means that Habeas Corpus was as often suspended as in force in 19th-Century Ireland’ (PDF p.14 / printed p.72).
- “That Act was in turn the envy of South African Prime Minister and architect of Apartheid Hendrik Verwoerd, who would have swapped one clause of it for every anti-apartheid law” (PDF p.14, wording as printed; the remark is sourced in note 32 only to a Mondoweiss article of 24 January 2011).
- Lloyd sets the Act in a sequence of settler colonial emergency law whose Israeli member is the retained British Mandate Emergency Regulations: such continuities “highlight the peculiar topology of the settler colonial state of emergency that ultimately makes what appears as an exception actually a norm” (PDF p.14; see State of Exception).
Related pages
Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, British Emergency Regulations, State of Exception, David Lloyd