The theoretical foundation for arbitrary rule is best articulated through Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception. In his work, the Italian political philosopher testifies that arbitrary rule is accessible to governments through the state of exception: a modality of government where democracies insist upon exercising tyrannical rule by imagining various crises to warrant the suspension of legal norms in the name of “securing” the state (Agamben, 2005, p. 28). However, Agamben's predicate can be interrogated along a few lines of flight in the context of the status quo: specifically, what exactly is arbitrary rule in the state of exception? What types of rules, standards, and political maneuvers are proliferated in this political terrain?

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This essay aims to better formulate arbitrary rule in the state of exception by interrogating scenes of refugee subordination in humanitarian aid organizations and court systems. The experiences of Ra Pronh from Eric Tang's work Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the Hyperghetto, and Keldy Mabel Gonzales Brebe de Zuniga from Jonathan Blitzer’s 2024 article “Do I Have to Come Here Injured or Dead?” unveil how arbitrary rule is exercised by states to define refugee inclusion and surveil refugee movements; ultimately, both scenes provide a firm illustration of how arbitrary rule in the state of exception operates to reinforce the carceral subjection of refugee life.

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Ra and Keldy’s differing experiences in the court system display how legislative bodies exercise arbitrary rule in the state of exception by sporadically defining who ought to be included and who ought to be suspended from membership. While Ra was granted access to enter the nation by immigration officers, Keldy was not; yet, framing their experiences through arbitrary rule in the state of exception provides an apropos theoretical backdrop to reconcile inconsistencies in their respective ordeals. In particular, Keldy was asked by an immigration officer during an interview to rehash her traumatic memories to define whether she was truly “persecuted.” While she was recounting her experiences, Keldy emphasizes how “the timeline was jumbled” … because “the threats had come in waves: there were her siblings' killings, then the fallout after Keldy testified against their killers in court.” (Blitzer, 2024, p. 17). At the scene of the interview,  Keldy’s inability to recapture the specific details of her trauma is administered as the sufficient condition to negate her inclusion into the nation. It unveils that, under arbitrary rule, any risk of opaqueness is a reason to mark the Othered as a “security threat” to the state. However, this execution of arbitrary rule ignores the simple reality that sharing traumatic experiences can reassemble the survivor's same scars, which renders the scene of the interview a tenuous space for survivors of colonial and imperial expansion. Yet, Ra experienced a different outcome during her interview. In particular, the interviewer says to Ra, “You seem like people who want to be honest,” which allows her to assume that “[the interviewer] wrote [them] a good report.” (Tang, 2015, p. 49) Although Keldy was unable to persuade her immigration officer, Ra's ability to do so during her interview reveals that at the scene of interrogation, there is no consistent metric for deciding who ought to be included in the nation; rather, acceptance is predicated on an affective attachment that cannot be explained through rational logics. Through both interviews, arbitrary rule is exercised according to a dogmatic basis that necessitates no coherent decision-making structure. Rather, inclusion is granted only when the refugee delivers an exceptional affective attachment to the immigration officer with their trauma story. At this moment, the refugee is simultaneously asked to completely reimagine and retell their traumatic events without reopening deep wounds. Court systems ask the refugee to dehumanize themselves by performatively recreating their traumas in order to earn a referendum on their life, which ultimately reinforces their subjugation and subjection.

In addition to the court system, Ra and Keldy’s encounter with humanitarian aid organizations unveils how refugee lives are subject to arbitrary rule through monitoring their spatiotemporal capacities and settings. Whereas Ra and Keldy generally face different outcomes in their interviews, they both share the experience of being perpetually uprooted and surveilled through systems of camps and detention centers. Keldy’s perpetual suspension is portrayed in her forced displacement across several zones of confinement. In fact, an immigration official tells Keldy the following: “ ‘What we're going to do is this,’ he began. ‘We're going to send you to prison for five days, and while that happens, we're going to send your children to a shelter in El Paso. When you get out of prison, you'll be able to join them” (Blitzer, 2024, p. 4). By folding Keldy into the carceral apparatus, the immigration officer exercises arbitrary rule by granularly puppeteering Keldy’s lived experience to the extent that she is left without agency or personhood. Similarly, Ra is also constantly thrown into the ebbs and flows of refugee displacement. While briefing her experience in Cambodian camps, she articulates the following: “We had stayed in the Cambodian border area for a long time. However, there was no food, so many people were sick and I was afraid of the [anti–Khmer Rouge] forces on the border. I did not know what they would do to us. The whole time on the border, we were afraid of being attacked. I think this is also why the Khmer Rouge tried to hide among the people. They didn't want to be attacked. Eventually, our only choice was to cross into Thailand to stay alive. But some of us were more scared of the Thai soldiers. They can kill us, too. But there was no choice. We had to cross because the situation was so bad in Cambodia.” (Tang, 2015, p.46). Here, Ra similarly underscores the sense of immense precarity carved into fugitive life and reveals the evasive grasp that carceral regimes have upon refugees to the extent that movement becomes unfeasible. The aggregate of Ra and Keldy’s narratives reverberate the tenor of humanitarian aid organizations as institutional structures not necessarily dedicated to uplift but rather invested in defending the lives included in the nation-state by producing the literal death and debilitation of the refugee.

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Hannah Arendt's prescription that the stateless refugee must be stamped with nationality (Wessel, 2016, p. 1) rings hollow when we consider the carceral apparatuses at the disposal of nation-states granted access to arbitrary rule in the state of exception. Drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben, it is clear that in the status quo, our political institutions are not so much looking to relocate refugees from one nation to another -- rather, Keldy and Ra's struggles reveal that the nation-state is invested in locating and displacing the refugee into perpetual transit zones, in-between spaces, and liminal localities. In this endeavor to relocate refugees into the nation-state, the grasp of humanitarian aid organizations and court systems take on the task of managing refugees via suspension into the borderlands, to keep them in constant flight and exiled into perpetual uprootedness in the space of nowhere.