Castaways in Their Own Country: State Power and Internal Exile

State violence as an exercise of state power leading political dissidents, journalists and artists amongst other groups to flee their home country and go into exile is well understood. What has received less attention is what I call internal exile. Internal exile is a dynamic process whereby the State uses its power (symbolic and material) to exclude those who are deemed unworthy of full citizenship from civil space. It casts these groups as not belonging to a nation’s social imaginary and as threatening its social order. When successful, internal exile is totalising and determines the entire experience of citizenship.

This presentation aims to conceptualise internal exile as communicatively constructed and materially translated. Communicatively, the State uses its symbolic power to cast certain groups as ‘the other’ through language that stigmatises, stereotypes, dehumanises and inferiorises. Ultimately, such language infiltrates everyday judgements, everyday language and civil norms. When this happens, internal exile becomes banal and the internally exiled become disattendable and thereby lose audibility, visibility, individuality and civil status. This, in turn, legitimises the material translation of internal exile: the expulsion of these groups from civil space. The expulsion from civil space has, as this presentation will show, urban, physical, educational, social, legal, political and cultural consequences.

Previous approaches have for example focused on exclusion based on race gender or class – but failed to capture that these are illustrations of a social fact in the Durkheimian sense and that is, that internal exile is the defining dynamic of ‘the dark side of civil society’ and shows the partiality of the social contract.