Page 80 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

66 Politics in a Small World

agencies taking over many of the functions of civil service departments.
Tasks such as prison security and assessing social security benefi t claims

are now carried out by contracted firms. While governments have always
relied on other agencies and organizations to realize state objectives, and
while they continue to set the framework within which services and goods
are provided in the name of the state, they are now more likely to do so

in negotiation with influential partners on whom they rely to a greater
extent than was previously the case (Jessop, 1997 : 575).
The internationalization of the state involves processes that are disas-
sembling its previous form, contained within national borders, and reas-
sembling it in new forms across borders. Saskia Sassen argues that this
reassembling is in part strategic, to effect a changing balance between
different branches of the state in order to increase the power of the
executive relative to the legislative. The US is exemplary of such tenden-
cies towards presidentialization, but it is a more general phenomenon
(Sassen, 2006 ; see also Poguntke and Webb, 2005 ). In the US, it means
that Congress is now much less able, and also much less likely, to ques-
tion policies that the executive puts in place in terms of privatization,
deregulation, and the marketization of public functions. There is an
increase of specialized regulatory agencies within the executive, which
often work in secret, that have taken over some of the oversight functions
of the legislature. This shift in the balance of power from the legislative
to the executive has been exacerbated by the declaration of the “ war on
terror ” following 9/11, raised security alerts, and increased powers of
surveillance, detention, and information gathering that the legislative fi nd

difficult to challenge, politically and legally.
It is in this context that we should understand the popularity of the
work of Georgio Agamben on state sovereignty in recent years. Agamben
explains state powers to suspend the rule of law in order to treat terrorist
suspects quite differently to others suspected of criminal activities as a
function of state sovereignty, arguing that it has always involved a distinc-
tion between those who are included within the state and those outside,
who may be “ killed without sacrifi ce ” (Agamben, 2005 : 4). Agamben
understands state sovereignty as intrinsic to the formation of states: the
origins of law lie in the distinction between zoe (bare life), which can

always potentially be killed without sacrifice; and bios (political life), the
life of citizens, which is preserved by the state (Agamben, 1995 ). The
sovereign declaration of a state of exception is always, then, a possibility
that exists within the rule of law, enabling the law to “ withdraw from its
usual jurisdiction ” (Butler, 2004 : 60). Agamben ’ s theory has gained in
importance in the US and Europe, where there have been declarations of