The Exception Lives: Diego Garcia and the Illusion of Legal Resolution

Introduction

The May 27 editorial by the Canadian Centre for African Affairs and Policy Research presents a powerful account of the Chagos Archipelago as a site of historical injustice and strategic significance. By highlighting the forced displacement of the Chagossian people and the enduring contest over Diego Garcia, the piece makes a compelling case for viewing the islands as a test of the so-called rules-based international order. Its attention to colonial legacies, legal rulings, and geopolitical contradictions is both timely and necessary.

At the same time, the editorial’s framing—particularly its suggestion that we may be approaching “the end of strategic exception”—deserves closer scrutiny. During my doctoral work in international relations, I had the opportunity to take a full seminar on Carl Schmitt’s political theory under Professor Alexander Wendt at the Ohio State University. That experience continues to shape how I approach questions of sovereignty, legality, and power—especially in cases, like this one, where law is not merely applied, but suspended or selectively enforced.

From that vantage point, Diego Garcia does not yet represent a break with the logic of exception. Rather, it appears as a rearticulation of it: the architecture of exclusion persists, albeit under new diplomatic and legal terms. What we are witnessing is not the closure of the exception, but its adaptation—recast in the language of sovereignty realignment, while the underlying calculus of power remains unchanged.

Strategic Exception: Not Concluded, But Reconfigured

The displacement of the Chagossians between 1968 and 1973 was not a chaotic byproduct of strategic necessity—it was a calculated act of sovereign decision. Entirely removed from their homeland to facilitate the construction of a U.S. military base, the Chagossian people were erased not just physically, but administratively, legally, and narratively. This was not a legal grey zone; it was the open declaration of an exception, one in which the normal rights of citizenship, residence, and recognition were suspended in the name of global security. The fact that this was carried out through a collaboration between two liberal democracies—Britain and the United States—underscores Schmitt’s core insight: that liberal legality is not immune to the logic of sovereign decision. It merely masks it more effectively.

The recent developments described in the editorial—a sovereignty agreement between Mauritius and the UK, and a prospective lease arrangement with the United States—are diplomatically significant. But they do not dismantle the exceptional architecture originally constructed to support Diego Garcia’s strategic utility. The military base remains. The displaced population has not returned. The primary sovereign actors remain unchanged. What has shifted is the language, not the logic.

In this sense, the exception has not ended. It has been reconfigured to appear compatible with international law and postcolonial legitimacy. Yet the deeper structure—a site held through suspension of local agency and sustained through strategic fiat—remains intact. The formal change in sovereignty may serve important symbolic and legal ends, but it does not fundamentally alter the core fact that Diego Garcia continues to operate as a space where power was, and still is, exercised beyond the bounds of ordinary law.

Legal Formalism vs. Political Reality

The legal trajectory of the Chagos Archipelago in recent years—culminating in the 2019 International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion and the subsequent UN General Assembly resolution—has produced a near-universal diplomatic consensus: the UK’s continued administration of the islands is unlawful, and sovereignty should revert to Mauritius “as rapidly as possible.” On paper, this represents a decisive legal victory. But in practice, little has changed. The United Kingdom has delayed meaningful compliance, and the United States has remained effectively silent—citing regional security concerns and the specter of Chinese influence as justification.

This disjuncture between legal determination and political implementation is not accidental; it is systemic. From a Schmittian perspective, law cannot constrain power unless power first consents to be constrained. Legal rulings, however robust, remain aspirational when the most powerful actors retain the capacity to ignore them without consequence. This is especially true in international relations, where enforcement mechanisms are diffuse, and normative authority often rests on precedent and perception rather than coercive power.

The Chagos case thus illustrates the fragility of what is often termed the “rules-based international order.” That order can function only insofar as its leading architects submit themselves to its principles. When they do not—as in the refusal to dismantle a base established through displacement and maintained in violation of legal consensus—the order begins to resemble not a framework of justice, but a hierarchy of exemptions. It becomes clear that the rules are binding not on all, but only on some—primarily the weak or the compliant.

In that light, legal formalism is not a counterweight to the strategic exception—it becomes its instrument. It furnishes the optics of order even as it fails to compel accountability. The appearance of law without the practice of enforcement is not progress; it is performance.

The Chagossians and the Production of Legal Non-Subjects

At the heart of the Diego Garcia controversy lies a population that remains strikingly absent from the sovereignty negotiations now underway. While the legal and diplomatic focus has shifted to questions of state-to-state jurisdiction—between the United Kingdom, Mauritius, and the United States—the Chagossians themselves continue to exist in a kind of political limbo. Their original displacement was not just an act of removal; it was an act of erasure. They were classified as “transient laborers,” denied historical recognition, and excised from the official narratives that justified the creation of the British Indian Ocean Territory. They were not simply moved—they were made invisible.

This is not an incidental oversight. It is a necessary function of sovereign exception. Following Carl Schmitt, the sovereign decides not only when the law can be suspended, but also who counts within the political and legal community in the first place. In this way, sovereignty entails the power to include by excluding—to create a category of life that is subject to power without being granted full political or legal recognition.

Here, the insights of Giorgio Agamben deepen the critique. The Chagossians have been rendered what Agamben calls homo sacer—figures who are neither citizens nor fully outside the law, but who exist in a zone where legal protections no longer apply. They are the archetypal legal non-subjects, excluded from both the benefits of sovereignty and the moral language of strategic necessity. Even now, as Mauritius moves toward formal recognition of its claim, the Chagossians’ right of return remains largely hypothetical, and their political agency largely unacknowledged.

What is revealed, then, is not merely a forgotten community, but a constitutive silence: a silence that makes the exception operable. The stability of the current arrangement—military, legal, and diplomatic—depends on the continued marginalization of the Chagossian people. In this way, they are not just victims of historical injustice; they are structurally necessary absences within a geopolitical framework that still privileges power over principle.

The Rebranding of the Exception as Legality

What makes the present moment so complex—and so rhetorically persuasive—is not that the logic of exception has been repudiated, but that it has been recast in the language of international cooperation. The proposed sovereignty agreement between Mauritius and the United Kingdom, coupled with Mauritius’s stated willingness to lease Diego Garcia to the United States, is being hailed as a breakthrough. And on one level, it is: it signals a symbolic end to colonial detachment, affirms multilateral legal norms, and gestures toward post-imperial sovereignty.

But symbolism should not be mistaken for structural transformation. From a Schmittian standpoint, what we are witnessing is not the reversal of the exception but its renegotiation—a shift from overt exclusion to managed compliance. The strategic utility of Diego Garcia remains intact. The base remains operational. The displaced population remains marginalized. What has changed is the vocabulary used to describe these continuities.

This shift is politically savvy. In a multipolar world, where legitimacy is increasingly tied to optics and norms, sovereign actors must justify their actions not only through force but through the language of international law. Thus, power is no longer declared outside the law—it is cloaked in legal rationality, giving the appearance of alignment with global norms while preserving core strategic interests.

This is the modern face of the exception: not brute defiance of law, but bureaucratized domination, wherein control is maintained through procedural legitimacy. What looks like decolonization may, in practice, be a rebranding of hierarchy—one that allows powerful states to retain their military footprint while deflecting criticism through gestures of legal formalism.

Such moves do not herald the end of exceptionality. They signal its institutional maturity. The legal scaffolding of sovereignty becomes a tool not for dismantling exceptional rule, but for laundering it into acceptability. In this sense, the strategic exception has not been defeated—it has been domesticated.

Conclusion: Legitimacy Demands More Than Optics

The Diego Garcia case does not simply test the outer limits of international law; it challenges the coherence of the very order that claims to be defined by it. If legal authority is contingent on political discretion—if the strongest actors can opt out when it suits them—then the promise of a rules-based system becomes not a guarantee of justice, but a matter of narrative control.

The editorial rightly notes that global legitimacy today is increasingly evaluated not by declaration, but by reciprocity. In this light, the continued operation of a strategic base on land acquired through displacement and held in defiance of international consensus is not just a legal anomaly—it is a liability. It undermines the moral posture from which Western states critique others for similar infractions. It hollows out claims to principled leadership in a world that is watching closely for signs of hypocrisy.

To be clear, the proposed realignment of sovereignty between Mauritius and the United Kingdom is not meaningless. It holds symbolic value, and it may open new channels for negotiating Chagossian rights and recognition. But it is not, in itself, evidence that the age of exception has ended. That age ends only when power consents to constraint—not when it merely changes costume.

If the international system is to retain credibility, its most powerful actors must be willing to abide by the norms they invoke elsewhere. Strategic assets like Diego Garcia may still be defensible—but only if their legitimacy is not purchased at the expense of those who were displaced to make room for them, or obscured by legal maneuvering. Real accountability cannot emerge from symbolic correction alone.

The lesson, in the end, is neither cynical nor utopian. It is Schmittian in its realism and moral in its orientation: the exception persists not because it must, but because it is permitted. Undoing it requires not just new agreements, but a new willingness to let principle guide power—not just appearance.