I'm staying for the next to last talk on the last day putting up with the fire marshal and the Jesus Freaks in there and and all that. I'm a nurse and I'm here to talk about NMRCOS. It's a distribution of Linux that the Nomad Mobile Research Center developed. Nomad started this project a long time ago and it never really got off the ground but that's you know we we've been working pretty hard on it after the events that Nomads talked about yesterday at our panel. Overall goals for the project you know we want a stable secure trusted system. Users we were initially we were gonna make this you know kind of like as hard to install as we possibly could.  We changed that when we realized that we wanted to target we wanted to make it more accessible to people that weren't really that knowledgeable about security so that you know it comes up locked down and you you don't so that the the administrator just has to unlock things in order to get access to the to the internet and everything so that it's more security intended uses things like you know human rights activists and stuff like that although if you heard Phillip Zimmerman's talk at Black Hat I probably shouldn't say that because now I can't use that in court to get out of shit so anyway like I said Nomad came up with this idea his first idea was to use a slack wear install and kind of hack through things and and hodgepodge it together it never it never really got off the ground. I think what I think what the problem was is that it was it was a little it was like to there's too much overhead required to get it out the door so when I came on I said well hey what you know why don't we start with something else you know and we talked about several different distributions you know red hat and Debbie and stuff like that we ended up we ended up going with Debbie and and reason why we decided to do that was because I've had several problems with red hats red hat before and the quality of Debbie and just seem to be far and above the best of any distribution that I could I could find their their documentation was up to date they they had everything about how to make us a derivative CD it was just a really high quality distribution and so we decided to go with that now the other thing is you know why not just start from scratch and and do a completely completely new distribution we thought about that as well but in the end you know the only the only real rationale for that would be just you know bragging rights you know we would have to we have to make our own installer would have to make our own you know CD creation you know system and everything and so it just really didn't seem to be that that big of a problem you know to take one that already exists I mean that's one of the hacker tenants use what's out there right so that's what we did all right so we got a Debbie and based OS we got a tweaked kernel that's still running kernel 2.2 that's how old this project is nomad is you know I didn't do everything on the project took all of us to do it nomad was the guy that did most of the kernel work so I'll talk about that here we got 2.2.25 right now I think we got an update to that the open wall patch the haplenix pass trusted path and forest and we got random IP IDs we didn't go with the GR security patch because nomad thought that it would be a little more they had some cool stuff in there but nomad thought that it was more difficult to set up so we ought to stay with what we got here and later on move on to to that if we could now I should note it I should note that this isn't the idea for this coming out now with a 1.0 release there's certainly going to be a lot of problems and I'm sure you I mean you guys you're going to find a lot I'm sure but the idea is kind of like why we're and why we're releasing encrypted and covert you know to get you guys to think and to try and come up with new ideas that may you know avenues we haven't even thought of of how to lock the box down how to do things so when I talk about things like why we for instance we see here but why why we and one of the goals of the project is we're trying to enforce not to help not just the security of the administrator the security of the users the privacy of the users as well that's why we have encrypt on there we're planning on having cryptographic file systems we don't have it yet we want to get this out to you guys so that you can use it see what's wrong see what you think can be improved get it back to us and you know away we go we have some customized applications pine I think is it still four dot five six it might have been updated but we tweak that so that the headers come back all screwy so you you don't know what's sending it and send me all eight dot twelve dot nine we went with that that if you're familiar with Debbie and they have three mini distributions within itself it's stable testing and unstable currently at the time of this writing send mail eight dot twelve that nine was an unstable so you may ask why we use unstable in our shipped shipped version well we found a couple problems with security problems with it and nomad felt safer going with send mail eight dot twelve that nine as opposed to what's currently in Debbie and yeah that right what the question was why did we use send mail as opposed to something else Debbie and by default installs ex I am I think and so why do we why do we even bother selling some by default well the reason for that is because it came down from the mountain on a tablet from from nomad he said we're going to install send mail so if you don't like send mail blame him and we also he that that's what he's most familiar with and I haven't really I'm not really a mailer guy so I said you know what the fuck we'll do that the other thing we do is we auto run Bastille by default during the second stage install assuming that you choose to install Bastille at auto runs I think I think we're the only distribution that does that on install by default the other things we got going on installs and boots up in a lockdown state we've we've done the tests where we install the operating system we have another system hooked up we run in map against it repeatedly make sure that everything's locked down and it it comes back everything's clean locked down by default you open it the administrator opens it up they if they feel like they want to have a particular application running we have a snort bit on there that's also installed if you go through the the task selection and select that as I mentioned before we have encrypt and then covert which nomad talked about yesterday I was going to do this and I'm really sorry I can't do it but I was timing it and I I would go way over if I tried to do this and explain every step to you guys and I'm really sorry there's just no time to do a live demonstration of it now you may be wondering like how do we how do we maintain that well we have a package repository set up just like Debbie and the system is nrcos.nrc.org that is also set up in your app set up whenever you whenever you install the the system it should automatically go out there and look for for package updates we don't have anything out there yet when we get back we're going to throw in encrypt and then covert and a few other goodies the thing about apt it lets us graft on to Debbie and we don't have to customize every single application by providing our own app server you can run Debbie and version of X windows even though we don't provide it even though we don't may not you know support it you know essentially you have X windows and all the associated garbage that goes along with it developing for a number c.o.s. if you want to develop for a number c.o.s. creating a non kernel package is really simple and it's actually already taken again by by basing it off of Debbie and you can already you can just go to the Debbie website and check out the Debbie and developers reference which tells you exactly how to make a package if I had time to do the demonstration and I'm really sorry I would have shown you briefly how to do that creating the kernel package is very similar it's also very easy what you do is you use a Debbie and supplied tool kernel package that will tell you how to build it and install it and creates a dev for you there's really not not a whole lot you got to do it's it's they made it really easy when you distribute your package you can either send it to us or fdp it to the to your own website there's there's documents out there to tell you how to how to set up your own app repository if you want so you can have yours ours then Debian's and kind of graft onto ours that way creating your own distro we we have actually the Debian included tools to create a CD require that you have an entire mirror of the Debian archive or at least a section of it which makes it kind of makes it extremely actually disc intensive it's you know it's like it I don't know 80 gig for the whole thing I think right now we created some tools that allow you to to create a CD using a very minimal amount of disk space I think currently we're using like maybe 150 mag total for the creation to see and everything that's on there as an NMRC dash CD package so when you install that you can you can basically learn how to create your own NMRC OS based CDs and kind of do what we did to Debian let's see now there's a lot of future plans for this thing like I said we're going to implement a lot of a lot of things regarding privacy for the user not just privacy and security for the admin there's been a recent talk in the Red Hat community about opening up the the the the development process for Red Hat Linux and I've been playing around with that and I've got a semi working copy of an RPM Red Hat based version of this and so we were talking about having you know both or out there so that people that want to use an RPM or Red Hat based distro can do that as well and now I'm going to open this up to questions and follow up because I'm sure you guys have a quite a few anything yeah I'm sorry I can't hear you run back there oh yeah can I get a bit more specific about trusted path and other kernel mods as I said Nomad was the primary developer on kernel mods and stuff like that so I'm going to let him answer that that's all right hey the basically on the trusted path when essentially what it does is in the kernel it enforces that when you run an executable it has to be owned by roots it has to not be world or group writable it has to be in a directory owned by roots that is not world or group writable and this applies even to root that way as someone gets on your box and put some code in there and for some reason you've altered your path to actually execute from your current directory first for example which would be stupid but if you did that the thing has to be owned by root the whole idea is that if someone pops an account on the system then they're going to have to get roots to get their executable to run that doesn't kill everything I know someone's going to say does it handle the like say a pearl dashy and then put your gobbledygook in there no it doesn't take care of that but it does at least kind of you know raise the bar a little bit as far as the other mods go the main thing is the the openwall patch as well as I don't know how many people are familiar with the haplenix patch those are the two main things the haplenix patch mainly does some stuff for charooting and a little bit better like logging during a p tracing and stuff like that a little more control over what's going on there the haplenix patch where's it from from some guy named Hank I can't remember the URL off the top of my head Google is your friends if you look for haplenix you'll find the you'll find the patch I can't it's like a aims group comm slash something or other I can't remember the URL top my head so yeah we looked at the trust Debian project there's there's other secure versions of Debbie and out there trusted and some other things like that let me go up here and we looked at that and yeah you yeah you may want to you know why didn't we just you know join the Debian project and contribute that way why do we have to create our own our own distribution well the reason the reason for that is a couple reasons a a lot of us are extremely paranoid and we don't want to join any any other project Debbie and I think if I remember correctly requires that you actually physically meet someone in order to get your key signed and everything there's a lot of us that's just that just really frightens us the other thing is the reason why is because there's there's been some differences one of the one of things I talked about yesterday I forgot to mention today is that something as simple as clearing the screen whenever you log out was a difference between what we wanted and what the Debian wanted the latest Debian listed the mailing list archive that I saw was that they decided that by default bash and not clear clear the screen upon log out now I agree that you know security through obscurity never works however it you know if we're targeting this for people that may not know a lot about security it's just helps you know it's it doesn't hurt you know if they don't know what they're doing when they leave and they leave all the crap that they've been doing they could leave something there that could later on be used to break into the system so something as simple as that allows you know made us kind of think you know why don't we just go our own way we'll graft on the Debian and well that way we'll have complete control over what we want to override and how we want to produce this what we use for a firewall that's currently IP chains to two kernel IP chains so that's what we're using there and in the in the install there's an actual thing where it's where it sets it up and all that for you it's a GS to GS variant okay well cool thanks man I appreciate we'll take a look at that what's okay well let me let me talk to you after this and we'll we'll get we'll get okay okay cool thanks he was saying that there's a gen 2 kernel that has most of the features that we have in there and it's a lot faster the 01 batch scheduler whole bunch of other shit so so take a look at gen 2 all right yeah cool we'll do that really I am not aware of that I'm sorry I didn't know if we have we have some CDs to give out so and I've I think we tested every single one of them to make sure they boot so I'll make sure to get you one okay we provide source packages Deb source packages do we provide Deb source packages they are not on the CD we're uploading them to nrcOS.nrc.org so you can app get them just like all the other stuff so that that should be done we tried we had some problems accessing it from here so we're going to do it when we get back yes steg in the file system like a rubber hose


So I want to welcome everyone to another School of Security Studies and International Affairs Journal sponsored New Voices in Global Security Lunchtime Seminar. My name is Amanda Chisholm and I'm the organizer and chair of this series. And I'm just admitting a few people. There we go. Right. So we are so pleased today to have Dr. Mark Kondo as our guest presenter. His talk is titled Emergency Exception and the Colonial Rule of Law in British India, 1800-1947. In this paper, Dr. Kondo's critiques the current Eurocentric understanding of state governance offered by theorist George Ola Agamon in his concept state of exception. Such understandings, Dr. Kondo's argues, fails to take into account how racial differences that render colonial rule an inherent authoritarian and anti-democratic enterprise from the onset. It was core. That sort of was core to the ways in which the colonial rule governed. The blurring of the executive legislation and judicial power that Agamon identifies with the state of exception were in fact, again, integral systemic features of colonial power. Using British India as a case study, Dr. Kondo seeks to reorientate our understanding of the state of emergency away from this framework of exception in order to consider how they may be more usefully considered as general techniques of colonial power. In doing so, he argues that rather than representing a point of rupture or change, the First World War simply offered an opportunity for the British colonial state to draw upon and expand an already extensive repertoire of coercive executive and legal practices that have been central to colonial control since the early 19th century. Dr. Kondo is a historian in the Department of War Studies. He is interested in the intersections between violence, race, and law within the British and French empires, with a particular focus on India and Algeria. He completed both his BA and MA at Queen's University in Canada, and in 2013 he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining us at KCL, Dr. Kondo's held a Leverhue Early Career Research Fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London between 2014 and 2017, and subsequently worked as a lecturer in imperial and global histories between 2017 and 2020. His previous work has examined the relationship between militarism, violence, and state building in colonial Punjab and the Northwest frontier of India. The important role of colonial anxieties and fear in justifying colonial violence, as well as the legal and discursive histories of colonial understanding of fanatical anti-colonial resistance. Currently Dr. Kondo's is working on a number of different projects, including a study of the commemorative history of the little known and Ajnala massacre in 1857, which I think is quite fascinating. Another piece of an abortive mutiny and coup d'etat against British rule in southern India, allegedly orchestrated by deposed Indian princes, as well as a longer comparative book project that explores how concepts of prestige, dignity, and honor informed imperial practices of retributive justice, and the ways the different imperial powers attempt to justify these within legal, moral, and other normative frameworks. Dr. Kondo's is joined today by Dr. Alastair McLeer, who serves as his discussant. Alastair is a historian of modern South Asia and the British Empire. His research focuses largely on the relationship between violence, law, and sovereignty in the context of the 19th and 20th century India and the Indian ocean world. His current publications tackle components of this wider question through the history of royal amnesty and corporal punishment. Before joining the University of Hong Kong, Dr. McLeer completed fellowships at McGill University and the University of Chicago. His research has been supported by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and British Academy. Currently, Alastair is working on his first book project, which examines the history of criminal law in colonial India from 1857 to 1922. This focuses on the underlying tensions between the colonial states' reliance on arguments of exceptionalism and force on the one hand and due process within the codified universal legal regimes on the other. Individual chapters within this book explore the codification of criminal law in India, judicial discretion in murder trials, the introduction of legislation of corporal punishment, forgiveness, and mercy, the reinstatement of sedation laws, and the trials of Indian nationalists such as Mahatma Gandhi. Dr. McLeer's new project examines deportation and reparation in the Indian ocean, framed around questions of who could be moved and where they can be moved to. This project draws on legal cases thrown up from the subaltern actors at the social and geographic peripheries of empire.  I'm super excited for this presentation. So, the audience, how this is going to unfold is we're going to have Mark talk firstly for 20 minutes or so about his presentation and then from there we'll have Alastair come in with his discussant comments and questions before we open it up to you, the audience, for further questions or comments. You can either pose these questions or comments in the chat box and I can read them out loud to Mark or you can raise your zoom hand and ask them live, the choice is yours. But yeah, for now and without further ado, I'm going to hand the floor over to you, Mark. Thank you Amanda for the introduction and thanks everyone. So, can you hear me now? Sorry. Sorry, I thought I pressed the hand. Thanks everyone for joining Amanda and the rest of you. And I was just saying, especially thanks to Alastair who's coming from Hong Kong and I think it's past his bedtime but he's going to soldier on and offer us what I'm sure are very insightful comments. So, I'm just going to share my screen here so you can see my slideshow. Can everyone see this? All right. Okay. Amanda, can you guys see the presentation view normally? No, we see the other view right now, Mark. All right, let's see. How about now? Yes, perfect. There we go. Okay, great. So, the paper I'm going to present today is going to be part of a special edition of First World War Studies. And as Amanda said already, the purpose of this issue is to essentially interrogate Georgie Ogamban's claims that the First World War and its immediate aftermath represented a crucial turning point in the history of states of exception. So, for Ogamban, World War I is important because of not only the sheer number of countries that declared states of emergency or siege during this conflict but because it also opened up an ostensibly new, radically anti-democratic way of thinking and imagining about state power. So, in this paper I'd like sort of take Ogamban to task by arguing that his framework is inherently Eurocentric and fails to take into account how colonial rule was an inherently authoritarian enterprise from the outset, essentially. And to do this I'm going to be using British India as a case study to explore how the blurring of executive, legislative and judicial powers that Ogamban identifies with the state of exception were in fact integral parts of colonial power. And so in so doing I'm hoping to reorient our understandings of states of emergency, whether these be declarations of martial law, the suspension of habeas corpus, the inaction of repressive legislation or the use of executive decrees and ordinances. And I'd like to move this away from the dominant framework of the exception that scholars are working with today in order to consider how these might more usefully be considered general techniques of colonial statecraft. So, as Amanda already said, instead of presenting First World War as a point of rupture or change, as Ogamban does, I'm going to argue that it simply provided a new opportunity for the British colonial state to draw upon an already extensive repertoire of coercive legal and executive powers that had been central to colonial court control since the early 19th century. So, during the past two decades scholars have been increasingly attentive to the way states deployed political and legal frameworks of emergency in order to suspend circumvent and essentially abrogate regular judicial processes, while at the same time conferring extraordinary executive powers upon various agents charged with protecting the state from both its external and internal enemies. And the apparent boundlessness of the contemporary war on terror both in terms of its global reach and temporal indeterminateness in particular has prompted a lot of urgent questions about the harmful effects of a permanent state of emergency and warfare upon society. So, if we look to the work of David Kennedy and Mary Alduzziak, for instance, both these thinkers have argued that what we're witnessing today is essentially the product of an increasing blurring between war and peace. And for both of them this is a problem that has characterized the modern industrial world since the mid to late 19th century. War, they both argue, has essentially ceased to be a temporary interruption of the ordinary procedures that prevailed during peacetime and has instead become embedded into the institutions that govern and regulate everyday life. I argue, however, that Kennedy and Dudziak's observations are based entirely on European and American perspectives and experiences of war and that if we adopt a more global outlook, a very different picture emerges. So, throughout the 19th and early 20th century, many of the key markers that helped uphold the hallowed boundaries between war and peace in the Western world, whether this was distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, public and private actors, and a set of legal principles about the agreed conduct in warfare, all of these things were either already seriously blurred or altogether non-existent in the imperial wars fought outside the Western world. And as Tara Pakawi has pointed out, the way we conceptualize differences between war and peace is through an inherently Eurocentric framework, one that is ultimately untenable in the colonial world, which, as he argues, represented a form of sort of permanent war against the colonized. So, in the colonial world, war, insurrection, and other kinds of emergency requiring the suspension of so-called normal procedures of everyday life could potentially arise at any moment. And thus, as the site of perpetual conflict, the colonial world provides us with a key way of examining these blurry boundaries between the so-called emergency powers of wartime and the everyday manifestations of this, these techniques during so-called times of peace. So scholars have been exploring these ideas for a while now, but what's striking is the extent to which so much of this work is still dominated by the theories of Giorgio Agamben, as well as those of Karl Schmidt, who Agamben built upon. Both these thinkers come from a decidedly Eurocentric tradition, and both wrote almost nothing about the extra-European world. If you look for the influences of these thinkers, Achilles and Bembe, for instance, has used the Agamben's theories to argue that the colonial world was a zone of permanent exception, par excellence, and represented a sort of form of absolute lawlessness in which the brutal violence of empire was enacted through unchecked sovereign discretion of colonial agents. And I argue that this expansive characterization of colonial rule and violence is really too reductive and ultimately inattentive to the myriad ways that law was actually quite central to the imperial project as a means of justifying colonial domination and the indisputably violent practices that it often perpetrated. So I think scholars like John and Jean Comer, for instance, have much more persuasively demonstrated that colonial regimes were actually deeply beholden to the law, especially in moments when they were seen to be transgressing it. So colonial violence was therefore enacted more not through the discretion of sovereigns, but through the techniques of what they call lawfare, the use of legal codes, charters, warrants, administrative regulations, and states of emergency, all of which were used to render violence legible, legal, and legitimate. Nasser Hussein's work on states of emergency in the colonial world is better than Mbembe's in my opinion, but he still also relies heavily on the theories of both Agamben and Schmidt, and his work is essentially attempt to resolve the apparent aporia between the avowed British commitment to the law alongside the frequent course to the use of sovereign discretionary powers during states of emergency. For scholars like Lauren Benton, one of the key problems with these approaches is they hold Europe up as their telos rather than seeking to understand how the colonial world was the site for new kinds of legal innovation. And I believe a more productive line inquiry lies down these roads and also following the work of John Reynolds, who's pointed out how the Schmidt-Agamben paradigm of sovereignty and law obscures the ways sovereign prerogative could actually be built into and operate within the terrain of ordinary legal procedures. So for Reynolds, emergency wasn't something episodic or interruptive. It was a technique of governance, embodied into the everyday functions of colonial regimes. So as I said, my paper takes its path of inquiry from Benton and Reynolds, and it seeks to examine the ways that the repressive measures used by the British colonial state during the First World War were part of a much longer tradition of colonial power where so-called emergency measures were actually routineized and embedded into the everyday function of the colonial state. So this brings us finally to the First World War. So in March of 1915, the government of India passed the notorious Defense of India Act. This was modelled after the defense of realm act passed by the British parliament the previous year. And the Defense of India Act conferred wide-ranging powers to colonial authorities to include in suspension of habeas corpus by allowing indefinite detention of political suspects charged or trial. And it also gave colonial authorities the power to conduct political trials using special commissions or tribunals that did not require a jury. Although it was made very clear that this was only a temporary emergency measure during the war, the government of India took a very controversial decision to extend the Defense of India Act following the war based on the recommendations of the Raul Act committee. So the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act known as the Raul Act provoked widespread outrage across India. It was quickly labelled the Black Act by the Indian public. And the backlash against this was so widespread that it led to violent protests that culminated in the infamous Jalainwalabab massacre in Amritsar in April of 1919. So the repressive measures adopted by the British government both during the war and after under the Raul Act were justified in terms of being exceptional emergency responses to the situation. But as I'm going to demonstrate, this was actually part of a much wider tradition of colonial rule that dates back to the early 19th century. So one of the most common techniques of protecting the state deployed by authorities in times of danger are martial law powers. And martial law is often upheld as the premiere example of the state of emergency and exception. However, as John Collins has recently shown, martial law was always historically understood, debated, and practiced within the procedures of the law. So as such, according to this understanding, martial law isn't a state of exception, but it's an extension of the legal powers granted to officers during periods of emergency. In the case of the East India Company, martial law powers were part of its original charter in order to help curb the rebellious behavior of its own subjects. And during the aggressive period of extended warfare and territorial aggrandizement for the company in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in India, the company saw fit to reaffirm the powers of the governor general to suspend regular law courts, declare martial law, and use court's marshals to try individuals for hostility acts of hostility or rebellion against the state under regulation 10 of 1804, which is also known as the Bengal State Offenses Regulation. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, the company periodically drew upon these martial law powers during its wars against various mobile successory states in India and also to suppress revolts against its authority. But of course, the most spectacular use of martial law powers in India occurred during the Indian uprising or mutiny of 1857. During this conflict, the widespread nature of the revolt and the desperate position of the British convinced the governor general Charles Canning, the man on the left here, that ordinary martial law powers were insufficient. And so between May and June of 1857, he and his legislative council passed in a series of emergency statutes granting even wider ranging powers to suppress the rebellion. And through these laws, Canning and his government not only augmented and expanded the purview of martial law powers available to colonial officers, but they also clarified the procedures used in their implementation. And I don't want to overstate the extent to which the British adhered to the rule of law during the uprising. There were of course widespread and egregious abuses of authority, as we can see from the sort of pictures on the right there. But the point I would like to make is that the inaction and practice of martial law during this crisis wasn't merely done through sovereign decree, but it was carefully implemented and regulated through the procedures of the law itself. So rather than this being a purely performative manifestation of sovereign power that exists entirely outside the law, according to sort of the Schmitts, Agamben, Walter Benjamin paradigm, martial law was actually an established mechanism of emergency rule that was ultimately enabled and adjudicated through the law in this case. Another key power that's often sought by authorities during times of danger or emergency is preventive detention. And one of the earliest and most enduring examples of the ways the British regime embedded emergency powers into the everyday functioning of the law was through the regulation through the Teenage Teen, also known as the State Prisoners Act. So this law enabled the Governor General to suspend habeas corpus and issue warrants for the arrest and detention of any individual suspected of undermining the safety and security of the colonial regime. One of the most illuminated examples of the use of the colonial state's reliance on this law occurred during the so-called Wahhabi Scare of the 1860s and 70s. And this is when the government used the law to arrest and detain Amir and Hasma.com, both of whom were accused of being part of a wide ranging fanatical Muslim anti-colonial conspiracy. When the Khan brother's lawyer mounted a legal challenge against regulation 3 of 1818 and he demanded a writ of habeas corpus, the high court sided with the government. And the decision by Chief Justice JP Norman to deny the writ of habeas corpus is really revealing about the ways emergency measures were built into the everyday workings of the state. So Norman gestured to the numerous wars, conflicts and other threats that British had faced in India both before and after the enactment of the regulation 3 of 1818. And he concluded that this law was indispensable in a country where there was always a permanent danger to the state. And Norman's characterization of the permanent danger allegedly posed to the state thus explicitly acknowledged that it was impossible to distinguish between periods of emergency and non-emergency in India. So in effect, Norman is saying that emergency was the norm in India. Following the Indian uprising, India underwent major constitutional changes as sovereignty was transferred from the East India Company to the British Crown. But many of the problematic issues with the blurring between executive, judicial and police functions continued. So in 1861 the India Council's Act made specific provisions for the Viceroy to retain emergency lawmaking powers in the form of ordinances and this effectively bypassed the normal legislative framework. And in a dispatch from August of 1861, Sir Charles Wood, the Secretary of State for India, admitted the extraordinary nature of this power but emphasised it was absolutely necessary to preserve the security and stability of the British regime. In the decades following the India Council's Act, Viceroy's generally exercised this power very sparingly. But it was massively expanded during the First World War. It was used 12 times just between 1914 and 15 alone. And one of the most notable usages of this was the ingress into or India ordinance of 1914, which granted officials the power to restrict the movement of return immigrants by either indefinitely detaining them or confining them to their villages. During the war, the government also passed the Emergency Legislation Continuance Act, enabling ordinances issued during the war to extend beyond their normal six-month period of expiry, many of which remained in force until 1922 and weren't officially repealed until 1927. And during the interwar period, the government also continued to use these repressive capabilities against the growing Indian nationalist movement. Alongside its continued ability to rule by ordinance and decree, the British colonial states continued to promulgate so-called repressive legislation, which was specifically designed to grant officers powers to deal with persuasive threats to colonial security. So the murderous outrages of 1867, for instance, a law I've written a lot about, granted colonial officials along India's dangerous northwest frontier, wide-ranging discretionary powers to try and execute fanatics were deemed an existential threat to the state. And although this law was only meant to be applied to the limited region of the frontier for only a few years, it was gradually expanded both in it being renewed time after time, and its jurisdiction was gradually enlarged as well. And what's really interesting is that in the early 20th century, when the British were facing revolutionary violence in places like Bengal, what we would identify now as sort of terrorist violence, they used the murderous outrages act as a sort of frame for how to frame terrorist violence, comparing them often to fanatics. It was also, this law was also used alongside Regulation 3 of 1818 and the Defense of India Act to indefinitely detain prisoners during the First World War. And following the war, the government of India continued to develop new kinds of repressive legislation to fight against revolutionary violence, terrorist violence. These included the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Acts of 1925, the Bengal Criminal Law Arms and Explosives Act of 1932, and the notorious Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act of 1932. So I'm going to move now finally to some sort of conclusion. So through the interwar period, the Second World War, right to the end of British rule in 1947, the government of India continued to rely on extraordinary legal powers to arrest, detain, trying to evict revolutionaries, enemies of the state, fanatics, hereditary criminals, anyone who was deemed threatening to the colonial regime. And as I hope to demonstrate in this paper, the British colonial regime's frequent recourse to these kinds of repressive legal measures outside of formally declared periods of emergency began well before the First World War, which did not mark so much a turning point as it did the culmination of a wider logic of authoritarian rule. The durability and longevity of these permanent techniques of emergency rule extended well beyond the colonial period into the post-colonial present. So regulation 3 of 1818, for instance, not only lasted until the final days of the Raj, but it was also retained by independent India until 1952 when it was replaced with similar legislation. Since independence, both Pakistan and India continued to regularly deploy draconian powers, preventive detention, other repressive legal measures to maintain order and control. Both the Indian constitution of 1950 and various Pakistani constitutions promulgated between 1956 and 1973, drew upon British constitutional precedents and retained various emergency provisions. More recently, the logic of perpetual colonial emergency has been replaced by a logic of anti-terrorism. So the Indian Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002, for instance, built upon colonial precedents and was widely used to persecute even ordinary criminals rather than terrorism-related offenses before its repeal in 2004. So when we look at the repressive legislation and use of emergency powers during peacetime in the colonial world, through the lens of the metropolis, these kinds of actions invariably seem exceptional. However, I argue if we adopt the vantage point of the colony itself, a very different picture emerges in a context where forced repression and violence were the norm. Laws like Regulation 3, the Murderous Outrages Act, the Ingressant in the Ordinance or the Defence of India Act were simply products of a wider logic of colonialism. As an autocratic authoritarian regime obsessed with maintaining its own stability at any cost, the British colonial state in India privileged security and embedded these into its everyday governing fabric. The colonial world was organised along an entirely different legal register from the metropolis, which is why attempts to understand it through the exception are less productive than looking to ways in which it was the site for the creation of new kinds of statecraft and legal innovation. And from this vantage point, we might also actually turn the mirror back against Europe itself and argue that the reason the First World War is seen as such a turning point in modern statecraft by Agamba and others is because this is a moment when Europe began to resemble less a metropolitan space and more of a colonial one. So the blurring between war and peace between executive, legislative and judicial functions and the existence of a state of permanent emergency is not something unique to the post First World War or even post 9-11 world, but it has been a distinctive feature of colonial war for centuries. So I'll end it there and look forward to Alastair's comments and your questions. Thanks. Okay, so I can jump in now, I think. So thanks Mark for first asking me to comment on what was a really enjoyable and stimulating paper. So I've read the wider paper, so my comments will pertain to some of those things, but I'll make sure that they they sent on what we've heard to her today. And I think it's particularly interesting and apt that we're thinking about some of these questions in our current climate, right, where questions of emergency and state power very much part of public discourse. So as Mark points out, his recent work builds on a really important set of, I think, recent scholarship that has gone a long way to dispel the idea that the rule of law was anything other than a discourse attached to the civilizing mission in many kind of colonial histories. But it's been much more powerful, I think, than simply holding up the idea of colonial promise to colonial practice. What it's done, I think, and what Mark's work does really powerfully in this in this paper is it forces us or forces a particular set of historical assumptions that I think were held in a certain liberal reading of 19th, 20th century world history to take more seriously the importance of histories that predated the sort of crises that happened in Europe in the 20th century. And that in this context is the colony India and Empire. And that I think is a really powerful argument. What it does, as Mark was saying in his papers, is it decenters Europe as the primary site for original experiments in exception in sovereignty and state violence, and asked us to bring forth the colony not as a peripheral space, but as actually the central space. And that I think is a really important argument. And then the other argument which he which I think is really powerful and again, I think is very is the one we have to take more seriously is that he convincingly demonstrates that an anxiety that some scholars are kind of coming to now in the post 911 world about permanent exception, perpetual emergency, a sudden kind of a sudden unsteadying of modern conceptions of civil liberties and the rule of law, when framed with a short historical lens are only really possible because like we said, the empire is not taken seriously in those histories. And so what I thought from someone who is interested in South Asia primarily, what I thought was most exciting, or maybe not most exciting, but was exciting about the paper was that what Mark does is he takes such a huge event like World War One, and says actually we need to think about specific laws like in the paper he talks about the criminal tribes act, which affects the particular community, or the regulation three of 1818, the State Prisoners Act, and says that World War One's history has to take has to engage in these histories that have affected communities or people in 19th century India. And that I think is a really useful way to think about the deeper histories of World War One outside of European context. So I've just got two questions or a question and a kind of a problem that I'll just pose to kind of begin the conversation. And these are things that pique my interest and I will admit they have, they speak to my own research interests. So there's a little bit of selfishness there. What I wanted to hear a little bit more about is in the paper you, Mark, you talk a little bit about the way in which there is a routinisation of emergency in the context of the British Empire, in this case India. And when I read the paper, it does, the wider paper does a really good job of laying out the ways in which if you start in 1818, you can just see the colonial state once it gets a taste for these emergency powers, just builds more and more and more of them. So you start with 1818, then you talk about the Thuggy Act, the Moppler Act, then the Criminal Tribes Act. So it's just meetings out, murders out, rages out. They go on and on and on, wipe up until today. And to me that is an argument that's not about just a bleeding of exceptionality into the everyday. It's about the expanding of the exception constantly. The question I have for you is kind of a methodological question. And I wonder whether is there a possibility in, because what I think the law does really effectively is it defines for itself what is the emergency and what is the political, what are political crimes and what are non-political crimes. And then actually I think one of the things I was wondering is, if we follow those laws too strictly, do we miss the ways in which the types of legal practices and procedures that don't define them, that aren't defined as emergencies or aren't put in the design of political, actually in substantial terms really resemble the same thing. So I'm thinking about everyday practices. So the ways in which in the colony, the magistrate can have, not if it's for petty crimes, can have hugely wide discretionary authority that there will be lots and lots and lots of under trial prisoners who would never have seen the court. There would be, as we talked in the past, whipping or capital punishment happens on such a wider scale. If you have legal defense in the metropolitan, often you won't have it in the colony. And these are not like, these are not defined as emergency practices, they're not necessarily targeting political actors, but the nature of being a criminal subject means that what is an emergency and maybe in the metropolitan can just be everyday in the colony. So the question I have in that sense is, to what degree can you also bring in everyday practices, which aren't in that genealogy of emergency into the frame of your analysis? And the second question I have is something which, again, I thought about when you were talking and it's about the critique you have of Eugenbin and Schmidt, which I think is very well taken and important. And when I read the paper, I read it again this morning and it hit me again. And it's just so interesting to me that the moment that someone like Eugenbin, the World War One, which is the moment that someone like Eugenbin can say until recently without too much pushback, but this is the turning point of world history towards new forms of emergency, is precisely the moment, like you say in your paper, that someone like Jinnah or Gandhi would actually turn against empire for the first time, fully. And they'll say, this is actually, we'll give up any kind of loyalty to empires over now and we're going to move towards a new form of political imaginary, which is decolonization, essentially. And the fact that the moment in which Eugenbin can see this anxiety of emergency is the moment which a Gandhi or a Jinnah will start to see new worlds of political life which separate themselves from the colony. I don't know what to do with that, but to me I think it makes, again, even more problematic, that he can't see that there was an opportunity there for people outside of Europe to think differently about politics, about rights. And so I don't know what to do with that, but I wanted to ask whether you thought there was something, whether we can push again, but even harder, not that he's some imperialist, but there's something about it which I think is deeply troubling, that he can't seem to see those histories in his writing. So those were the two comments, but I really enjoyed the paper, I thought it was very rich and I learned a lot from it. So thank you. That's fantastic. Thank you, Mark and Al. Thanks. Oh, Mark, I'm just going to say before I let you jump in, just remind the audience that, yeah, Mark, I'll let you respond to Al's comments now. But the audience, if you have any questions or comments of this fascinating talk and session points, just please raise your hand or put it in the chat box. But now, Mark, the floor is yours. Sure. Can everyone hear me okay? I increased the volume on my mic, but is this okay? Okay. So yeah, thanks again for your really enthusiastic and detailed engagement with this. In response to your first question, yeah, I think definitely we can't just look to these big emergency laws or laws that are designed to deal with political crimes and high stakes things. And we actually have to look to the embeddedness of this in everyday practice, as you said. And the Criminal Tribes Act, I think, is a good example of this, right? Because I didn't have time to talk about it in the talk I just gave, but I do mention it briefly in my paper. But you know, this is a law, it's not conceived as an emergency, but the British say that, well, there's this pervasive threat by all these wandering bands of criminals across Northern India. And we can tell them by their tribe, their caste, whatever else. So we need to regulate them. And this is done through a law that stays in place throughout the rest of colonial rule. It stays in place in independent India under the Habitual Offenders Act. And it defines the daily existence of people who are labeled as threatening under this law. They have to report to a police magistrate if he demands it, he can imprison them arbitrarily. So as Alaser said, you know, this this everyday law, in a way, gives extraordinary executive power and authority to colonial officials. Radhika Singh has written recently about this, which I think is really good work. And to me, what's really interesting is that this is a codified law. This happens after codification begins in India. And codification, in theory, is meant to erode arbitrary sovereignty and arbitrary discretion when it comes to the application and enforcement of the law. But the men who are drafting these codified laws are men like Henry Mayne and James, it's James Stephen. And the treatise on law, where he very clearly states that he doesn't see codified laws as necessarily eroding executive power and discretion. He sees it as strengthening them. So for him, you can give the officer a great deal of power through the letter of the law. And there's a fundamental tension here between Stephen's approach and how, say, Carl Schmidt would define discretionary authority because Schmidt, in the Agamben paradigm, it's all about the sovereign being completely outside of the law. He doesn't have the prerogative, the discretion, except for that there's no law defining and holding him. Whereas Stephen and the colonial state actually tried to process that into the everyday workings of the law. And that is, again, why I think it is important that we look to these more mundane everyday sort of legal practices. And yeah, that's something I'd be very happy to expand on more in future work. But yeah, as I said, this piece is geared towards the First World War. So I decided to take a sort of lingerie look at sort of big legal innovations and changes. In terms of this question about, you know, crisis of empire, Agamben seen this also as the beginning of a crisis of sort of democracy in the metropoles, I think it's really interesting. I've still been mulling it over since you first proposed this to me. And one has to wonder, I think in a lot of ways, you know, why did the British and French colonial states, for instance, why did they resort so much more to emergency powers in the colonies after the First World War and particularly after the Second World War? It's because they faced sustained nationalist decolonization movements, right? And they need emergency powers in their arsenal. The states of emergency are enacted in Malaya, Kenya, Palestine, Algeria, of course, Indochina. And so one, I'd be very curious to look more into this sort of relationship between this with the extent to which the authoritarianism of European states is actually a product of them clamping down on these these decolonization, these liberation movements. And to what extent again, the colonial world is being a driver of change and prompting greater authoritarianism from metropolitan states like Britain and France. But I haven't thought enough about this, but I think it's a really interesting sort of avenue to look down for sort of future research. So I'll end my responses to you there, Alistair, but I'm sure we'll come back to these in future discussions. Great. Thank you. We have a question now from Hilary. Hilary, did you want to ask it live? Sure. Thanks, Mark. It's a great presentation. You know, I'm super interested in your work. And thanks, Alistair, for the comments. And I find your argument very persuasive. And my question really is about two, I know you use India as your case study to go into depth, but to what extent would you argue that these practices and these processes are representative of the overall British imperial approach, so they're representative of British empire and not uniquely associated to the British relationship with India? Thanks for that question, Hilary. You know, India is sort of my main area of expertise still, obviously. So that's why I always go back to it. But I have been reading up a lot recently, but I've just been rereading David Anderson's Histories of the Hang on the Kenyan emergency, which is all about the use of law there in sort of the show trials against Mao Mao's success specs. And as I was sort of saying in response to Alistair's question, emergency is sort of the go to method of power during the wars of decolonization in the 19, at the end of 1940s, 50s and 60s. So there's emergency, as I said, in Malaya, Palestine, and Auden, in Cyprus, in Kenya. I'm not sure if they do. There's an emergency in Rhodesia at some point. It wouldn't surprise me. It's the same thing in the French Empire in Algeria and Indochina. The Portuguese declare emergencies in Angola. So emergency becomes like a governing framework, basically, to maintain authoritarian control in the face of increasingly democratic anti-colonial movements. One thing I think would be interesting to look at, however, is maybe the differences in the way emergency powers are deployed between different colonial states. So, you know, places like Kenya and Algeria are settler colonies. And there's very different racial dynamics there that are played in, say, in India. And the way the law operates in terms of emergency procedures there I think would be interesting. There's, of course, differences between the French Empire and the British, right? The British always eschew this image of militarism. They say that, you know, they're like Athens, they're commercial free traders, and that's what their empire is about. Whereas the French are always tired with this brush of being extremely militaristic. And to some extent that is true. The military had a huge amount of authority and power in places like Algeria for much longer. And in the Algerian case, when the emergency is declared there during the Algerian War of Independence, the military basically takes over the entire government of the colony. Whereas in a place like Kenya, what's interesting is that the military works very closely beside this, beside the civil government, but it's not that the military takes over all together. Which I think is a misperception too. When people think of martial law, it's that the civil government is completely subsumed. Martial law, actually civil powers, often from what I've seen in different emergencies, work alongside the military and they're used as sort of supplementary authority to prosecute martial law. So in 1857 in India, civil officers are given martial law powers because they realize that there's not enough military officers to fight rebels and to hang them at the same time. And you said you're interested in 1919 in Amritsar. My friend and colleague Kim Bogner, his book, which I think is really brilliant and really interesting is he, first of all, he finds out that martial law wasn't declared by the time this massacre took place at Jalian Wallop. The civil law was fully in effect after that. And even after martial law was declared, the civilian administration still kept functioning. Which is again why I don't think we can just see martial law as this period of lawlessness when the military just takes over. There is a lot of collaboration and functioning between civil administrations and the military still there. So that's my very discursive, roundly answer to your question, Hilary, but I'd be happy to talk more about this in future. No, it's great. And it made me think as well of the case in British Honduras during the same time where the police, there was close collaboration between the civil authorities and the police as well. They're partly because the British didn't have enough of their own forces to comprehensively implement things like martial law even after the uprising in 1919. So yeah, I would love to discuss this with you sometime. Great. So we have also another follow-up question from an audience member and then I'm going to use my position as chair to ask a question of my own mark. So one of the audience members said, very concerning when so-called exceptional powers promulgated within wartime are held and carried into peacetime. He's a post-World War I. You mentioned that Pakistan kept such power post-independence and India. So what British draconian laws have been continued till now in India and Pakistan? So I guess maybe the legacy of these. And then my question is just to pull, sorry, is just to pull more on your conversation you had with Hillary too around the indigenous collaborators, I guess, like how does racial logic kind of separate from the dangerous, suspicious kind of indigenous to someone that, you know, a hierarchy, someone that we can trust to administer or help administer these sorts of laws. I just wonder the racial dynamics that played into producing hierarchies of indigenous people too. So great. Thank you. All right. So I'll answer Leslie's question first. So I tried to touch on this a little bit in my conclusion, which I, of course, had to cut down a lot from the original paper. And I'm blanking on all the, in the original paper I've listed a whole bunch of laws actually that India or Pakistan either retained after independence and then just sort of change the wording around a bit or essentially replaced these laws, these draconian laws with new ones along the exact same line. So I think the 2002 Terrorist Prevention Act is one of the examples I mentioned in the case of India. In the case of Pakistan, one thing I was really floored to discover when I was first writing about the Murderous Outrageous Act. I started coming to this at the end of my PhD around 2013 and that Pakistan still had this on its statue books. They still had the 1867 Murderous Outrageous Act in place in what was then the federally administered tribal areas. So along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And they were using this in the war on terror. So you could literally see a colonial law designed against Muslim fanatics. And it's it being reprocessed and carried on in the contemporary war of terror. So in that case, not just the discursive and legal category of fanatics informing what a modern day terrorist is, but the same law being used. I mean, I don't have enough information on how much it was used, but it was still on the statue books when I was researching back then. So that to me was really, really striking. In other cases, I mean, the Indian Penal Code is a good example of continuation of colonial law. So this was written first in 1860, drafted originally in 1830.   But the Indian Penal Code also has sections of the law that are specifically designed to protect the state against addition. And, you know, the British use this very, very widely during the Indian nationalist movement to arrest figures like Gandhi, Nehru, and others who are agitating for freedoms. And I think it's 123B or 123A is the section of the Indian Penal Code on sedition. And the current Indian government is using that to arrest farmers right now and farmers protests. Just a little more contemporary stuff. The controversy with Greta Thunberg and Rihanna, who put their support behind the farmers movement. There was an FIR report done by the Delhi police on Rihanna and Greta Thunberg under this section of this colonial era law for sedition. So the post-colonial states have inherited these colonial legal systems. And I would say they've inherited a lot of the authoritarianism of the colonial rulers beforehand in using them. So I hope that answers your question, Leslie. So, Amanda, your question was about sort of... Sorry. Is that also being used, that law against journalists who are covering the farmers thing and have come with opinions that the government doesn't like? Yeah, it's very wide ranging. It's about sedition. So, and sedition, of course, is not defined in the law. Sort of like the term fanatic is not defined in the murderous outreach as that. So it gives enormous, again, discretion for local authorities to define what is sedition. And another sort of charge that we will often see against people protesting government actions in India these days is being anti-national. So I remember when I was in Delhi around 2013 or 14, I think this is when there were protests at JNU, and Kanhaya Kumar was arrested as a student sort of activist under the same colonial era sedition law as Gandhi was. So you see a very clear continuity, but instead of now of them being nationalist leaders who are fighting it, it's people who are criticizing the government being locked up under these laws. Does that answer your question, Leslie? Yes. Okay, I'll take that as a yes. All right. So, Amanda, your question about indigenous collaborators. So this has been something discussed by scholars since the old Cambridge School of the 1970s, right? And it's been a sort of very highly politicized debate in some ways about how we approach this topic. But as Gandhi himself recognized, empire doesn't work unless the colonized people collaborate and cooperate.  You don't work with the British, they can't function. And the British, the French, whatever colonized in power, they're always very good about enlisting certain groups, patronizing them, making sure they were beneficiaries of colonial rule, and then they would then also enforce colonial rule amongst other people within them. So the British had sort of princes in the princely states in India, they had martial races, of course, as you write about your own research, to keep these groups off one another, they would also sort of, you know, favor more moderate politicians, whatever it was. In places like Kenya, the British colonial states used traditional tribal chiefs, elders, headmen, these sorts of things as bull works for the colonial regime against sort of the nationalist movements of Kenyatta and the more militant wing of the Mao Mao. And I think this is why, you know, colonial struggles are very complex, because who constitutes the nation, who is fighting for freedom is very different, because there are lots of groups within these countries that don't see themselves as being on the side of the nationalists. The nationalists are constantly having divisions amongst themselves. And in some ways, you know, some people argue that wars of decolonization in places like Zimbabwe and Kenya are actually in a lot of ways civil wars between these different indigenous communities who have been divided and ruled by the colonial regime and have exacerbated existing socioeconomic, political, and historic tensions between different groups. And there's this huge fallout, of course, today in the post-colonial world because of these divisions. Hopefully that sort of answered a bit what you're asking about, Amanda. Oh, sorry, you want to know more about who we discern as loyal and who is it, right? Was that? Yeah, just, I mean, the messiness of what Alistair says the every day too, right? The ways in which these racial, gender, caste, kind of politics play into how, you know, and that relationship, that ambivalence, right, of who's determined loyal or trustworthy otherwise. Yeah, so they're, you know, the British often look for the sort of traditional brokers of authority and power. So, you know, in the early 19th century, they patronized sort of high caste Brahmin groups who they saw were the natural leaders. And, you know, if we want to institute change, we convince them first, and then they'll do a sort of, it'll triple down. You know, in the case of martial races, right, you know, whether it's Sikhs or Gurkhas or Punjabi Muslims, these are groups who stood by the British in a time of crisis, helped them suppress the uprising in 1857, and therefore are very much rewarded as a result of that. But what's interesting is, you know, these, who's loyal, who's not, is very complicated, because in the case of Sikhs, for instance, the British uphold them as the premier martial race, the most loyal of the loyal, Punjab is the nursery of their post 1857 Indian army. But at the same time, as I've written about in my book, they remain acutely anxious that, you know, if the Sikhs are unhappy, if there's a revolt here, the entire empire will crumble, because we put all our eggs in one basket. And so the British bend over backwards to keep certain groups content in places like Punjab, especially when it comes to the Sikh community, which of course leads to massive economic infrastructure development with canal colonies, and essentially the militarization of Punjabi society, which then Pakistan inherited at partition, a very over strong over powerful military that had its teeth into rural society politics economy. And as one of the reasons Pakistan has had so many military coups and periods of military rule since the post colonial period. But yeah, the question of loyalty is always very difficult. And even groups that somehow were collaborators, could often be playing the colonizers off against themselves, taking advantage of them, you know, martial races, Pashtuns, for instance, were a martial race, right? But lots of Pashtuns would join the British service, they would get the new fancy rifles and weapons, and they would just abscond and then use them to shoot at the British, right? There are lots of tribal chiefs in Kenya who were happy to take British money, and just continue to do their own thing. So there are lots of acts of resistance, even within these so-called collaborators and collaborator networks. Great, thank you. And then of course, Hilary is putting comments, you know, just this to further unpack, right, how we understand collaborative motivations of aligning or otherwise, or yeah, so the everyday messiness of all of this, which is which is fascinating, right? So yeah, great, thank you. So Matilda, I don't know if you had your hand up or not. Did you want to ask the question? Yeah, I did. Mark, thank you so much for this talk. Really interesting. And I actually have two points. One is more of a comment, and then the other one is a question. So the thing that you raised about, I'm not sure if it was the Regulation Three Act or something right after, in terms of the preventive detention, which was used in 1914 and 15, the way that it was, or as far as I could read what it said on the slide, there seemed to be a lot of parallels in the wording in terms of security narratives towards people coming in from the outside into the British, Raj, with what we see in European border politics nowadays. So those narratives, it struck me a little that it was so obvious that you could find them in today's narratives of how to preventively, I don't know, capture and detain people who might actually be a form of, I don't know, national or pose some sort of national security problem or issue or whatever. So I was just wondering whether, I mean, one thing is to compare those, right, compare those two narratives and try to understand what, let's say, colonial underlying structures we might find in there. But I wonder what, you know, what larger implications this might actually have for the involvement of security as a whole, like for today's security politics. And then the other thing which I wanted to ask you was because you were talking about the use of certain colonial laws in post-colonial Pakistan. I just wonder whether you see any process or any developments in terms of that the Hindutva movement led by Modi or the BJP is kind of using, starts to use more of these post-colonial laws or formerly colonial laws than, I don't know, I'd say more moderate governments before, let's say under Singh or whoever else. I'm just interested whether you see there's a parallel between these nationalist movements and the use of these laws. Okay, thanks for those questions. I'll think I'll go to the first one, which I think is interesting, this question of borders and border crossing. And I would say this has always been a concern and a source of anxiety for states and particularly colonial states because, you know, a state, it wants to have people fixed in a certain area so they know exactly how many people are there, how much they can tax, they can know who they are, whether they're threatening or not. But when people move across porous borders, this presents a problem for the state, and they don't know if there's economic smuggling going on, if there's threatening political ideas moving back and forth. So borders have always been a concern, at least in colonial India. You know, I've written a lot about the northwest frontier, which between, was British India and Afghanistan at the time, the British were of course very worried about fanaticism and sort of Muslim extremists coming in from Afghanistan across these borders. They're very worried about smuggling and criminality across the internal borders in India because there's princely states at this time, which are semi-independent, and the British actually have to have extradition treaties with these Indian princely states to get criminals back. Eric Bailey's written about this in the case of Hyderabad, and this caused conflicts between the British colonial state and these internal other princely states. There's also French territory in India at this time as well. And the British were very, very worried in the case of a place called Sunder Nagore, which is a suburb of Calcutta essentially, which was a haven for revolutionary activity in the early 20th century. And this is because it was under French jurisdiction, and revolutionaries could order weapons, print propaganda, plan attacks in French territory, carry them out in British territory, and just cross the border, and the British couldn't do anything about it. So borders are always a key concern for states and controlling them. And we can see, you know, the ingress in the Indian ordinance in the First World War. This was because the British were worried about radicalized Indians, particularly gathered party members from the west coast of Canada and the United States coming back into India during the war and fermenting, uprising, and insurrection, which they indeed tried to do. And so, yeah, regulation three is part of that, right? It's part of this expansive fear of, you know, destabilizing elements crossing borders, which were very fluid at the time it was drafted in 1818. This was a period of big territorial conquest, and the British were still sorting out everything. And I think one they wanted to do is give themselves as much the way as possible to control the movement of people. And, yeah, of course, today, whether it's, you know, the US border with Mexico or, you know, the UK border with the entire rest of the world, as it were, there is, I think we can see the same concerns about states in terms of whether there's a sort of continuation of colonial logic there. I'm not really sure I haven't thought about that so much. But it might be an interesting thing to think more deeply about. In terms of your question about, you know, do sort of more authoritarian right-wing groups like, you know, the RSS, for instance, resort to draconian laws more authoritatively or more frequently. I would say it seems that way right now. But if you look at the history of post-colonial India, for instance, one of the biggest abuses of liberty was done by the Congress party, the party of Gandhi and Nehru by India Gandhi in the Indian emergency, when she literally suspended the constitution, declared that elections had been rigged against her. And it was an emergency rule from 75 to 77 Alistair, emergency rule in India in the 20th century. And that was done by the so-called good guys, as it were. So I think it's not necessarily one side or the other. But what I think is dangerous is when states have these executive powers, they have this broad framework of emergency to work with. And this is the thing, a dumpling point is that when states acquire these more expansive powers, they're very low to give them up. And it's the same thing with colonial states. And this is why these repressive laws, they stay on the statute books for over hundreds of years. There's Indian nationalists in the 20s and 30s and they're writing, why does regulation 3 still exist? This is absolutely archaic to modern conceptions of political liberty. But states don't want to give up these extraordinary powers once they happen because they can draw upon them whenever they're challenged. And depending on their commitment to democracy or not, we'll use them against those they see as threatening to their rule. That's what an amazing conversation. And I think this brings us back to Alan James's point before he had to scoot off too, is that a broader discussion around this blurring between war and peace and that we're talking about is not just pronounced the farther away from Europe, but it also gets, but also how far into the past beyond the 19th century. So the continuity is right in the ways in which we can lessons learned of how governance in India, but also similar strategies around how crisis is understood and how security threats are understood will stop states in the global north to global south more broadly too. So I've personally learned so much today, Mark, Alistair and Wicked Smart questions from the audience too. So thank you so much to Mark and Alistair specifically and then also the audience more generally for this intellectually vibrating lunch hour. So I want to thank you all for coming and next Wednesday we have another new voices. So please it's the same link I believe. So please come along to that as well. I guess Mark and Alistair, I'll give you the final words before we sign off. Just say thank you for Amanda for organizing this and inviting me and for Alistair for staying up so late to participate in this discussion and follow you for joining and asking your questions. This was a really good forum to sort of sound out, think through some of these ideas that I'm still working with on this article. So thank you all. I want to say thank you both for Mark and Amanda for having me and I really enjoyed it. It was and it's not too late. It's only it's about 9 30 so it's fine. I've just