GHASSAN HAGE University of Melbourne ´ Etat de si` ege: A dying domesticating colonialism? ABSTRACT The sentiment of being “surrounded by barbarians” was once specific to settler-colonial societies. But as the European refugee crisis made headlines in 2015, it became evident that this sentiment is gaining widespread currency in the Western world. Three developments lie behind its extension: first, the resurgence in the militarized Western appropriation of world resources and its colonial imaginary; second, the crisis in the order of the national borders that has regulated the exploitation of land, resources, and labor in the neocolonial era; and third, the ecological crisis, which equally manifests itself as a crisis in the order of the borders of domestication that defined the modern exploitation of nature. Analyzing the intersection of these social processes offers us important insights into some of the dominant dynamics of Western culture today. [settler colonialism, primitive accumulation, refugee crisis, national borders, ecological crisis, Agamben] T he two parts of this article’s title evoke a pair of works that are well known in anthropology, even though they originated outside it. The main title, “ ´ Etat de si` ege,” is a French legal concept that was famously examined by Giorgio Agamben (2005). In particu- lar, Agamben worked on the distinction between an ´ etat de si` ege “r´ eel,” “effectif,” or “militaire” and an ´ etat de si` ege “fictif”—that is, between a real and a fictional state of siege. This distinction was an important build- ing block for Agamben’s widely used conceptualization of the “permanent state of exception”: the mode of governmentality that hovers on the bor- derline between legality and force and that, as Agamben argued in dialogue with Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, is symptomatic of our times. My subtitle, “A Dying Domesticating Colonialism,” incorporates the title of Frantz Fanon’s (1967) book A Dying Colonialism. There, Fanon is concerned with the forces at work in the final stages of the French settler-colonialist venture in Algeria. I am, however, connecting to “dying colonialism” the idea of a “dying domestication”: the final stages of an equally colonial mode of instrumentalizing, dominating, and exploiting the natural world, as well as differentiating oneself from it. In what follows, I create a space of interplay between these themes to help explain how the feeling of being “under siege” has become in- creasingly pervasive in the contemporary Western world. 1 I am also con- cerned with the way it has become integral to a dominant mode of governmentality. 2 This feeling emerges amid what I will refer to as a colo- nial crisis, generated by the rise in the number of people seeking asylum in Europe, the resurgence of Western militarist interventionism in the Mid- dle East, and the various forms of Muslim self-affirmation that have ac- companied it. I will finish by arguing that the intensity of this colonially derived sense of besiegement cannot be fully understood without tak- ing into account a similar sense of besiegement generated by the eco- logical crisis. In doing so, I will stress the importance of analyzing the way both crises interact. AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 38–49, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C  2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12261