Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Criminal Terrorism and Exceptional Legislation in Italy

The configuration of state sovereignty has been historically constituted through a spatial distinction between an inside, the space of domesticity, and an outside, the space of anarchy and war. Yet, post 9/11, scholars have raised our attention to how the Global War on Terror has increasingly blurred this spatial division. This chapter, however, shows that the overlap between these two dimensions has a much longer historical trajectory. Through an analysis of Italian state responses to the Sicilian mafia, this chapter shows how the logic of war has been inscribed into the logic of domestic security since the Italian unification in the 19th century. By adopting a legal-historical perspective, this analysis exposes that the exceptionality of this inscription shows itself instead to be a process of normalization. Indeed, between 1992 and 1994, a series of exceptional legislation against the so-called ‘criminal terrorism’ of the Sicilian mafia is sustained via the claim that Sicily was in a state of war between the Italian state and the Sicilian mafia. From this time onwards, the exception has increasingly been normalized and let to a progressive militarisation of security discourses and practices. This is most evident in the normalization of the consistent intervention of the Italian army in the domestic realm. The effects of this are twofold. On the one hand, the choice of deploying the Italian army within Sicily to respond to criminal challenges re-articulates the spatial configuration of state sovereignty through a claim of a war ‘within’, which marginalizes any possible alternative discourse. On the other hand, the discourse of ‘war’ conceals the secret negotiations between Italian state officials and affiliates of the Sicilian mafia.