Necropolitics Covered

Lopez Oggier, F. (2026). Itinerant deathworlds: Spanish border externalisation and the necroborder. Territory, Politics, Governance, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2025.2594500Abstract: In 2006 Spain spearheaded European border externalisation, re-spatialising its border into a peripatetic political institution to systematically intercept ‘irregular’ migrants. This paper conducts a necropolitical analysis of Spain’s border externalisation projects by reviewing migrant mortality/disappearance data and conducting a discourse analysis of first-hand migrant accounts with the dislocated bordering apparatus. I posit that Spain’s border externalisation efforts create ‘itinerant deathworlds’: a dislocated form of necropower that follows migrants while they are in transit. Post-mortem violence and psychic trauma cause itinerant deathworlds to linger long after migration journeys have ended, projecting them into indeterminate spatio-temporal scales. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Palombo, L., 2007. Whose turn is it? White diasporic and transnational practices and the necropolitics of the plantation and internment camps. Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 3.Abstract: The bordering of the Plantation Camps of the 1860s and Internment Camps of World War One (WW1) through the racialised biopolitical and necropolitical relations of the state of exception have controlled local shifts from the position of non-white and white ‘objects of labour’ to ‘political subjects’ or citizens of the nation. The borders of the Camps are violent colonial techniques that re-affirm an anglophilic form of white diasporic and transnational power. This process of instituting borders of control “outside the law” has operated to strengthen white anglophilic sovereignty and its participation and embeddedness in a “global” colonial project. These camps became permanent “exceptional”1 spatial arrangements that diversified but also continued the effects of the dislocation of Indigenous Australians. These camps continued the violent mechanisms that attempted to control Indigenous people’s “life and death” and that in Mbembe’s words have “civilize[d]” them as providers of free labour (see Perera 2002: para 11; Mbembe 2003: 14 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Khoshneviss, H. (2024) ‘State of Exception, Necropolitics, and Puerto Rico: Naturalizing Disaster and Naturalizing Difference’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 35(1), pp. 75–89. doi: 10.1080/10455752.2023.2279957. Abstract: Right after Hurricane Irma hit Puerto Rico and Florida, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017. Around the same time Harvey hit Texas. The vast difference in the treatment of Puerto Rico as a US territory, compared to Florida and Texas on the “mainland,” sparked conversations about the location of Puerto Rico in the US imagination and policies. The media coverage of the disaster and the statements from officials made it clear that while certain populations are protected and saved, certain others are abandoned and “let die.” To provide an explanation for these different treatments, I explore two “naturalizing” processes. First, I show how the historical construction of Puerto Ricans as “naturally” inferior disguised their century-long exploitation. Second, I examine how the framing of Hurricane Maria as a “natural” disaster on the one hand concealed historical interventions by the United States in Puerto Rico and on the other hand, ignored how disaster capitalism has caused an increase in the intensity and frequency of disasters. I suggest that state of exception and abandonment are two concepts that can provide an explanation about how these converging processes have made disasters the norm in the colony, rather than an anomaly. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Citation: Osuri, G. (2009) ‘Necropolitical complicities: (re)constructing a normative somatechnics of Iraq’, Social Semiotics, 19(1), pp. 31–45. doi: 10.1080/10350330802632766. Abstract: This article theorizes the concept of necropolitical complicities in the construction and writing of ethno-sectarian identities in the context of the war in Iraq. Drawing on Mbembe's concept of necropolitics in relation to the (re)construction of a normative somatechnics, the article argues for an acknowledgment of operative colonial epistemologies and techniques of governance that have fuelled contemporary sectarian violence in Iraq. The interplay between these epistemologies and techniques of governance and the violent assertions of Iraqi ethno-religious identities are theorized as necropolitical complicities. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Abstract: The Holocaust left behind countless bodies – bodies dispersed across the execution sites, former Nazi camps, repurposed Jewish cemeteries; bodies hastily buried at the outskirts of the former shtetls and in the forest. This article traces the early postwar attempts by various actors to respond to the material (omni)presence of dead bodies. It engages with endeavors by Jewish survivors to exhume and rebury human remains of the victims of the Holocaust, but also with practices instantiating and perpetuating their dehumanization: the mutilation and robbery of the dead by the local non-Jewish populace and their neglect by the stateCitation: Dziuban, Z. (2025) ‘Discordant necropolitics: survivor-led exhumations and violence against the dead in the early post-Holocaust Poland’, Holocaust Studies, 31(3), pp. 421–443. doi: 10.1080/17504902.2024.2392317. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Morgensen, S. L. (2011) ‘The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now’, Settler Colonial Studies, 1(1), pp. 52–76. doi: 10.1080/2201473X.2011.10648801.Abstract: Settler colonialism is exemplary of the processes of biopower theorised by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. However, settler colonialism remains naturalised within theories of biopower and theories of its relation to coloniality. White supremacist settler colonisation produces specific modes of biopolitics that sustain not only in settler states but also in regimes of global governance that inherit, extend, and naturalise their power. I extend Patrick Wolfe’s theory that a ‘logic of elimination’ constitutes settler colonialism in the genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous peoples, by indicating that this also indigenises and naturalises white settler nations as projections of the West. Agamben’s work illuminates how Indigenous peoples are eliminated in a state of exception to Western law, which by functioning to erase consanguinity – as the patriarch in Roman law eliminates the defiant son - explains Indigenous peoples’ seemingly contradictory incorporation within and excision from the body of white settler nations. This biopolitical process specific to settler colonialism also structures the manner in which white settler societies demonstrably universalize Western law, both within their bounds and in global arenas. My call to denaturalise settler colonialism in social theory is but a first step towards broader study of how the biopolitics of settler colonialism structure current modes of biopower and require concerted critique at the intersections of Indigenous and settler colonial studies. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

This is Necropolitics Covered. A mini audio series covering literature on necropolitics one abstract at a time. My name is Liv Roe. I'm a former elected member of the New Zealand local government, with a Master's in Political Science from Victoria University of Wellington, where my dissertation focused on necropolitics. While doing my post-grad research, I noticed that not a lot of people around me, even the politically savvy, haven’t even heard about it. I supposed it might have something to do with the fact that compared to many political theories that are centuries old, Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics was relatively young, only emerging in the early 2000’s.So, in this series I aim to address that gap in knowledge, particularly for people who are interested in learning about necropolitics. Together, we are going to cover the existing body of literature about or relating to the topic of necropolitics by reading through the abstracts, summaries, or excerpts of academic papers from different sectors and industries all over the world. Unfortunately, this is probably not going to be the kind of short-form content that is going to summarise and simplify everything for you. We are only going through the basics of these papers to hopefully encourage you to find their full pieces to read and get into for yourselves. We have become way too used to just consuming a few minutes of bite-sized information during our scroll and then repeating the same talking points to others without further in-depth reading and reflection. Citations for these sources are always provided. So listen through, get to reading, get to thinking, and get to taking some action. Necropolitics Covered episodes are available on Apple Podcasts. You can also find inks, PDF downloadables, and other bonus stuff on Substack: necropolitics.substack.com. And if you would like to get in touch, send me an email on [email protected]. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Abstract: This research examines the representation of queer characters in Nigerian films through the lenses of necropolitics and biopolitics. Although LGBTQ+ presence in Nollywood has increased, there is a lack of scholarly focus on their experiences of internal migration and the forces impacting their lives. This study analyzes Hell or High Water, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, and Walking in Shadow to explore themes of exclusion, escape, and erasure amidst societal norms and necropolitical pressures. Using Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics alongside Michel Foucault’s biopower, the research investigates how these narratives navigate social stigma, state violence, and internalized discrimination, revealing broader patterns of marginalization. This work emphasizes the need for inclusive and nuanced portrayals of LGBTQ+ experiences in Nigerian media.Citation: Okadigwe, M. N. (2025). Between exclusion and escape: necropolitics, biopolitics, and queer narratives in Nollywood films. African Identities, 23(4), 1047–1065. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2025.2501794 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Morton, S. (2014). Sovereignty and necropolitics at the Line of Control. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50(1), 19–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2013.850213Abstract: This paper considers how the sovereignty of the Indian government over Kashmir is asserted and contested around the Line of Control, and the military checkpoints that visualize such forms of sovereignty. Beginning with a discussion of the ways in which the Government of India’s Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the Public Safety Act provide a paralegal context for extrajudicial killings and torture, the article proceeds to consider how recent literary and cultural representations of Kashmir such as Naseer Ahmed and Saurabh Singh’s Kashmir Pending, Bhasharat Peer’s Curfewed Night, Mirza Waheed’s novel The Collaborator and Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown not only document the crossing of the Line of Control by so-called insurgents, but also raise questions about the violence of state sovereignty by mourning the lives and deaths of those who dare to challenge the Indian state’s spatial performance of sovereignty. In so doing, the paper suggests that postcolonial narratives of mourning offer an important counterpoint to the necropolitical logic of India’s performance of sovereignty over Kashmir. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Abstract: This article examines the Western Atlantic migration corridor to the Canary Islands, one of Europe’s most perilous yet persistently traversed routes, through the conceptual lens of infrastructures of endurance. Drawing on fieldwork in El Hierro and Tenerife, it employs patchwork ethnography and semi-structured interviews with migrants from West Africa and the Horn of Africa. A distinctive feature is my engagement as a Red Cross volunteer in El Hierro, which provides rare access to humanitarian infrastructures and their moral economies. The study integrates Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics with migration-infrastructure theory to theorise infrastructures of endurance as fragile, moral, and material assemblages through which migrants collectively sustain life amid systemic restrictions. Four interconnected dynamics structure the analysis: fragmented journeys, necropolitical exposure at sea, reception as humanitarian deterrence, and solidarities that make endurance possible. Findings show how migrants convert abandonment into provisional architectures of life. The Canary Islands emerge as experimental sites of European border governance where deterrence, hospitality, and resistance collide. Conceptually, the article advances infrastructures of endurance to rethink corridors, survival, solidarity, and mobility justice within Europe’s expanding necropolitical migration regime.Citation: Salifu, M. (2026) ‘Where the route ends and the new border begins: necropolitical governance and migrant resistance in the Canary Islands’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, pp. 1–23. doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2026.2646983. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Abstract: This article uses Michel Foucault’s account of state racism from “Society Must Be Defended” to understand racialized violence in the criminal justice systems of the USA and England and Wales. Foucault argues that modern states make race in order to exercise the sovereign power to kill, by both directly killing racially defined groups and through “indirect murder…or, quite simply, political death. I argue that both the US and English criminal justice systems exercise state racism directly and indirectly, including through police shootings and imprisonment. This state racism extends to multiple groups who are racialized as non-White, including Black people, immigrants, and indigenous peoples. Given the connection that Foucault identifies between sovereignty and racialized state violence, I suggest that ending racism in these criminal justice systems requires developing non-racist forms of national identity and reconceptualizing sovereignty to delegitimize the state’s power to kill.Citation: Pemberton, S. X. (2015) ‘Criminal Justice as State Racism: Race-Making, State Violence, and Imprisonment in the USA, and England and Wales’, New Political Science, 37(3), pp. 321–345. doi: 10.1080/07393148.2015.1056429. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Abstract: From 1958 to 1964 in Colombia, during the first years of the partisan power-sharing agreement known as the National Front, roving crews of gunmen labelled ‘bandits’ who had been mobilised and then abandoned by party elites terrorised local populations in the countryside. We track the gruesome photographic record of that violence: first, as it was produced by bandits who recruited photography in their bids for local sovereignty; second, as it circulated through government and media accounts that turned those same images back on the bandits as part of the military’s hunt for them as outlaws; and third, as a group of scholar-activists used them in academic publications that sought to shock the public into conscious concern and stimulate a sociological discussion about what caused and fuelled the violence. We argue that disparate uses of the same type of images – portraits of bandits and the cadavers, often mutilated, of their victims – constituted a necropolitical visual regime in which the elite consensus between government and press most effectively harnessed the photographs’ affective charge and channelled it into the pacification effort.Alexander L. Fattal & Andrés F. Caicedo Sierra (2023) A Necropolitical Visual Regime: Banditry in Colombia, 1958–1964, History of Photography, 47:4, 368-388, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2024.2429879 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Abstract: This article examines Zionist sexual politics as a particular modality of settler colonial subject making. It analyses the inclusion of Israeli LGBTs into the state, by examining the cultural archive of Zionism, in which the colonisation of Palestine and Palestinians is constitutively inscribed and obscured. Tracing the itinerary of Israel’s LGBT movement, it looks at how the Zionist project becomes articulated on novel terms. Focusing on the specific formation of an Israeli gay identity in tandem with Israel’s shifting settler colonial discourse and sexual politics, this article suggests that the itinerary of Israel’s LGBT movement forms the condition of possibility for Israel’s pinkwashing campaign to take shape. Following Palestinian anticolonial queer interventions that see pinkwashing as part of the Zionist project, it intervenes in analytical practices that frame pinkwashing as a manifestation that arises from the global conditions of homonationalism. It asks: how does Zionist settler colonialism form the conditions of possibility for an Israeli gay subjectivity and pinkwashing to emerge? In doing so, it complements contemporary conversations on the formation of sexual subjectivities within settler colonial contexts by suggesting that these not only define modern sexual politics, but simultaneously re-shuffle the foundations of the Zionist settler colonial project itself.Citation: Stelder, M. (2018) ‘‘From the closet into the Knesset’: Zionist sexual politics and the formation of settler subjectivity’, Settler Colonial Studies, 8(4), pp. 442–463. doi: 10.1080/2201473X.2017.1361885. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Abstract:Trans-Syrian refugee sex workers in Lebanon occupy a unique intersection of compounded vulnerabilities: gender identity, forced displacement, precarious labor, and systemic violence. Engaged in sex work for survival, these women navigate high-risk environments where they endure harassment, assault, and marginalization. This paper explores a self-defense training provided to 10 trans-Syrian refugee women in sex work, examining how they conceptualize self-defense—not only as a physical skill but as a tool for negotiating power in abusive partnerships, safeguarding themselves from violent clients and law enforcement, and mitigating everyday risks. Employing an intersectional framework, it explores how gender identity and refugee status amplify exposure to violence, while queer necropolitics examines how state and societal forces render trans refugees as “disposable” subjects outside legal and humanitarian protections. Additionally, critical refugee studies highlights forced displacement as a site of vulnerability and resistance, where trans-refugee sex workers actively subvert their erasure through embodied self-defense. Participants’ narratives demonstrate that self-defense goes beyond physical protection—it is a strategy to resist violence in sex work, manage abusive intimate relationships, and confront structural conditions of exploitation. This study challenges the victimization of trans refugees, highlighting their agency and the need for policies that address their intersectional realities.Citation: Diab, J. L. and Samneh, B. (2025) ‘Fighting to Be Felt: Queer Necropolitics and Self-Defense as Resistance for Trans-Syrian Refugee Sex Workers in Lebanon’, Journal of Homosexuality, pp. 1–22. doi: 10.1080/00918369.2025.2537833. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Abstract: Since the Turkish government’s recent turn to authoritarianism, tens of thousands of public dissidents and government critics have been subjected to dismissals and revocation of civic rights via emergency decrees. The victims call this process ‘civil death’. We aim to understand the logic behind this form of punishment in Turkey by examining the differential genealogy of civil death in the work of Hannah Arendt, Bertrand Ogilvie, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe. We demonstrate that a later form of civil death was used by totalitarian regimes in a process leading to the reduction of targeted individuals as ‘superfluous’ and as ‘living corpses’ in concentration camps. In these contexts, death became an instrument of biopolitical and necropolitical powers. We propose that although contemporary punishment of public dissidents in Turkey shares some similarities with these forms of civil death, it may more fittingly be identified as civic death. We argue that while civil death is based on the classical political right of the sovereign to ‘make die’ after first reducing targeted individuals to little more than living corpses, civic death is linked to the power of the sovereign to ‘let die’ through the exclusion of public dissidents from economic, social, and political life.Citation: Özdemir, Seçkin Sertdemir, and Esra Özyürek. “Civil and Civic Death in the New Authoritarianisms: Punishment of Dissidents through Juridical Destruction, Ethical Ruin, and Necropolitics in Turkey.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 46, no. 5 (2019): 699–713. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48541175. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Abstract: COVID-19 has made visible and deepened inequalities globally, while also manifesting the vital role of functional food, health, and care systems in a context of strong socio-ecological interdependencies. We here mobilize bio– and necro–politics to problematize the declaration of agricultural workers as ‘essential’ and the accompanying policies during the early months of the pandemic, focusing on the region of Lleida, Spain. We show how this proclaimed indispensability was aiming mostly at securing cheap labor to agri-business while workers continued to be treated as expendable. An intersectionality lens allows us to understand discrimination and racism as health determinants, operating within and defining ‘glocal’ food necropolitics and COVID-19 biopolitics.Citation: Panagiota Kotsila & Lucía Argüelles (2024) The necropolitics of expendability: migrant farm workers during COVID-19, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 51:2, 441-465, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2023.2243440 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Mahmoud Alhirthani (09 Mar 2026): Transediting necropolitics BBC’s Arabic and English coverage of Gaza’s digital blackout, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, DOI: 10.1080/17447143.2026.2639337 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

Gržinić, M. (2022). Necropolitics of Achillo Mbembe: An Extended Essay on the Book. Philosophical Vestnik, 42(1). https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.1.10 (Original work published 31 December 2021). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com