Thomas J. Frost

The British Indian Ocean Territory’s (BIOT) establishment in the 1960s exemplifies the UK’s efforts to maintain global standing through imperial possessions. The colonised people of these islands, the Chagossians, were swiftly expelled, their interests subordinated to those of the imperial whole. This article re-evaluates the Chagossians’ legal resistance to their treatment, drawing upon archival releases which shed light on the earliest stages of their litigation. We contend that private law rights of exclusion have underpinned the UK Government’s approach to the saga, as they have done for colonised peoples in the past, including the Banabans on Ocean Island. These underpinnings have ensured that the UK Courts’ judicial review decisions have not been able to adequately address the Chagossians’ interests, let alone reverse their expulsion. Rigid categorisations of the Chagossians’ relationship to property and territory have further hampered their cause. We nonetheless maintain that the Supreme Court decision of Bancoult (No 2) leaves open the possibility of future legal challenges by the Chagossians against the UK Government’s latest refusal to authorise resettlement of parts of the BIOT. Ongoing litigation, however, requires that the courts accept that the Chagossians’ claims cannot be conceptualised in narrow public law terms, with Commonwealth Aboriginal/indigenous-title jurisprudence providing one as-yet-unexplored avenue.

This book explores how the figure of the slave has been used to construct ideas of freedom in Western political and legal philosophy. The figure of the slave has supported philosophical and legal defences of colonialism, coloniality and the supremacy of the white subject. Yet for Giorgio Agamben, the slave stands (almost counterintuitively) as an exemplar of a potential form of future positive political existence. Developing this line of thought, the book reads key thinkers Agamben engages with in his thought and writings – including Aristotle, Saint Paul and G W F Hegel – and draws on decolonial theory to argue that the lives of people who were enslaved and unfree, and their actions and gestures, can point towards a paradigmatic form of political belonging. By reading Agamben in a decolonial direction, we can imagine alternative forms of agency, recognition and subjectivity, which can challenge the necropolitical world of racial capitalism in which we live. This study will appeal to scholars, researchers and graduate students with an interest in the thought of Giorgio Agamben, radical politics, legal and political philosophy and decolonial theory.

This first book-length study into the influence of Emmanuel Levinas on the thought and philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life, demonstrates how Agamben’s immanent thought can be read as presenting a compelling, albeit flawed, alternative to Levinas’s ethics of the Other. The publication of the English translation of The Use of Bodies in 2016 ended Giorgio Agamben’s 20-year multi-volume Homo Sacer study. Over this time, Agamben’s thought has greatly influenced scholarship in law, the wider humanities and social sciences. This book places Agamben’s figure of form-of-life in relation to Levinasian understandings of alterity, relationality and the law. Considering how Agamben and Levinas craft their respective forms of embodied existence – that is, a fully-formed human that can live an ethical life – the book considers Agamben’s attempt to move beyond Levinasian ethics through the liminal figures of the foetus and the patient in a persistent vegetative state. These figures, which Agamben uses as examples of bare life, call into question the limits of Agamben’s non-relational use and form of existence. As such, it is argued, they reveal the limitations of Agamben’s own ethics, whilst suggesting that his ‘abandoned’ project can and must be taken further. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers, graduate students and anyone with an interest in the thought of Giorgio Agamben and Emmanuel Levinas in the fields of law, philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences.