Emergency regimes in contemporary democracies

Abstract

Emergency regimes as a legacy of French colonialism in Cameroon remain a key instrument to legalising strategies of control and subjugation of people. Officials in the country have been relying on these regimes not to save the state from a potential threat of war or invasion but to deny a fair democratic game, eliminate political opponents and keep control of power, people and resources. The core arguments of the present study devoted to emergency regimes in contemporary democracies with strong emphasis on Cameroon lies in its conceptual framing which is a clear contextualisation of the problem of the exception in the colonial period. In elucidating the situation in Cameroon, the study hilights how the permanent recourse to emergency regimes within the colony was central to Europeans’ tactics in their strategies of control and domination of colonised people. Starting with detailed historical analysis grounded on colonial and postcolonial experiences in Cameroon (and even Algeria), the study attempts to shift the understanding of the theories on the exception and sovereign violence by placing contemporary legal and philosophical debates on the exception in the context in which they originally emerged, a means of legitimating the subjugation of colonised peoples. More specifically, the thesis shows how the country’s colonial past strongly influences the current state’s structures through a basic reliance on emergency measures which became normalised to a point where law’s force has been reduced to the zero point of its own content. The draconian measures have been routinised and have successfully moved from the exceptional sphere to that of the normality. Additionally, patterns of rule by ordinance and decree were put in place in the early ‘post-independence’ period, and have now become the norm in Cameroon. As consequences, the process matters of justice are reduced to bare legal force, and in that process the legitimacy of both state and law are compromised, rendering subjects politically jaundiced and demoralised. The net effect of such developments appears to be detrimental to the very foundation of the state which is then subject to a process of disintegration.