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Space and Polity

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Droning, zoning and organizing: Kafkaesquereflections on the nomos of the earth in thenorthwestern tribal belt of Pakistan

Muhammad Ali Nasir

To cite this article: Muhammad Ali Nasir (2015): Droning, zoning and organizing: Kafkaesquereflections on the nomos of the earth in the northwestern tribal belt of Pakistan, Space andPolity, DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2015.1090117

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2015.1090117

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Droning, zoning and organizing: Kafkaesque reflections on the nomos of theearth in the northwestern tribal belt of Pakistan

Muhammad Ali Nasir*

Institute of Political Science, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

(Received 2 January 2015; accepted 25 August 2015)

This article reflects on the spatiality of the “War on Terror”. It argues that the “War on Terror” isa discourse that identifies the exceptional, i.e. terror, in order to normalize spaces and subjects.Since these standards (norm/ exception) presuppose an order, it relies on Schmitt’s concept ofnomos in order to theorize how the spatial dynamics of the “War on Terror” are connected to anorder that enables life and law to be shaped accordingly. The concept of nomos is read intandem with Kafka’s concept of the wall, in order to tone down the aspects of decisivenessand totality associated with the concept of nomos. The empirical focus of the discussion ison the northwestern tribal belt of Pakistan.

Keywords: war on terror; Pakistan; sovereignty; drones; Carl Schmitt; nomos; Franz Kafka;the wall

Introduction

The present article reflects on the spatiality of the “War on Terror”. It does this by providing aKafkaesque reading of Schmitt’s concept of the nomos of the earth. The concept of nomos is uti-lized in order to appreciate the way spatial orderings shape law and life. The Kafkaesque insertionis made in order to appreciate the way such orderings generate byproducts and spillovers, and theway such unanticipated effects are brought within the ambit of those orderings. From this theor-etical perspective, it is argued that the “War on Terror” needs to be analysed in the light of itsspatial–legal background and effects. As such, the “War on Terror” is seen as a discourse thataims to “normalize” life with respect to that order. In other words, it is argued that the “Waron Terror” discursively generates “terror”, which enables it to identify spaces, subjects and vio-lence that evade normalization and that consequently ought to be normalized.

These points are argued out by analysing spatial dynamics in the northwestern tribal belt ofPakistan in the wake of the “War on Terror”. I begin by analysing the spatial reasons underlyingthe drone campaign in the tribal belt. I argue that the invocation of national and international lawto counter the drone campaign goes on to serve those very reasons that caused it to be initiated inthe area in the first place. I call this aspect “droning”, that is, the phenomenon of unleashing aerialviolence in certain spaces whose end is conditioned to the “normalization” of those spaces withrespect to the overall territorial based nation-state order and “neutralization” of “suspects” withrespect to their capacity to wage violence against such an order. Later, I analyse how this orderrequires that those spaces be structured into territories proper, and the way such practices

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

*Email: muhammad.alinasir@hotmail.com

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allow a nation-state to manifest itself as a “real” organizing power. I call this aspect “zoning”, thatis, the phenomenon of determining specifically what belongs where, and then shaping both withrespect to that understanding. These two sections focus on the discursive capacity of the “War onTerror”where certain actors (US Air Force, Pakistan Army) unleash violence in the name of coun-tering “terror” without that being considered either substantively injudicious (since it generates“positive” effects) or unjust (since it confronts “terror”). Finally, I analyse the manner in whichspatial transformations are affecting lives in the tribal belt. I call this aspect “organizing”, thatis, the phenomenon of making lives “livable”.

Before I introduce my theoretical framing in the next section, let me state a few limitations ofthis work. The present article neither offers a complete statement on the territorial order at presentnor conceptualizes the way “indigenous” order works; it only reflects on the spatial aspects of the“War on Terror” with respect to the nation-state based territorial order. Similarly, this article doesnot explore the possibility of a contradictory “nomadic” nomos. This limitation springs from thetheoretical perspective used here, which, as Kafka acknowledged, makes it impossible for a singleeye to verify decisively all legends in circulation.

In the beginning was the wall

There is a certain Kafkaesque ambience to the world as we find it. It is a place where one statelaunches aerial strikes on another with its consent in order to enable the state which is beingattacked to be sovereign over its territory, where whole populations are uprooted by “their”state for the “own” benefit of the uprooted, where vocabularies and practices relating towarfare can proliferate without any “war” taking place from a legal perspective, where paterna-listic measures are backed by coercion and violent measures are not conceptualized as being coer-cive and where failures relating to institutional measures do not function as failures but as reasonssignifying that enough was not done. In order to access “the Kafkaesque through Kafka’s works”(Nasir, 2012, p. 43), this article critically engages with Kafka’s parable “Beim Bau der Chine-sischen Mauer” (Kafka, 1952). In this short story, Kafka presents the wall as a concrete spatialimaginary that affects both law and land. Given the spatial underpinnings, I read the Kafkaesqueconcept of the wall together with Schmitt’s concept of nomos, as the former works as a correctiveto the latter, that is, by toning down its totality and decisiveness. In this section, I first go throughKafka’s parable, offering commentary on it that is useful for my present purposes. Then, I relatethat discussion to Schmitt’s concept of nomos, commenting on the possibility and the desirabilityof reading these concepts together in the context of the “War on Terror”.

In Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China”, an elderly Chinese man reflects on the Great Wall ofChina. The narrator wonders that if the wall was meant as a protection against “the people of theNorth” (p. 129) then why had it not been “a continuous structure” (p. 129)? As the narration pro-ceeds, it is the wall itself which emerges as “the real”. By marking a land, walls found and con-cretize distinctions: territory and wilderness, fellow countrymen and aliens, the Empire andnomads. Alternatively, these inscriptions invoke an enclosure. That is, in walling “ourselves”from them, we simultaneously wall “them” for our safety. Therefore, “we” are here and “they”are there, and both need the wall. Thus, the wall is not meant solely for defense. Its permanencerelates the people to the four-walls of the “home” (oikonome) it creates. Then, the act of buildingwalls connects the internal household management with the outside world. Through demarcationof a land by walls, work and warfare, economy and politics, human and material become one. Infact, trades, professions, education and arts “gained recognition only in so far as they had refer-ence to the wall” (p. 130).

Therefore, more walls hold ground, more they tend to the symbolic. It is symbolic because thelegends generated by it “cannot be verified by any single man with his own eyes and judgment”

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(pp. 128–129). Hence, walls can never be built completely but in a “piecemeal” fashion (p. 128) –even then it bears “great gaps” (p. 128). However, the gaps were left purposely to make its con-struction occur in historical successions so that walls can incorporate “architectural wisdom of allknown people and ages” (p. 129). Thus, the act of creating the wall produces history, that is, byforming “a constant ring of brothers” (p. 133) with uniform objectives, skills, strategies, functionsand territory. The commonality that is erected with reference to the wall then orients all localitiesto itself, and if there is a clash between the two then this only signifies that more needs to be done.Then, the strength of the wall lies in the fact that it always functions as a focused work-in-progresssince “human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint” (p.134). To quote Schmitt: building a wall remains an ongoing “constituting act of spatial ordering”(Schmitt, 2006, p. 72). In this sense, walls generate a veritable process, and requires an intenseengagement (cf. Jones, 2012, p. 147). First, an engagement within produces, as Schmitt saysin a Kafkaesque manner, “new anterooms, corridors, and accesses to power” (Schmitt, 2006,p. 337). Further, despite thoroughness, walls institutes anonymity of orders (p. 135). Thismeans that despite commanding the “office of the command” (p. 135) remains both impermeableand irreducible to a single person. Second, an engagement without requires that the movement ofnomads (both those that are within and those that are without) be constantly monitored againstwhom walls are being built. This is necessary in order to ensure that builders and not nomadsshould have “a general better view of the progress of the wall” (p. 129).

Furthermore, since the narrator is from the southeastern region “almost on the borders of theTibetan Highlands” (p. 140), he wonders if the Great Wall really serves his town as “a protectionagainst the people of the north” (p. 136). He concedes having never seen the nomads in his entirelife but still whose “faithful artistic representations” make the “unruly children [of his region]…fly weeping into [their elders’] arms” (p. 136). However, it is not his peculiar concern which isimportant, but the overall function of the wall. He notes that by requiring the construction ofthe wall, the Empire “exceeded its workings directly and unceasingly to the farthest frontiersof land” (p. 145). Thus, once the narrator “traversed the souls of almost all provinces”(p. 145), he saw that the Empire had stayed even when Pekin and the Emperor “died long agoand the dynasty [was] blotted out” (p. 143). By appropriating land, the Great Wall producedthe Empire by bringing “territorial difference into being” (Jones, 2012, p. 171). In this sense,the Empire is not the one that walls, but is itself an effect of the process of walling whichtakes place through the actions of multiple subjects. Then, it is the wall which merged thepeople, Empire and law into a whole as a “greatest unifying influence among people” (p. 146).Alternatively, walls make room for “positive” law which legalizes the political only when thepolitical has been spatialized (Galli, 2008, p. 32). That is, the enclosure of space is at the sametime an enclosure of legitimate violence. In a nutshell, the wall is based on “sacred orientations”(Schmitt, 2006, p. 70), since it acts as a spatial imaginary of a concrete order. Precisely becausewalls install a world-picture, their subsidiary functions and roles can be questioned but not theirbeing. It is this conceptual capacity, i.e. of functioning as spatial imaginaries theorizing thedynamics of an order, which works as a point of convergence between the concepts of nomosand the wall, and which allows one to read them together.

It is in order to analyse how the process of enclosure takes place, what are its guiding ration-alities and what are the justifications offered, and how specific acts relating to enclosure take placewithin an overall order, that Schmitt becomes of particular use to anchor the Kafkaesque reflec-tions offered here. The concept he utilizes to study order is nomoswhich, like the wall, is a “fence-word”meaning “dwelling place, district, pasturage” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 75). For Schmitt, nomos isa “matter of the fundamental process of apportioning space essential to every historical epoch”(Schmitt, 2006, p. 79). What makes it possible to speak of the nomos of the earth is the “planetaryconsciousness” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 86) that takes the totality of space to be its focus. Thus, Schmitt

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in The Nomos of the Earth reads the spatial conditions sustaining the order of the earth, guidinginterstate politics and producing international law. This leads him to consider how land and sea –and then air – have been “appropriated, divided, and developed” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 346). WhereasKafka’s parable placed the Chinese Empire at “the center of world” because of the Great Wall, forSchmitt the workings of nomos in today’s “scientifically surveyed planet” requires that one con-sider “world-historical events”(Schmitt, 2006, p. 78). Logically, with the collapse of the BerlinWall and the ascension of the Iron Curtain, questions surrounding the “convergence of orderand orientation” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 78) have resurfaced. This necessitates (re)reading the pro-cesses of appropriation, distribution and production upon which may rest, as announced by Pre-sident Bush Sr., the “New World Order”. This requires one to analyse the manner in which anorder walls a land imposing certain obligations on those who are being enclosed and imposingcertain requirements on those who are enclosing.

Despite influential accounts suggesting that appropriation and distribution are no longer pro-blems because the “end of history” has made abundance in a mutually recognizing world possible(Fukuyama, 1992) or that “civilizations” with “core states” and “fault lines” have made “culturewrit large” the source of contests (Huntington, 1996), analyses informed by Schmitt’s thinkinghave also made their way through.1 However, despite value of readings inspired by Schmitt, itneeds to be appreciated that an order relies for its construction and circulation on specific tailoredstrategies, firm yet fractured moves and tactics swinging between decisiveness and deferment.Approaching Schmitt via Kafka, this article reads how the “War on Terror” is a manifestationof an order, how it generates and then interrelates the binaries between norm/exception andwar/terror and how it is a discourse with lags and loopholes which in turn allows it to functionas something more than a conventional warfare vocabulary. However, on “account of the greatextent of structure” (Kafka, 1952, p. 129), this article does not aim to chart out the broad contoursof the order as it is at present (Schmitt, 2006, pp. 351–355). Understandably, a Kafkaesquereading cannot claim thoroughness.

I now begin my analyses of the tribal belt. Each section is modelled after an aspect thatSchmitt (2006) assigns to the concept of nomos: land-appropriation (p. 327); division and distri-bution (p. 328); and pasturage (p. 328). Each aspect corresponds to the question: “Where and howwas it appropriated? Where and how was it divided? Where and how was it produced?” (p. 327).2

Each aspect is used as a frame with which I conceptualize the socio-spatial transformations, whilesimultaneously making necessary interventions into the way each aspect is understood.

Droning: air spitting fire on earth

For Schmitt, the Greek noun “nomos” comes from the Greek verb “nemein” which “indicates anaction as a process whose content is defined by the verb” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 326). The firstmeaning of nemein is the German nehmen: to take or to appropriate (Schmitt, 2006, p. 326).To read the fundamental sense of the term, Schmitt prefers Landnahme: land-appropriation(Schmitt, 2006, p. 328). I begin this section by analysing the drone campaign in the tribal belt.I argue that the drone campaign needs to be understood in the light of “land-appropriation”,since the context of the “War on Terror” construes anomalous spaces as dangerous zones thatcannot be left to their own devices. I consider the drone campaign as a symptom of land-appro-priation process since the reasons offered for it (“safe havens”, tribal lawlessness), the discursivetools with which it is countered (territorial integrity, sovereignty, juridical rights) and the con-ditions through which it may ostensibly end (no cross-border infiltration, ousting of dangerousaliens, effective state control) all have concrete spatial dimensions.

Before proceeding further, it is important to chart out the entry of drones from the southeast ofAfghanistan into the Pakistani northwest in the wake of 2002 US-led occupation. A banal

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question: what is Afghanistan and Pakistan? In international relations, proper names personifyingstates designate both the geographical area delimited within its boundaries and the unified, self-contained state structure seen to be sovereign over it. Consequently, international law acknowl-edges both these structural (e.g. state sovereignty, national law implementation) and spatialdimensions (e.g. territorial integrity) (Schmitt, 2006, p. 148). What may be difficult to circum-scribe as being “Pakistan” in the tribal belt becomes all the more perplexing in the case of Tali-ban’s Da Afghanistan Islami Amarat (The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan). Was the Amarat astate? This question itself has a curious formulation, since it presumes that all geopolitical assem-blages governing people can be demarcated as states. Let us look at this question through the defi-nition that Skinner influentially offers. The Amarat could neither be “distinguished from the rulersor magistrates”, nor were these rulers and magistrates “entrusted with the exercise of powers”(emphasis added), nor had this power to remain with the rulers “for the time being”, nor couldits authority be “distinguished from that of the whole society or community” over which thosepowers were exercised (Skinner, 1989, p. 112). Because the Amarat eludes such abstractionand identification, it likewise appears difficult to pinpoint whether it was a “church”, military,cadre, a coalition of Pashtun tribes, strategic alliance of ethnicities or simply “the commanderof the faithful” (Ameer ul Mominin). This does not hubristically mean that there was nothing.It was, and perhaps is, there. What is important is to note is an inability to justifiably understandthe Amarat through the lens of Rechtsstaat, constitutional and international law, and public andprivate law. This inability is predictable, given that the latter legal categories are all based on aterritorial order that divides the soil of the earth “into state territories with firm borders”(Schmitt, 2006, p. 148).3

Consequently, the Amarat did not merit “recognition”. It, therefore, did not belong to the“international community” of states. Because of absence of this “certification of trust”(Schmitt, 2007, p. 305), it was not “sovereign”. Since one confronted a “non-state”, there wasnot a war but “struggle” (Schmitt, 2007, p. 203). There was no war since there was no state(but perhaps only a religious–political movement) against which the “Allies” were fighting.Therefore, there was no state which could be declared as enemy. Unlike Laos, Vietnam or Cam-bodia, there was not simply an intervention since there was no partisan group one primarilywanted to aid. Unlike Gadhafi’s Libya, there was no police action since there was not a regimeone wanted to dislodge while maintaining the “state” in existence. Eo ipso facto interstate inter-national law was not in suspension when the “war” began; it had to be created. The ongoingprocess of “state building” in Afghanistan needs to be understood in this territorial context ofthe “War on Terror”. Therefore, the present Afghan regime based on the presidential form of gov-ernment installed by the US and NATO is not a “successor state” of the Amarat.

In this sense, there is a “struggle”. It is because the territorial changes worked out by theAmarat – proceeding as they were at the overlap of alliance and conquest (Saikal, 2004,pp. 210–230; Rashid, 2010, 17–81) – were beyond legal recognition. Still, these changes weretoo significant as not to be ignored in relation to the spatial order of “the globe” as evidencedby the growing concerns of third-parties, stakeholders, “international community” and variouswatchdogs. The overlap of alliance and conquest for land-appropriation entailed both “civilwar” in Afghanistan and a difficulty in demarcating precisely the walls of Afghanistan: ifAmarat exceeded Afghanistan’s borders, if it was synonymous with Afghanistan, or if it wasstill expanding within to fill the borders demarcating Afghanistan.4 Therefore, with theabsence of the walls, Afghanistan may have had external contacts (like Kafka’s nomads) butno legally and diplomatically proper foreign relations (like Schmitt’s personae publicae).5

With an absence of a wall, practically and conceptually, demarcation becomes fuzzy. This alsomakes it difficult to take up the question of reciprocity de jure or de facto. From a juridical per-spective, this entails that it becomes difficult to precisely locate a “legal person” with equality and

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equal sovereignty. Nonetheless, after the events of September 2001, “Afghanistan” was underfire. But, if the relationship of the Amarat to its borders remained ambiguous, then where andhow was “Afghanistan” appropriated? “War” in Afghanistan itself assumes something: thewalls defining Afghanistan. True, Afghanistan can be defined, and its longitude and latitude ident-ified. However, once “war” began, it could no longer be confined to Afghanistan because ofcertain gaps in the wall. Here, I focus only on the northeastern border of Afghanistan to seehow “war” entered the Pakistani northwest.

It is because of these gaps between Afghanistan and Pakistan that the US Department of Statewas forced to construct a geospatial category reflective of spatial anomalies: “safe haven”(USDD, 2006, p. 15). These “safe havens”, which shelter unlawful violence, “exist astride inter-national borders or in regions where ineffective governance allows [for the] presence [of terror-ists]” (USDS, 2006, p. 16). Therefore, as the tribal belt in Pakistan became a “safe haven” for theTaliban and Al-Qaeda after December 2001, an “important objective in the global war on terror”became the conversion of the tribal belt “into a regularly administered province of Pakistan”(USDS, 2006, p. 20). Since the area in question was on the other side of the wall, it could notbe appropriated outright following the 2001 US-led occupation. Therefore, it was because thatthere was a wall in place in the global cartographic discourse which in reality was not outthere, that is, in not being reflective of that form, which brought the neologism “Af-Pak” intoObama administration’s political vocabulary (FP, 2009). Further, it was this very opening thatallowed drones to enter into the Pakistani tribal belt either in hot pursuit or as an almost constantpresence performing pre-emptive assassinations.6 Since 2009 alone, there have been more than330 strikes, with the agencies of South and North Waziristan being the major points of target(BIJ, 2014).

Schmitt identifies a relationship between nomos, naming, and Nahme: once a thing is appro-priated, it is named, and this acting of naming signifies that it has been taken up (Schmitt, 2006,p. 348). Nameable is appropriable. In the context of tribal belt, this means corresponding“politics” and “warfare” based on such a “terrestrial reality”. However, the tribal belt is a namewithout a complete Nahme when one sees it in the light of its complex colonial history and itssemi-autonomous status in Pakistan. It is from here that I begin reading the drone campaign inthe tribal belt. In the tribal belt, drone warfare is a phenomenon that informs that though aland may fall on the other side of the wall, it is not possessed and owned by “its” state, in away that this tribal “autonomy” has now become a “liability”. Now, drones are a technologicaloptimum of the techniques with which appropriation takes place (Schmitt, 2006, p. 347): itspits fire, hovers in air, monitors people, is guided through “chips” activated by local spies onground, receives satellite signals from outer space and can be operated from anywhere onearth. Of course, the drone campaign does not appropriate land itself. However, it is a minoryet concrete manifestation of the rationale that something is ambiguous with the presentspatial–legal status of the land, and that any response to this ambiguity has to be effective inits outcomes.

Is drone warfare “air bombardment” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 320)? One can detect in the “conven-tional” urban air war theatres destruction of vital infrastructure, which, by instituting retributionand causing annihilation, “criminalizes” enemy. What is important to note here is the reason whysuch a massive use of aerial violence does not generate an equal amount of public scandal asdrone attacks. From a legal perspective, former is allowable because international law can norma-tively constrict the warring parties with its standards, while the latter is problematic becausedrones do not follow targets but simultaneously mark and execute them, which not only makesa prior legal constriction ineffective but also overturns the strict gulf between expedient/justand virtual/real (cf. Gregory, 2011, p. 199; Beard, 2009, p. 443). Further, in contrast to the con-ventional aerial violence in warzones, drones can operate in a space without that being construed

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as an explicit declaration of war. This makes the law of war inapplicable, since acts symbolizingwar can take place without declaration of war. Similarly, international law presupposes war asoccurring between two “states” (and thus making it possible to conclude an open and publicpeace treaty between those two entities), and it is obviously not a war against Pakistan. On theother hand, since “targets” enter Afghanistan’s warzones and then go back to the tribal belt, Pakis-tani national law remains ineffective in either curbing the “suspects” or in holding them accoun-table (USDS, 2006, p. 16). This territorial entangle produces legal conundrums: even ifinternational and national law find the drone campaign scandalous, it cannot tell the statepowers how to achieve those “legitimate” objectives legally. It is here that drones become theanswer. As an exceptional measure drones become an occasion for further normalization, sinceit is not normal (such as, starving to death of thousands in the wake of aerial bombing on coreurban infrastructure and facilities in a lawful act of war) but the exceptional that “rings liberalalarm bells” (Johns, 2005, p. 629). As such, the fundamental problem and the theoretical basisof scandal lies not in the effect that drones have on human lives per se, but in the fact thatdrone attacks appear to have no firm legal basis and cannot properly be sieved through the exist-ing legal instruments. That is, it is neither the occurrence of violence nor its destructive potentialon human lives but its possibility to escape juridical context which is scandalous.

Moreover, through drones, there is a constant presence without any reciprocal need of occu-pation. Therefore, despite a close one-directional contact between the US and the tribal belt, noobligations bind the former to the latter. It is so since the US is neither an occupying nor solely aland-appropriating power because land has to be appropriated for Pakistan within whose wallsthese “safe havens” lie. It is this use of the drone campaign which answers the reason why thePakistani state could and does collaborate in it (Aziz, 2013; Mir, 2013). The politics of verticalitythus not only “makes [the life down there] explicit” (Sloterdijk, 2009), but it also makes air anobject of enclosing techniques.7 Further, Schmitt notes the way acts leading to territorial demar-cation (re)produce “friend and enemy antithesis” (Schmitt, 2007, p. 28). This enables Pakistaniintelligence and military institutions to mark and redraw alliances and groupings, that is, to ident-ify pockets of loyalty in the tribal belt. However, at least for the Pakistani state – and this is whereKafka becomes of relevance – it also clearly evades the political since friend and enemy, inhabi-tant and combatant lie “within”, putting any strict differentiation on a nebulous plane. Moreover,the figure is more complicated when it is seen that the Taliban have not advanced any claims tostatehood in the tribal belt, and therefore one is unable to cleanly categorize what is going on inthe tribal belt as being either “people’s war”, or “revolutionary war”, or “liberation struggle” or“civil war”.

Further, in this dialectic of enemy/subject of state, an unnamable entity emerges: a recidivistpossessed with animus furandi bent on violating law, a combatant who destroys law, and a nomadwho knows no laws. This makes the “War on Terror” discursively different. Unlike imperialistschemes where “the other” was always outside, making political demarcation as a colony poss-ible, and provided one’s imperialist self with a contrastive identification, “terrorist” is anotherwho is a product of the overarching order, lies within, and consequently is pure negativity.8 Inthis sense, drones do what national and international law is unable to do, since those suspectscan neither be sentenced in the civil nor military courts, nor sent to an ordinary prison, nor putinto a “prisoner of war” camp under international law. This process has its own Kafkaesque under-tones. This is so, because being unnamable in the legal matrix, “terrorists” can work beyond legalconstrictions. In other words, it means that rights of those fighting “terrorists”, such as militarypersonnel, as identified in the law of war, can be disregarded by them. For them, then, there isno decisive “legal” containment; this, however, can be moral, personal, religious or traditional(cf. Schmitt, 2004, p. 36). This also extends the confusion in Pakistan’s political discourse: ifthere should be negotiations with the TTP in the tribal belt and if negotiations should be

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“under” the Constitution (Boone, 2014), if there should be an end to drones’ intrusion by shootingthem down (Crilly, 2012; Roberts, 2013), if “surgical” strikes should be extended (Avasthy, 2014;News, 2014b), if the extension of full-blown military campaigns into the entire “turbulent” area isthe “solution” (ET, 2015b). Further, if justice is function of legal discourse at present that effec-tively works in “protected territories” (Elden, 2009, p. xxii), then in those spaces where law itselfremains unable to hold ground, the question of justice gets muted. Thus, the tricky discourse ofthe “War on Terror” incorporates, evades and risks both the political and the military.

It is here that one needs to situate these “airquakes” (Luftbeben) (Sloterdijk, 2002) in the lightof the ground dynamics of the Pakistani state, since the autorite établie lies with it. Further, in thecreation of “firewall” both the US (through drones) and the Pakistani state (through militaryengagements) become indistinguishable (Iqtidar & Akbar, 2014; Javaid, 2015). From this per-spective, there is no anomaly in the fact that the “US [launches drone attacks on] Pakistan[without being] at war with it” (Gregory, 2011, p. 190). The public invocation of internationallaw in order to counter drone attacks through the concepts of “sovereignty” and “territorial integ-rity” re-appropriates the tribal belt for Pakistan. Similarly, the argument that drone attacks violatehuman and constitutional rights of the “suspects” also presupposes those “humans” as juridicalsubjects of state, and theoretically requires that there be effective legal architecture in placethat is more fundamentally able to govern the conduct of those “humans” with respect to theirjuridical rights (Nasir, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). Thus, the use of these concepts serves the veryend which caused drones to enter into the area in the first place: the inability of nation-state toeffectively police and structure “its” territory. Thus, “normalization”, that is, for example, useof aerial strikes by national air force to achieve the ends drones have in view, emerges as alogical end-result of this process, since then violence would function within the legal framework,even if this causes the intensity of violence to exponentially increase in the meantime (ET, 2011).In other words, by invoking legality in the tribal belt to counter drones, the Pakistani state is pre-sumed and realized as the sovereign: E pluribus unum. If the reformulation of interstate spatialorder (Schmitt, 2006, p. 290) in the postwar era produced the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtainand the Cold War, then the regularization of order (Ordnung) and orientation (Ortung) necessi-tates firmer walls defining Afghanistan and Pakistan. Thus, analysing “droning” will remainpartial if the groundwork of the Pakistani state is not simultaneously appreciated. It is to thisthat the next section turns.

Zoning: distributing and dividing

The second meaning Schmitt ascribes to the Greek nemein is the German teilen: “to divide or todistribute” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 326). This signifies the “action and process of division and distri-bution” (p. 326). Schmitt illustrates this linguistically through the German Ur-teil which meansboth an original part and a specific judgement. The primary division (divisio primaeva) presup-poses appropriation to create legal order. Consequently, law depends on both appropriation anddistribution. To explain, Schmitt quotes Hobbes (p. 327): “And this they well knew of old,who called that nomos, that is to say, distribution, which we call law; and defined justice, by dis-tributing to every man his own” (Hobbes, 1966, p. 234). For present purposes, both division anddistribution are captured through the idea of “zoning”. Zoning entails creation of separate geo-graphical areas (industry, commerce, residence) to produce corresponding social practices(trade, finance, domestic life) and subjects (labourers, bankers and managers, families). Thisspatial arrangement makes it easier to determine what belongs where, and to shape both accord-ingly. In this section, I look at the way tribal belt is being structured into a territory proper, and theway techniques performing this task enable themselves to be grouped under the heading of anation-state. In other words, this section looks at the process that divides the tribal belt as a

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problem zone and then works to include that within the state territory, and the way this dynamicaffects tribal people who are given what is due to them with respect to the surroundingcircumstances.

The tribal belt is taken up administratively as Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA),and is placed under the control of the President of Pakistan. It is divided into seven tribal agenciesand six frontier regions. It is administered, with some changes, through the Frontiers’ CrimeRegulation Act 1901 of the British Raj. This act zoned the tribal belt as a “frontier” and congealedits status as “tribal” – both of which point to an indecisive land-appropriation during the colonialtimes (cf. Fields, 2010, 2011).9 In this light, the Act divided the tribal belt into agencies, exemptedit from the colonial courts of the Raj and gave substantial authority to the “Political Officer” whowas to be appointed by the Governor of North-West Frontier Province (Awan, 1972). Importantly,the successive revisions to the Act have reread it without practically appropriating the land.10

Therefore, the process of zoning the tribal belt as a “fixed tribal frontier” is oxymoronic. A fron-tier, as Derrida notes, does not take the “form of a solid front: it escapes, remains evasive, open,undecided, indeterminable” (Derrida, 2003, pp. 90–91). In more practical terms, Lord Curzon,Viceroy of the Raj in 1901, noted the capacity of frontiers to constantly produce geographical,political, legal and military “ruptures” (Curzon, 1907, p. 8).

Likewise, Section 3 Article 247 of the 1973 Constitution of the Pakistani state exempts thetribal belt from the acts approved by national and provincial legislatures (Constitution, 1973).A Kafkaesque question: if there is not a wall or if the gaps within are greater than the wall’s struc-ture, how can “the familiar binaries of law/lawlessness, inside/outside and military/ civilian hold”(Brown, 2010, p. 85)? Interestingly, this constitutional exemption is itself based on a legaldecision and remains a “juridical act” (Agamben, 2005, p. 1). This means that despite being aspecial case, the legal status of the tribal belt remains within the juridical context, and as suchits spatial status can be reworked by altering the legal coordinates. Consequently, when thetribal “autonomy” forcefully appeared as “anarchy” after the fall of the Amarat in 2001, this jur-idical context operated as a portal enabling zoning to take place. Resultantly, the Pakistani statefully operated as per the constitution as it tore open the constitutionally protected status of thetribal belt.

After the fiery 2001 in Tora Bora (which in Pashto incidentally means “the black cave”),Pakistan military launched its first “military operation” (and not police operation or counter-insurgency) in the tribal belt in June 2002. This significant move meant a concerted attemptto appropriate the tribal belt into the Pakistani state for the first time in national history.Historical “cantonments” like Wana and Razmak increased in scope and size, whereas othermilitary instalments were strategically spread out. Further, two full-blown military engagementshave focused on South and North Waziristan: Rah e Nijat in 2009 and Zarb e Azb in 2014,respectively (DT, 2009; News, 2014a). By 2010 alone, there were around 140,000 Pakistanitroops stationed on the western “front” (LA, 2010). This act of inclusion affects what is tobe given to the people, which, presently requires a wholesale compulsory migration from theaffected zones, has caused around five million people to be “internally displaced” from thenorthwest since 2002 (IDMC, 2013, p. 1). However, for Schmitt, “displacement” and “dislo-cation” are corollaries of the process of land-appropriation which works through “warfare…proscription, deprivation and forfeiture”, among others (Schmitt, 2006, p. 328).

Each act of division corresponds to a corresponding process of appropriation. In order to zonethe tribal belt differently now, in contrast to the colonial times, even small details matter. Thus,forest areas are being made passable to counter infiltration, checkpoints created to determineadmissibility, watchtowers erected to track movement of bodies and goods, zones (“red”,“green” or “buffer”) demarcated to evaluate the writ of the state, and so forth. This is sup-plemented by debating possibility of “fencing” the Durand Line (Shah, 2013), that is, of

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converting the makeshift frontier convenient during colonial times into a properly guarded borderfulfilling postcolonial needs. Therefore, the advance of technologies relating to mapping, surveyand spatial control concretizes political imagination. In contrast to the frontier marked duringcolonial times guided by the Russophobia of the 1870s, current enclosure practices are “notbuilt as defenses against potential attacks by other sovereigns… rather they refer to transnational,informal, or subterranean powers” (Brown, 2010, p. 21). Then, it is not the wall per se, but the factthat there is a recession of it, which is the problem. This makes it difficult to discern whether gapsin the wall are left purposely, whether the makeshift fences signify wall, or whether both thesegaps and makeshift arrangements are inbuilt within its structure. These openings then make itpossible for the wall to be used in another way. This requires firmer enclosure, since enclosinga space is not aimed at restricting mobility, but of overseeing and filtering it, that is, of makingit possible to decide on it (cf. Rosière & Jones 2012, pp. 228–231; cf. Jones, 2012, pp. 118–121; Weizman, 2007). This makes it possible to simultaneously create gates, since gates canonly be inserted into the structure of the wall.

This process of division distributes corresponding obligations on the tribal populace. Asnoted, each military engagement into a specific agency has required massive “internal” migrationof the population living there (Iqtidar & Akbar, 2014). This strategy is guided by a tactic of asupervised repopulation. The objective of compulsory migration is to identify the “savage”within, so that he can be more thoroughly alienated and then rooted out (cf. Jones, 2012,pp. 3–4). Between depopulation and repopulation stands subsequent extension of state insti-tutions. As the “internally displaced persons” leave their belongings vulnerable to destructionand decay, they can return to find the state in place, which holds the possibility of ensuring tothem a route towards economic development and a guarantee of juridical rights (ET, 2015a). Insum, this process enables state institutions to secure “all” within and through the wall.

Therefore, various practices relating to zoning of the tribal belt resultantly make the abstractnation-state concrete. These practices then feed on knowledge to extend their sway, and, by impli-cation, that of the state itself. As Kafka tells, with the building of the wall, every “reflection…sank in the ground [and became] a part of the wall” (Kafka, 1952, p. 131). Hence, such an engage-ment has also made it possible to thoroughly collect data on property and casualties, note numberof “infiltrations”, record intertribal and intra-tribal feuds and conduct censuses. With the use ofquantitative tools, these data function as “ruse of reason” generating “regularized” patterns(Ewald, 1991, p. 144). On the basis of it, it becomes possible to develop military strategies, nego-tiation possibilities, cost–benefit analyses and “development” policies. In this sense, any questionbefore a specific knowledge is the concrete role it performs in a specific order, since it is ininterpretation that one affects the studied world.11 In this sense, “knowledge” stands inbetween the two aspects (division and distribution) ascribed to “zoning”, since it allows zonesto be carved out (helping formulate strategies, smoothening unpredictability, enabling legitimateviolence) and allows it to be determined how those zones are to be governed (the apt set of jur-idical rights, development and aid, schooling and uplift programs).

It is here that one should address a popular assumption on the “lawlessness” in the tribal beltwhich – comparable to Homer’s free seas – is seen to have “no limits, no consecrated sites, nosacred orientations, no law, and no property” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 43). This assumption construesthe tribal belt to be “exceptional”, where neither state agencies nor the tribal populace itselfremain bound by law. In the remaining part of this section, I will focus on the former, and willtake up the latter in the next one. It is true that the process of droning and zoning is violent. Simi-larly, one should acknowledge its human consequences: apart from “internal refugees”, more than30,000 people have been killed in the tribal belt since 2001 (Tribune, 2013). From a legal perspec-tive, what is important to note here is not the occurrence of violence, but an attempt to bring itwithin a juridical context. In this sense, despite the fact that not all acts relating to the

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aforementioned processes can be legitimized from a legal viewpoint, there is no legal answer tothe problem one confronts in the tribal belt. Hence, what is going on in the tribal belt is an attemptof law to ground itself, to make it possible that legal decisions can be made and effectivelyimplemented.12 Therefore, each military engagement in the tribal belt has overlapped withamendments to the 1997 Anti-Terrorism Ordinance: in January 2002 (Dawn, 2002), November2002 (ATO, 2002), November 2004 and January 2005 (ATO, 2005), October 2009 (ATO,2009), June 2011 (AACPR, 2011), March 2013 (ATO, 2013) and February 2014 (Tribune,2014). These amendments deal with “anti-terror” courts, allow “extra-judicial” confession andshooting suspects on sight, exempt the “law enforcing agencies” from the actions “done ingood faith” and so on. It is correct that this may constitute an emergency based legal regime,since makeshift courts, mobile prisons or “swift” trial procedures are not part of a “normal”legal regime. Once grounded, however, law has a tendency to exceed itself,13 making it possiblefor the normal legal regime to be installed depending on the reigning circumstances. Therefore,for Schmitt, a positivistic insistence on rules only reduces legitimacy to legality and resultantlyremains unable to trace law in its formation and extension.

It is here that one needs to appreciate how these processes affect life. If the “essence [of thelaw] from a specific perspective lies rather in the life of men itself” (Savigny, 1814, p. 30), then theanalysis offered here will remain incomplete without appreciating the way life is impacted as lawgrounds itself.

Organizing: pruning and rearranging

The third meaning Schmitt discerns in the Greek nemein is the German weiden: “pasturage”(Schmitt, 2006, p. 327). Schmitt identifies this with the German nutzen which “embraces bothproduction and consumption and the antithesis between them” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 327). ForSchmitt, the very way in which a society produces and consumes signifies the way it organizeslife.

When interpreted from the perspective of the “life of men itself”, this aspect of nomos can beseen to correspond to Latin cultūra (to cultivate) or colō (to till) – what is signified by the Englishword culture or the German Kultur. This reading opens three further dimensions. First, it entailsproduction through and ownership of an already appropriated and divided land. Second, it meanscultivation of the inhabitants through their contact with the land in the cycles of production andconsumption. Third, it means consumption of education and law by inhabitants for the purpose ofcultivating their human “nature”. In this sense, nomos was also seen by Greeks as the “objectifi-cation of the polis, and its development was the most important stage in paideia (education)”(Ulmen, 2006, pp. 9–10). Therefore, this reading incorporates two conflicting dimensions.First, it can mean the “careful nurture of nature…which obeys the order that nature itselfgives” (Strauss, 2007, p. 104). Second, it can also mean “harsh and cunning fight againstnature… by conquering nature” (Strauss, 2007, p. 104). These conflicting dimensions are cap-tured through the idea of “organizing”. By this, it is firstly meant the process of cutting and trim-ming, that is, of carving organs out of a body. This simultaneously enables one to rearrange andcultivate, that is, of altering the overall arrangement of a body by reorganizing. In this section, Ianalyse the way in which spatial transformation is impacting lives in the tribal belt. The idea of“organizing” is utilized in this context in order to focus on the processes that mark specific socialpractices as problematic, and the manner in which this marking and overcoming enables lives tobe made “livable”.

In the tribal belt, life is largely governed by a set of rules which the local populace calls asPashtunwali. These rules regulate behaviour. Interestingly, it is the adherence to these rules –rather than birth or territorial belongingness alone – that defines one’s standing as a Pashtun

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(Johnson, 2008, p. 59; Lindholm, 1982, p. 210). Consequently, the sphere of membership in thetribal community expands or contracts in the light of one’s conformance with Pashtunwali.Rights, duties, roles and actions are determined at the intersection of communal allegiance andtribal affiliation. “Each counts as one” only because of and through one’s tribal affiliation. Alter-natively, the worth of a tribe is gauged through the adherence of its members to Pashtunwali.Even in cases of contravention, one is dealt with as a Pashtun. Let me take here shah-rel (ostra-cism) as a point of discussion.

Ostracism itself emerges out of Pashtunwali. Then, the idea that a violation has occurred, thatthe act merits ostracism and the shape ostracism has to take is informed by Pashtunwali. Ostra-cism ranges from non-participation in important life-events of the boycotted while allowing hiseconomic life to function as normal to a complete tribal disowning of the boycotted. The lattermeasure becomes necessary when someone has violated the “honour” (nang) which meansthat one’s tribe then has to disown one. If the tribe continues to protect the ostracized then thattribe or that branch itself becomes the object of badal (revenge, reciprocity, reciprocation)(Spain, 1972, p. 46; Spain, 1985, p. 63). Importantly, even with ostracism, one is not outsidePashtunwali. This works in contrast to Homo Sacer of Roman law who because of beingbanned “may be killed by anyone” (Agamben, 1998, p. 54). Here only the aggrieved party caninstitute badal. However, it also remains possible that the banished may seek nanawatai (sanctu-ary, protection, asylum) from another tribe or tribal branch, breeding a fresher round of intertribalpolitics (Caroe, 1976, p. 351; Spain, 1985, p. 66). Therefore, Pashtu poet Khushal Khan Khattak(1613–1689) (Khattak, n.d., p. 89) says:

Pah jahaan da nangyaali di daa dwah kaarah,Yaa bah ukhri kakarai yaa bah kaamraan shi.[The one with nang has two obligations in the world:Either to lose his life or to emerge victorious.]

It is the concept of nangwhich is important here. Nangmeans something which is collectivelydefined and can be appreciated only within a social formation (and not in abstraction) like honour,dignity and esteem. Nang also entails something which everyone possesses in one’s own personand immediate relations like land, women and property. Because of this correspondence, it fallsupon one to protect one’s nang, since interference in another’s nang even for the purposes ofdefense is a violation. Thus, although Pashtunwali is collectively formulated, it devolves uponevery adult individual to oversee the code, to adjudicate and to reciprocate. Hence, Khattaksays that even losing one’s life for the sake of nang is equivalent to emerging victorious.Then, there is no “bare life” here, a life which is merely human or biological, since there is noabstract concept of a detached human per se. There is nothing apart from nang; “it is inbones” (Khan, 1990, p. 24). Like the bone marrow, nang constitutes one differently. It is histori-cally formed, varies from tribe to tribe, section to section and brings with it consequent obli-gations and duties. Nang can be violated but it cannot be removed, disowned or stripped.Further, there is no “mere” human because there is no sovereign who decides. Rather, a tribaladult male is himself the guardian of his nang. With the absence of a sovereign power monopo-lizing violence, there is no citizenship. This also entails a curious relationship. Nang can only beprotected by oneself. Badal (revenge) only assumes the form it has when it comes from one’s ownhands. As an aggrieved party, one participates in the Jirga (adjudication assembly) to ensure thatone is oneself the executor of the sentence that is passed. From this perspective, what follows inthe national courts of law is seen from three critical views. First, it is seen as “emasculation”, sinceboth juridical and executive powers are transferred elsewhere. Second, it is interference, sinceone’s nang may be violated without the courts of law recognizing it, since it evades any

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encapsulation by the “positive” juridical order. Third, it is seen as overpowering, since it washesaway the tribal legal autonomy, incorporates a different and conflicting set of “legal” rules andbrings corresponding changes in the conception and modes of justice.

Moreover, it is largely because of this reason that every adult male in the tribal belt remains“armed” and that there can be no strict bifurcation between an individual member and a trainedcombatant. Even this fact has created problems both for the Pakistani state in the tribal belt and theUS/NATO in Afghanistan. The problems emerge as the walled categories become unassignable:asset or threat, soldier or civilian, combatant or non-combatant, local or migrant, non-Taliban orTaliban, innocent children or dangerous adolescents. This is acknowledged even by sympatheticart exhibitions against drone strikes in cities like London and Lahore that display bomb shells,photos of injured children, crying women and devastated old people – but seldom the photosof dead young males.14 This acknowledges a certain aspect of the way tribal life is organizedas problematic, at least within a conceptual framework that works with the aforementionedanalytical categories. It is here that one needs to look the process of “organizing”, and the way“disorder” is reoriented and “disorientation” is reordered. Of course, it would be naïve toassume that the context of the “War on Terror” has altered life – and that too in a decade. Theobjective of these notes is to theorize the force at work reorganizing tribal life. As Kafkainforms, practices, arts, trades and education need to be there before the wall; the wall onlyorients them to its own being (Kafka, 1952, p. 130). With this viewpoint, I only note twoaspects: the way practices organizing tribal life function and the way institutional practices arebeing inserted into the tribal belt “that invoke the nation-state at every step” (Chakrabarty,2000, p. 41).

First – and rather surprisingly – the Pakistani state itself attempts to govern through “tra-dition”. Thus, there is strategic use of badal (revenge) to play off one tribal solidary groupagainst another in order to stave off potential resistance to “state-building” efforts. Further, thecomplex practice ofmailmestia (hospitality) is being studied to snowball the contact chain of “ter-rorists”. There is also the use of Jirga to introduce a stalemate if helpful or initiate a dialogue whenconvenient. The practice of panaah (asylum, protection) is being monitored so that the tribalassociations and alliances can be recorded. This also helps in seeing whether, where, and inwhat quantity are the “black sheep” being reared. Moreover, relatives and property are alsoknown to being confiscated in order to strike at the nang of the “terrorists”, so that they can volun-tarily submit themselves to law. On the other hand, there are informed policy proposals that advo-cate slicing away “radical” Islam from the “traditional, non-radical” Pashtunwali by “weakening”the “class” of mullahs and “strengthening” the malik (local chieftains) (Johnson & Mason, 2009,pp. 10–11; McMahon, 2009, p. 17; Gant, 2010, p. 1). In this sense, by attempting to governthrough “tradition”, policy making defines what the acceptable form of “tradition” is (cf. Jones& Munoz, 2010).15 However, this stance towards Pashtunwali is that of reification and selection.What is important is to see how these practices are also problematized, and the way this enablesthe state to extend itself.

It is because Pashtunwali is “not related to the state [that it now appears] unclear and precar-ious” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 202). Therefore, badal is disclosed as a symptom of lawlessness, nangbarbarity, mailmestia infiltration without “proper” documentation, bramata (revenge or recipro-cation evoking personal dimension) anachronistic and nanawatai as producing “safe havens”. Inshort, tribal autonomy stands as something of a status naturæ. Of course, this description does nothave to reflect transparently what the tribal belt “actually” is. However, once things are seen fromsuch an angle, they assume a “real” form (in narrations, policies, amelioration strategies) even ifthey “do not exist” (Foucault, 2007, pp. 118, 239). Thus, the absence of sovereign power is rereadas a condition where everyone bears the capacity to wage violence. This dispersal of capacity towage violence entails an absence of sovereign power. This absence means that there is no central

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power source which can make people accountable or impose its decisions with effect. From alegal perspective, all these practices emerge as full of problems: nang produces a status whichdenies to its bearers both their humanity and citizenship; Pashtunwali stands beyond publicand private law, which makes it both anti-juridical and patriarchal; Jirga functions as a makeshiftassembly lacking “objective” judicial tools. It is on this reorientation that the entire tribal history isbeing re-viewed. As everything preceding the construction of the Great Wall in Kafka merelybecame its prelude later, so every historical event here painfully confesses to the “unruliness”of the tribes and its “mad mullahs”, all the while pointing to the urgency to save them from them-selves. Similarly, it is important to note here that the “scandalous” legal practices occurring in thetribal belt, such as makeshift military courts or drone warfare, can only be countered through thevocabulary of “positive” law, such as constitutional and human rights, and not through the con-ceptual tools that the indigenous legal understanding offers. This is important to note in order toidentify the direction in which normalization ought to head. Therefore, what is needed is an instal-ment of a sovereign power that can rule through the de-personalized law.16

This brings me to the second aspect of “organizing”: practices that can make lives “livable”.So, now there are projects to introduce mass level schooling to supplant tribal modes of learningto impart “knowledge” that will “uplift” and “develop” the region (Dawn, 2013a). On the otherhand, the tribal youth is disclosed as “unemployed” since it has remained unable to cultivate itselfthrough the cycles of production and consumption. This is because the tribal people are now seento rely largely on two “illegal” channels, apart from the legal but insufficient dependence on agri-culture and cattle. First, there is smuggling which itself presumes borders, borders’ traffic con-trols, state’s taxation machinery and international law (Dawn, 2015; ET, 2015c). Second, thereis rampant “crime”. Therefore, given “unemployment”, measures are being taken to inductpeople from the tribal belt into public institutions by providing them with “safer” outlets of“employment” (PDMA, 2011). There are also calls to introduce police and courts to counterthe possibility of every tribesman being armed. In short, the tribal belt needs to be “integrated”well into the “nation” (Dawn, 2013b). The way problems are posed, the interpretation theymerit and the solution they require is connected to the law associated with the modern territorialstate having “a unified, self-contained area” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 145). Then, narratives – of state-hood, nation, patriotism, danger, security, development – function, so that “interests” can corre-spond to “rights”.

This also means that those lives that are countering such processes have a host of initiatives toconfront. And, once their violent capacities are directed against such “progressive” initiatives,they not only pollute the polis but also threaten humanity. If the process of “organizing” in theaforementioned direction signifies “the margin of modernity” (Jones, 2012, p. 3), then a lifethat jeopardizes this process becomes a negativity whose such counter-conduct becomes anoccasion for its further elimination. Now, this process of organizing both needs state-basedefforts and participation of the general populace. However, as Kafka informs, despite grave struc-tural oddities and useless exertion on the life of masons who were building the wall, such a pool ofefforts is nevertheless required. It is because it organized the life of the village that the Great Walloccupied “the very ground” on which the people can live (Kafka, 1952, p. 146). That is why, lawgrounds justice, which in turn assumes normalization of spaces and subjects.

Concluding remarks: space is out of joint

This essay has conceptualized the discourse of the “War on Terror” in spatial terms. It has donethis by analysing the way it discursively marks the exceptional, that is “terror”, and requires con-sequent normalization. From this perspective, the “War on Terror” has been presented as a nor-malizing discourse. This tendency of it needs to be theoretically grasped with respect to the

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dynamics of a certain territorial and legal order. These points have been presented by focusing onthe northwestern tribal belt of Pakistan in the wake of the “War on Terror”. I have focused on“droning” (normalization of space with respect to the overall territorial based nation-state orderand “neutralization” of “suspects” with respect to their capacity to wage violence against suchan order), “zoning” (normalization of space as a territory of the Pakistani state) and “organizing”(normalization of subjects with respect to the way their lives are arranged). At the same time, ithas been argued that such normalizing processes are neither decisive nor total, but also producelags and unanticipated consequences. Therefore, an important question becomes to analyse theway such byproducts function, and are taken up as problematic by the order itself.

Academic analyses of the “War on Terror” have largely tended to focus on specific practices,such as drone campaigns or detention schemes, in order to scrutinize their effects and cause.However, what is required from the present perspective is not only to see how various specificpractices are interrelated, but also to see the way such measures create and then fill spatial andlegal vacuums. That is, it requires one to identify the direction in which normalization heads,and what consequent impact this has on the spatial and legal order. Further, an important questionfor future inquiries can be to identify how this transformation conserves that order, or perhapsgoes on to impact it to an extent that it produces a related but different order. Thus, I concludethis article with Schmitt’s remarks as a possible track for future inquiries: “In such times of dis-orientation, the essential juridical task becomes that of properly ascertaining the reality of a fadingand a rising nomos, and of disclosing the derivation of each” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 182).

AcknowledgementsSpecial thanks are due to William Walters for his feedback at every stage of this study. I am also grateful tothe editor and the anonymous reviewers of Space and Polity for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes1. Commenting on the Military Order of November 2001 (US, 2001) that extended indefinite detention of

‘enemy combatants’ at Guantánamo Bay, Agamben discerns a ‘state of exception’ (Ausnahmezustand)signifying ‘pure de facto rule… entirely removed from the law’ (Agamben 2005, pp. 3–4). Hardt andNegri (2000) see a global civil where the ‘border place no longer exists’ (p. 83), and where the enemyis moralized and theologized (p. 13). Derrida finds ‘a critical reading of Schmitt very useful’, albeit forhim the ‘violence unleashed’ in the wake of ‘September 11’ is ‘not the result of “war”… [because] theidentification of enemy’ remains difficult (Derrida, 2003, pp. 100–101; original emphasis).

2. Despite a certain ‘enchantment with words’ (Dean, 2006, p. 9) and its ‘contested etymology’ (Brown,2010, p. 45), Schmitt’s philological appropriation of nomos remains of utility in a twofold manner.First, it allows one to conceptualize the mapping of the world. Second, it allows one to understandthe way life corresponds to that mapping. This article, therefore, appropriates nomos as a conceptualtool with which one can construct a ‘paradigm… in order to understand its historical structure’(Agamben & Ulrich, 2004, p. 610).

3. ‘The properly legal notion of “territory” is a creation of the modern age’ (Heller-Roazen, 2009, p. 164).4. This was a corollary of funding and assisting separate groups during Afghan Jihad, which at that

moment served the interest of preventing a single stakeholder to negotiate with CIA and ISI and toestablish its writ afterwards when the war was done with (Mamdani, 2004, p. 130), but which laterpropelled bloody intergroup rivalries as the war ended (Ahady, 1995, p. 626), the result of whichfor the overall territorial order was more troublesome as the newly formed Taliban emerged victorious.Instead of finding a paradoxical ‘recoding’ of the mujahidin as terrorists, one can rationalize suchpolicy shifts in the light of the changing dynamics of global order.

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5. Thus, Mullah Zaeef, Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan (the latter being one of the three countries torecognize the former) was not given ‘diplomatic immunity’ when the US-led occupation of Afghanistantook place in 2002, and was arrested from his place in Islamabad. Soon afterwards, he ended up blind-folded and naked at the American navel battleship USS Bataan, on his own account (Zaeef, 2006).

6. It is here that one can read maps that congeal walls as governmental mentality (Foucault, 2007, p. 107).Weizman (2002) notes: ‘Attempting to represent reality, [maps] not only mirror but also shape the thingthey represent… as much as describing the world, they create it’.

7. There is now an extensive theorization on the nomos of the sky and the politics of verticality (Adey,Whitehead &Williams, 2011; Saint-Amour, 2011; Sloterdijk, 2009; Virilio, 1989). Similarly, there is ahost of literature presently that is intent on gathering knowledge of how daily life changes under drones(Amnesty, 2013; LUD, 2012).

8. This answers the reason why Jews as pariahs lost every identity in Nazi camps but that of being Jews, but‘terrorists’ in the ‘War on Terror’ reach ‘maximum indeterminacy’ (Agamben, 2005, p. 4; Butler, 2004).

9. In 1893, the British mission led by Mortimer Durand met the Afghan Ameer and finalized an approxi-mately 2650 kms long ‘border’. This ‘Durand Line’ begins in the Pamir Mountains in the north, movessouthwest, and ends near the Helmand River. Curzon referred to this arrangement as a ‘threefold fron-tier’ (Curzon, 1907, p. 4). The first frontier was the directly administered territory of the Raj. Thesecond was indirectly administered territory of the tribes. The third was the buffered territory of Afgha-nistan. Pakistan, as the ‘successor state’ of the Raj, inherited both Durand Line and the peculiar admin-istrative status of the tribal belt. At various points, such as Chaman and Chitral, the ‘border’ has almostbeen inexistent for the tribes living on either side. In a certain sense, one may discern here an ‘“in-between” space transcending the geopolitical boundary that divides the constitutive nation-states’(Dear, 2013, p. 71). An important reason why the tribal belt was presently disclosed as having – forThe Economist – ‘semi-autonomous anarchy’ (2007) was that the Durand Line failed to act as awall, as an interstate border.

10. As a seasoned imperialist, Curzon fully appreciated the problem of land-appropriation, law and order.He is noted to have remarked on Waziristan: ‘Not until the military steamroller has passed over thatcountry from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start thatmachine’ (Howell, 1931, p. 106).

11. Therefore, the strategy of letting ‘the “facts” speak and hence simulate an objectivity… [in factdepends on] the questions asked’ (Gadamer, 2003, p. 301).

12. To explain, Schmitt quotes Lorenz von Stein (Schmitt, 2007, p. 47): ‘As soon as constitution isattacked, the battle must then be waged outside the constitution and the law’ (Stein, 1921, p. 494).While reading Benjamin, Derrida notes this overlap in the German Gewalt which besides violencemeans ‘legitimate power, authority, and public force’ (Derrida, 1992, p. 6). Similarly, Weber’s defi-nition of the state as having the monopoly of legitimate physical violence (das Monopol legitimer phy-sischer Gewaltsamkeit) captures the relationship between law, violence, and legitimacy (Weber, 1919).

13. In this regard, Kennedy notes that American courts have ‘also, on occasion, argued that the Consti-tution protects rights even when it does not explicitly enact them as law’ (Kennedy, 2002, p. 194).

14. A New York Times’ article reports that ‘unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving theminnocent, all military-age males in a strike zone are counted as combatants, according to several admin-istration officials’ (NYT, 2012).

15. Concerning the creation of the colonial category of ‘customary law’, Chanock observes that ‘custom-ary law, far from being a survival, was created by changes and conflicts… and was neither customarynor British’ (Chanock, 1985, pp. 3–4, 57).

16. Thus, drone attacks are precisely the legal and conceptual limit of Jirga system because of two reasons.First, Jirga matches action and accountability. In case of drones’ ‘kill-chain’ (Gregory, 2011; Herbert,2003) this seems impossible: Is it the drone operator operating from anywhere, the gadget itself, localinformants, American military machine, the US/Pakistani state, President of the US, American tax-payers and voters? Second, its decisions remain enshrined within logics that obviously stand in con-trast to the ‘rule of law’ – and thus cannot be heard ‘globally’. In this sense, the 2013 judgement ofPeshawar High Court on drones is important on three counts (PHC, 2013). First, it bares a tribal indi-vidual off his affiliations and presents him as a ‘human’. Second, it invokes the sovereign power withwhich this human is intimately connected as he makes claims upon and contrary to it. Third, throughthis, the judgement claims the territory for international law, since: (a) there are humans that are there;(b) there are human rights that are to be juridically guaranteed by a specific state and (c) there is viola-tion of those juridical rights in the process, along with a violation of sovereignty of that rights’ guar-anteeing state.

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