Modernity’s corollary has been the ability to place those whose societies have evolved in other ways beyond the limits of the fully human, resulting in discriminatory treatment that became most clearly formulated in the paralegal status of “enemy combatants” and the establishment of offshore camps for detainees—such as that in Guantánamo Bay—where subjects defined as less than human, shorn of their rights, can be caged. In other words, modernity becomes the benchmark through which to measure and therefore to define the human.

XREF: Connects to critiques of colonial modernity and the concept of dehumanization through legal classification, echoing postcolonial theory and Arendt's analysis of rights.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 46