No exceptions: authoritarian statism. Agamben, Poulantzas and homeland security

This article outlines and compares two different ways of making sense of counterterrorism and the configuration of political power in its context. Against the backdrop of US homeland security, it first outlines Agamben’s thesis on the permanent state of exception. Despite its resonance with key aspects of homeland security, this thesis is found to be analytically limited and theoretically brittle. To overcome its shortcomings and provide a better understanding of contemporary organisation of political power, a strategic-relational approach is suggested, derived from Poulantzas’s state theory.