In what follows I will use Secret Wars to explore the relationship between space and sovereignty, both in the way the rule of law is distributed across Battleworld, but also in the way resistance to that law takes on specifically spatial features. This story, I will argue, enables us to get to the heart of a very complex concept in which law and violence, rule and exception, protection and banishment, inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, are all intimately entwined. By doing this, the event spoke a profound truth about the dark nature of sovereignty, but by making Dr. Doom the sovereign of Battleworld the event also performed a decisive ideological function by suggesting that the dark heart of sovereignty only emerges with a super-villain in charge. It thereby wrongly suggests that once the good guys wrest back control the politics of the exception is truly the exception to the normal order of things.

The premise of the story is that giant cosmic entities called The Beyonders want to destroy the universe, but Dr. Doom manages to preserve fragments of it and collect them together to form a planet called Battleworld of which he is now both the creator god and the ruling sovereign. As sovereign he oversees a collection of jurisdictional territories in which he keeps the peace through the use of appointed barons. The threat of disorder both from within the collection of governable territories and the ungovernable badlands beyond the wall known as The Shield means Battleworld is in a permanent state of emergency supposedly warranting Dr. Doom’s “benign” tyranny. Much like the sovereign Leviathan that Thomas Hobbes argues is necessary to hold the commonwealth together, Doom has ‘the use of so much power and strength […] that by terror thereof he is enabled to conform the wills of […] all to peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies abroad’ ( 1994: 109 ).

In this article, however, I want to address the specifically spatial arrangement of this instability. In Giddens’s work noted above he addresses the way in which the superhero might be thought of as ‘a counter-sovereign stepping outside official avenues’ (783) in order to protect the innocent, but I’m interested in the way that sovereignty and the sovereign use of violence is rather a complex knot in which inside and outside become indistinguishable. There is no outside for a sovereign or counter-sovereign to step into because the very concept of sovereignty dissolves the border between them in the very act of maintaining it. The philosopher most attuned to this topology of sovereignty is Giorgio Agamben, and I will argue that the Marvel event entitled Secret Wars (2015, 2016)—designed to reform and reboot the Marvel Universe, recalling the Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars limited series published between May 1984 and April 1985—is a perfect vehicle for thinking through this problem.

In these and other studies ( Bainbridge, 2015 ; Curtis, 2016 ), the exceptional status of the superhero has also been used to talk about more generalizable problems within our conception of sovereignty. Here, the seemingly opposed concepts of law and violence bleed into one another, introducing a certain instability or Derridean ‘undecidability’ ( Bainbridge 2015: 461 ) into a concept supposed to be the epitome of decisive thought and action ( Schmitt, 1996 , 2005 ). Elsewhere the effects of the exercise of law’s violence have been shown to produce another example of that undecidability in the form of the pharmakon that is both cure and poison (Brooker, 2012; Curtis, 2012 ). In superhero comics this is something most regularly seen in the dangerous and unwanted side effects of superhero powers, where their pursuit of order often generates more chaos.

Fifteen years of a ‘War on Terror’ have been an especially fruitful time for studying superhero comics. The exceptional politics of the Bush Doctrine encouraged numerous scholars to return to important questions about the relationship between law and violence, and the nature of a state of emergency that are central to both the superhero mythos and an understanding of sovereign power. At a time when states themselves became rogue or took on the role of the vigilante—at least from the perspective of established International Law—scholars naturally gravitated towards thinking about what the exceptional status of the superhero might tell us. Good examples are Jason Bainbridge’s study of how superheroes reveal ‘the gaps or lacunae in law’s operation’ ( 2007: 461 ), or as Todd McGowan puts it ‘law’s inadequacy’ ( 2009: np ). Also important are Cassandra Sharp’s discussion of the ‘retributive desire’ inherent in the ‘penal populism’ ( 2012: 356 ) of superhero comics (something that became very evident in the early days of the War on Terror), and Thomas Giddens’s analysis of the link between superheroes and natural law, in particular how Batman represents something ‘beyond the limited resources of an imperfect system’ ( 2015: 783 ).

The Space of Sovereignty

When sovereignty is thought in terms of space and borders it is usually as a geopolitical analysis pertaining to national identity or international relations. With regard to superhero comics, there are excellent examples of this (Dittmer, 2012), but here sovereignty will be thought in philosophical terms. This will be done by considering three related issues: the law’s primary role in the distribution and partitioning of space; the declaration of a state of emergency; and the sovereign ban, or the relationship between law and banishment. In all of these it will also be necessary to bear in mind the relationship between law and violence that has defined sovereignty from Bodin to Weber. All of these issues create a constellation of sovereign order and arrangement that need to be thought together.

In The Nomos of the Earth Carl Schmitt begins his analysis of the word nomos, normally translated as law or rule, by stating its original meaning in Greek was ‘the first measure of all subsequent measures’ (2003: 67), and therefore pertains to ‘primeval division and distribution’ (67). This also introduces the normative order of the law precisely because the nomos represents how the world ought to be divided and arranged as opposed to how it is, but Schmitt reminds us to not reduce nomos to this normative understanding. Derived from the Greek word nemein meaning to divide, Schmitt argues ‘nomos is the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes visible’ (70). Thought in terms of sovereignty, then, it is ‘a constitutive act of spatial ordering’ (71). The centrality of ordering, dividing and arranging to the nomos is also evident from the fact that another meaning of the word in Greek is a wall or hedge. Nomos is therefore the division, partition, distribution and allotment of space. The law as we understand it then becomes both the representation and preservation of that primary partitioning. It is therefore no surprise that on Battleworld Doom’s ‘first law’ is that no border or boundary can be crossed without special permission. In fact, the only place people from different regions can meet and mix is a building in New Attilan called the Quiet Room.

The nomos is also something of a conceptual division that separates and connects the sacred from the profane, for example. It is not just a matter of property, but also what is proper or appropriate in a given space. Regulation of behaviour and language is therefore another way of maintaining spatial divisions, and here we can immediately see how what is excluded by the sovereign division is essential to the definition of what is included. For Robert Cover, the nomos also functions through another form of distribution, namely the stories that circulate giving legitimacy to the law as it is set out. The law for him is something we ‘inhabit’ (1992: 95). He writes: ‘understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live’ (96). The management of language and narrative, especially in the form of stories is therefore an important aspect of sovereignty. This is most evident in Secret Wars where Dr. Strange—Doom’s sheriff on Battleworld—is in charge of religious observance across the territories, while his daughter, Valeria—Reed Richards daughter in the normal universe—is in charge of science. Thus, the two principle narrative realms are managed to maintain the worship of God Doom.

We are introduced to this narrative division on Battleword in issue 2 of Secret Wars. While (virtually) everything on the planet is as Doom wills, an important part of the story is that two craft managed to survive the end of the multiverse and arrived on Battleworld carrying heroes and villains with memories of the time before Doom. When one of the craft is discovered and its existence is brought to Valeria’s attention at The Foundation, home to Battleworld’s science division, it threatens what she calls an ‘ideological breach’ (np) or what Dr. Strange refers to as ‘schism’. He then immediately enacts a sovereign order to ‘seal off the site’, telling Valeria: ‘I am invoking … quarantine’ (Hickman and Ribic 2016: np). In quarantine, the site or location of the craft is immediately walled off, so to speak. A border is placed around it marking it as heretical and hostile to the law. While this is not explicitly visualized it is formally created by the following page being one of the most impressive images of The Shield that we see (Figure 1).

To understand the importance of this act of quarantine in relation to sovereignty and the creation of a sites of exception, we need to look at a couple of related issues in Schmitt’s work. The first is the distinction between friend and enemy that Schmitt argues is essential to the conception of the political. Unlike morality, economics or aesthetics the ultimate criteria for politics is the threat posed by ‘the other, the stranger […who] is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien’ (1996: 27). The difficulty Schmitt himself has maintaining this distinction, as well as any criticisms of it cannot be explored here, but it is introduced to set up Schmitt’s major contribution to sovereignty that occurs at a time when a sovereign state is threatened by alien forces abroad or at home. The true test of sovereignty is the ability (power and legitimacy) to announce a state of emergency.

A state of emergency is understood to be an exceptional situation in the sense that the law that usually applies is suspended. An example of this would be the implementation of martial law, which is the suspension of the civil and legal rights and protections that citizens normally enjoy. For Schmitt, the sovereign is the person ‘who decides on the exception’ (2005: 5), or the person with the power or right to suspend the law in the face of exceptional circumstances. This also takes on a spatial dimension, not because friend and enemy, partisan and agitator are located in a field of conflict, but because the state of exception destabilizes the spatial arrangement and separation of law and violence.

To work through this we need to return to the condition that the establishment of law is said to overcome. This is the violent state of nature where Hobbes believes ‘every man is enemy to every man’ (1994: 76). In Hobbes’s lawful commonwealth, the violence of the state of nature is not so much overcome as monopolized by the sovereign. As Agamben argues, it ‘survives in the person of the sovereign’ (Agamben 1998: 35) to be used against a future threat to the security the sovereign guarantees. Here, I would take a rather different position from Giddens who argues that the superhero as counter-sovereign ‘moves beyond the limits of the sovereign state, back into a state of nature’ (2015: 773) to argue this supposed outside is actually an internalised component of sovereign legitimacy. Given that violence and disorder are always potentially imminent in both Hobbes and Schmitt, the state of nature, according to Agamben, remains ‘continually operative in the civil state’ (1998: 109). This gives justification to regular displays of sovereign strength or force. In this regard, Agamben can argue that ‘exteriority [understood as the state of nature…] is truly the innermost center of the political system’ (36).

The potential for violence and the consequent logic of the state of exception that legitimizes the use of violence is the first instance of sovereignty’s curious spatial arrangement.

The state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two sides of a single topological process in which what was presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a Möbius strip or a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception), and the sovereign power is this very impossibility of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception, physis and nomos. (Agamben: 1998: 37)

This curious topological feature is encapsulated in two important elements of Battleworld’s security and law enforcement: The Shield and the Thor Corps.

As noted, The Shield is the architectural symbol of Doom’s sovereignty. It is a giant wall that traverses the lower southern hemisphere of Battleworld. It is the physical expression of Doom’s law and is key to the arrangement of his kingdom. It serves to protect the relatively orderly regions in the north from three ungovernable regions in the south: Deadlands, Perfection and New Xandar. We are asked to believe, by Doom himself, that although he is God there remain certain parts of Battleworld that even he can’t control, and yet it becomes clear these regions have an important ideological or propaganda function in that only Doom can supposedly protect the north from this existential threat, thereby legitimating his tyranny.

As he notes in issue 1 of Inhumans: Attilan Rising, without the exercise of his strength ‘the weak become meat for the beasts beyond The Shield’ (Soule and Timms 2016: np). Doom’s rule is thus sanctioned in part by his role as creator but also as protector, where the permanent state of emergency in relation to the threat from the south justifies Battleworld’s exceptional politics and Doom’s use of violence to maintain order. In this sense the external threat posed by the ungovernable regions becomes an important internal component in Doom’s tyranny. As Black Bolt asks in issue 4 of that story: ‘What purpose do those beasts serve in Doom’s perfect machine?’ (np). The answer is simple; the beasts and the monsters, the anarchy and existential threat legitimate the division and maintenance of the world according to Doom’s will.

The threat from south of The Shield that becomes an integral part of Doom’s rule is indicative of the intimacy between law and violence in our conception and practice of sovereignty—even if that intimacy is disavowed in our politics. In Battleworld this relationship is suggested by the fact that Doomstadt, the capital and legislative centre of Battleworld has Doomgaard, the home of the Thor Corps, as its neighbour. We can understand this through Agamben’s claim that the police have become ‘the place where the proximity and the almost constitutive exchange between violence and right that characterizes the figure of the sovereign is shown more nakedly and clearly than anywhere else’ (2000: 104).

For Agamben, the focus on ‘“public order” and “security” on which the police have to decide on a case-by-case basis defines an area of indistinction between violence and right exactly symmetrical to that of sovereignty’ (104). In a state of exception in which the order maintained by the police is given priority over whatever protections citizens may have in normal conditions, any adversary automatically becomes a criminal (106). This intimacy, Agamben argues, has an ‘intangible sacredness’ (105) displayed in various ceremonies and public pageants. On Battleworld it is shown in issue 2 of Secret Wars by Castle Doom being built inside Yggdrasil, the World Tree, home of Thor and the Norse gods in the regular Marvel universe. Here, not only has a man taken the place of the gods, the gods have become the tyrant’s police, and their home has become his castle.

The violence of sovereignty has two other spatial components crucial to Agamben’s analysis, and which are also central to Secret Wars. The first is the sovereign ban, which includes banishment and exile, while the second is the related figure of the camp, an area in which the exceptional nature of sovereign power can be brought to bear without any legal hindrance. Banishment has long been the prerogative of sovereigns who had the capacity to exile those who threatened them and in many cases confiscate their property. The ban is therefore related to the exception in that it is a moment in which the law and its normal protections are withdrawn from the person banished. This manifestation of exceptional politics does not mean the law no longer applies, as Bainbridge argues (2007: 461), rather the law is performed precisely in and through this withdrawal. Again, what appears to be outside the law is very much internal to it.

While banishment meant removal from the protections of the court or the city—sometimes with a price placed on one’s head—it often meant removal to a place of imprisonment and torture. In Agamben’s study, he brings these together under the figure of the homo sacer, a being defined by ‘the unpunishability of his killing and the ban on his sacrifice’ (73). In other words, the homo sacer is that special category of being—and I say being because it is no longer a legal person—who can be killed without the killer facing any responsibility or reprisal, and without the killing taking on the social significance of a sacrifice. In this sense the homo sacer is nothing. Stripped of the form of life given by political association (bios), such a being is reduced to the insignificance and worthlessness of ‘bare life’ (zoē).

The political importance of the ban for Agamben can be seen in his claim that it is more foundational than the contract Hobbes argues marks the foundation of the commonwealth. Adapting Schmitt’s primary distinction between friend and enemy he argues the sovereign ban is the ‘originary exclusion’ (83) that creates ‘the first properly political space’ (83), and is ‘the originary juridico-political relation’ (109). The ban marks out who does and does not belong and therefore who is protected and who is not. In Secret Wars the ban features in this primary way. While it is Doom that creates and holds together Battleworld this order is made possible by his banishment of two former enemies. In the regular Marvel universe, Doctor Doom’s most noted antagonists are the Fantastic Four who included Reed and Sue Richards, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm. As the leader of the team Reed Richards was an especially significant adversary, it is therefore interesting that he is completely excluded from Doom’s World, only appearing by accident in the two groups that saved themselves from the destruction.

The other members were included in his arrangement of Battleworld, but two of them only existed under the condition of the sovereign ban. In issue 3 we learn how Johnny Storm, the flying, pyrotechnic superhero was banished to the sky where he existed as Battleworld’s sun, shedding light on the orderly clearing Doom had made amongst the multiversal chaos. Then, in issue 6, we discover that Benn Grimm, the stone-based behemoth also suffered an originary exclusion by being made to exist as The Shield. Bren Grimm wasn’t exiled beyond it like other heroes that incurred the wrath of Doom. Grimm was The Shield. Indeed, the first time we see Grimm in this situation is when his face appears on the wall of one of The Shield’s holding cells where Doom has Thanos imprisoned (Figure 2), thereby further developing this close link between the wall and the law. As the principle sign of Doom’s law, the creation of The Shield in and as an act of banishment is thus a wonderful personification of sovereign power. What is more, with Reed Richards absent and Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm banished, Doom, in the style of the patriarchal despot (despotēs in Greek means head of the household) was also able to “confiscate” Reed’s family, taking Sue Richards as his wife and her children as his own.

However, if exile removes a person from their place in the community, the camp is a specific localization of the sovereign ban. In such places people are abandoned. They lose the protection of sovereign command (ban). It is therefore the place where the state of exception physically manifests itself. For Agamben, ‘The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. In it, the state of exception, […] acquires a permanent spatial arrangement’ (2000: 39). Battleworld is such a space. Although different regions are shown to contain camps—such as the ‘biolabs’ in Age of Apocalypse, or the ‘sanitation stations’ in Hail Hydra—it is in fact the entire planet that has become the camp. In political conditions determined by the state of exception, Agamben argues the sovereign ban becomes the new ‘nomos of the planet’ (45).

The Thor Corps who subject any dissenters to executive and often extreme violence across Battleworld are evidence of Doom’s new, exceptional nomos. As are the numerous heroes, such as America Chavez and Abigail Brand, who are exiled to The Shield to continuously battle the invading hoards from the south, or are exiled beyond The Shield to face certain death, like Greer Nelson or Hank Pym in Age of Ultron vs Marvel Zombies. In fact, just as we saw with this ungovernable region that is essential to the authoritarian governance of Battleworld—its exclusion is an integral part of Doom’s perceived legitimacy and power—the inhabitants of the south are themselves marked by this contradictory mix of exteriority and interiority; belonging to two categories at once. The zombies are, of course, living and dead, while the Ultron robots are both animate and inanimate. Just like homo sacer who is a ‘living dead man’ (Agamben 1998: 131), and belongs by being excluded, these monsters epitomize the curious topology of sovereignty where inside and outside are clearly marked and yet indistinct.

The politics of the exception that defines sovereignty therefore undoes the stable division between law and violence, order and chaos, becoming a threshold or passage through which one can cross over into the other. In the many Battleworld stories, one in particular draws out the implications of this with especially disturbing effect. In 1602: Witch Hunter Angela, the eponymous hero hunts and kills entities known as Witchbreed (the early 17th century term for mutants) that threaten the security and stability of the realm. In this mode she operates in the sovereign role that Schmitt likens to the biblical figure of the restrainer (katechon in Greek), a manifestation of exceptional politics that holds back the manifestation of evil and the apocalypse it threatens (2003: 59).

Interestingly, the last of the Witchbreed Angela kills just happens to be King James. Already, then, in the opening scene of issue 1 we have a complex relationship between power and subjection, friend and enemy, inside and outside where the supposed foundation of the law, the King, is also an agent of its dissolution. With the Witchbreed no longer a peril, Angela turns her attention to a new enemy, the Faustians who have gained powers through deals with the “devil” and as such present a threat to the established order. In doing so, Angela and her fellow hunter/lover, Lady Serah, attract the wrath of the Faerie Queen—the real power behind the Faustians—who declares that when Angela kills three more Faustians she will kill Serah.

Aside from the invocation of evil that the Faerie Queen represents, her threat is also presented in explicitly spatial terms. In issue 2 we are told that the borders of the Realm of Faerie ‘drift like smoke, and open and close as they please’ (Bennett, Gillen and Hans 2016: np). The Realm of Faerie is therefore the enemy because it is an ontological threat to the principle of order itself, a theme that is visually explored in Stephanie Hans’s choice of page layouts (Figure 3). The Realm of Faerie, then, is either the antithesis of the clear, stable boundaries marked out by sovereignty or it reveals a disturbing truth about the indeterminacy of those divisions. The Faerie Queen is also the opposite of the Hobbesian corporation or commonwealth, instead of unifying she multiplies and spreads by colonising bodies of the Faustians with whom she deals and uses them to ‘claim lands’ (np).

Having hunted and killed two more Faustians, they track down the third, a young woman going by the name of Anna Marie, at Castle Caldecot. Angela tries to save Anna Marie from the realm of the Faerie Queen, but fails and is forced to kill again. As promised the Faerie Queen immediately takes the life of Serah. In issue 4, unable to deal with the loss, Angela decides she cannot live without her lover and finds a way into the realm of the Faerie Queen by using faerie magic. Once inside she confronts and kills the Faerie Queen in order that she might assume her position and return Serah back to life. Through this, what was the restrainer has become the manifestation of the very menace she sought to end, and the problem with the politics of the exception that defines sovereignty lies in this very dangerous dynamic.

As has already been noted, the exception makes interiority and exteriority indistinct, situating sovereign power both inside the law (as foundation and guarantee) and outside the law (as suspension and violence). In other words, the exception renders the law always already extra-legal. The sovereign is therefore also the rogue, which makes it especially interesting that Angela’s passage from one world to the next begins with her killing Anne Marie who is the member of the X-Men known as Rogue in the regular Marvel universe.

The extra-legality of sovereignty, or the idea that the sovereign is always already something of an outlaw plays an important part in Jacques Derrida’s analysis of sovereignty where he argues this being-outside-the-law means ‘the beast, criminal and sovereign have a troubling resemblance: they call on each other […]; there is between sovereign, criminal and beast a sort of obscure and fascinating complicity, or even a worrying mutual attraction’ (2009: 17). For Agamben, too, the sovereign politics of the exception that suspends the law in the name of security has a similar logic whereby the ‘sovereigns who willingly agreed to present themselves as cops or executioners, in fact, now show in the end their original proximity to the criminal’ (2000: 107). It is only proper, then, that in issue 4 we are told that Doom did not create Battleworld from his own strength or will but from powers he stole from the Beyonders. It can therefore be said that the sovereignty of Battleworld was founded in a criminal act.