Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 24 Feb 2016).

Introduction: Interpreting the violent state / Austin Sarat and Jennifer L. Culbert -- On the forms of state killing -- The innocuousness of state lethality in an age of national security / Robin Wagner-Pacifici -- Oedipal sovereignty and the war in Iraq / Jeremy Arnold -- Sacrifice and sovereignty / Mateo Taussig-Rubbo -- Due process and lethal confinement / Colin Dayan -- From time to torture : the hellish future of the criminal sentence / Thomas L. Dumm -- The child in the broom closet : states of killing and letting die / Elizabeth A. Povinelli -- The lethality of the Canadian state's (re)cognition of indigenous peoples / Mark Antaki and Coel Kirkby -- Investigating the discourses of death -- Death in the first person / Peter Brooks -- Open secrets, or the postscript of capital punishment / Ravit Pe'er-Lamo Reichman -- Ethical exception : capital punishment in the figure of sovereignty / Adam Thurschwell -- No mercy / Adam Sitze.

This book brings together scholarship on three different forms of state violence, examining each for what it can tell us about the conditions under which states use violence and the significance of violence to our understanding of states. This book calls into question the legitimacy of state uses of violence and mounts a sustained effort at interpretation, sense making, and critique. It suggests that condemning the state's decisions to use lethal force is not a simple matter of abolishing the death penalty or – to take another exemplary example of the killing state – demanding that the state engage only in just (publicly declared and justified) wars, pointing out that even such overt instances of lethal force are more elusive as targets of critique than one might think. Indeed, altering such decisions may do little to change the essential relationship of the state to violence.