The Inheritance of the Imaginary: Martial Law’s Rhetoric in Twentieth Century Northern Ireland

Until the early twentieth century, there was recourse by British administrators to martial law. However, such a concept was not considered to be law, at least not by many legal theorists. Martial law only ever existed after an ex post assessment, constructed from the common law of necessity and through the issuance of grants of indemnity. Despite this, within British society, martial law developed a normativity of its own. Employing the imaginary as a mechanism through which to conceive martial law, thereby, offers an important contribution to its current theorisation within the legal (historical) discourse: providing a means to properly interrogate its uneasy place within the historical record. This is important because the twentieth century saw the adoption of statutory provisions that were inspired by this imaginary and the utilisation of the rhetoric that accompanied it. Moreover, it is through conceptualising martial law as a product of the imaginary of law that one is able to reflect more broadly on the construction of the legal order and conceptualisations of normativity.