No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Necropolitics
... Previous research has shown state and police interventions such as child apprehension, harsh drug and anti-homeless laws reproduce structural violence at critical life junctures (Boyd et al., 2016). Mbembe (2003) describes such state-sanctioned violence as 'necropolitics' , which are 'practices used to subjugate racial minorities' , which relegates them to precarious and life-threatening conditions that 'confer upon them the status of living dead ' (p. 284). ...
Persons living with mental illness and Indigenous people are over-represented in police-involved fatalities, yet few studies have examined these intersections together. In canada, Indigenous persons are susceptible to police violence and death, due to a myriad of factors, such as systemic racism, community surveillance, and proximity to police departments overinvolved in the use of force. Using quantitative content analysis of media reports of Indigenous people involved in police-based mental health emergency response, this study examined demographic and contextual factors associated with fatal outcome. all cases included media articles published between the year 1970 and 2022. McNemar's chi square tests were conducted with categorical variables that violated the assumption of independence. all remaining variables were entered into a binary logistic model, which explained 40% of the variance and found statistically significant associations with lethality for multiple age ranges. No differences were observed for sex, region, or type of police service.
O português preserva a história da violência colonial contra os corpos não brancos e as línguas e epistemologias que esses corpos-memória guardam. Esta é também a língua que constrói narrativas sobre conquistas e descobertas de territórios e missões civilizadoras para subjugar povos que já habitavam esses espaços. Partindo do pensamento decolonial, explora-se o uso performativo e artístico da palavra poética em poemas de Ellen Lima que escreve em Tupi Antigo e em português. Argumenta-se que a sua escrita performativa assenta numa gramática decolonial que pode configurar caminhos de reparação. A praxis decolonial desafia a violência colonial que a língua portuguesa silencia.
En el contexto de la crisis climática y una modernidad exhausta, este ensayo explora la crisis de la imaginación histórica como un fenómeno en el que el tiempo se convierte en una trampa circular. La lógica del extractivismo temporal impone una visión del pasado como una secuencia de colapsos y renacimientos utilitarios al servicio de las estructuras actuales de poder, reflejando el agotamiento de nuestra capacidad para concebir alternativas al presente hegemónico. Las narrativas históricas dominantes seleccionan y simplifican solo aquellos elementos del pasado que confirman una visión lineal del progreso. EN respuesta, se analizan pasados sin papeles y modelos históricos alternativos como las sociedades descentralizadas de la Edad de Bronce, las culturas indígenas y las estructuras comunales medievales, los cuales abren el tiempo a una pluralidad de posibilidades y desafían la clausura ideológica del futuro. Este enfoque invita a reimaginar la historia no como una herramienta justificativa, sino como una práctica ética que, al liberar la memoria de esta explotación temporal, redescubre un tiempo lleno de potencialidades colectivas para repensar el presente y sus futuros.
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic prompted governments worldwide to enforce biosecurity measures such as border closures, lockdowns, and testing protocols to contain the virus. These measures significantly impacted cross-border truck drivers at the Beitbridge border between South Africa and Zimbabwe, a key trade corridor. Recognized as essential workers, these drivers sustained supply chains despite stringent biopolitical controls that heightened their vulnerabilities. This paper, grounded in a biopolitical framework, explores the ways in which pandemic-induced mobility restrictions and irregular border policies have heightened health vulnerabilities and economic challenges for cross-border truck drivers. Through examining these challenges, this research underscores the importance of integrating mobility-conscious considerations into public health policies to enhance pandemic preparedness. Using an inductive qualitative approach, the study recruited 20 male truck drivers through convenience sampling for in-depth retrospective interviews enhanced by memory-eliciting prompts. Thematic content analysis uncovered key insights from their narratives. Findings reveal that while governments implemented stringent health protocols to control virus transmission, these measures disproportionately disadvantaged truck drivers by limiting healthcare access, prolonging border delays, and reinforcing economic precarity. The study also highlights the contradictions of essential worker status, where drivers were instrumental in maintaining supply chains yet denied fundamental protections. Utilizing memory-eliciting devices, the research captures drivers’ lived experiences, illustrating how biopolitical governance prioritized economic stability over individual well-being. The study calls for mobility-conscious public health policies, improved occupational health standards, and participatory approaches to border management. Future research should examine the long-term effects of pandemic policies on mobile essential workers and assess the role of technology in mitigating logistical and health challenges.
Towards the end of his book, African Philosophical Adventures , John Murungi laments the injurious impact of Western epistemological hegemony on the humanity and well-being of non-Western peoples and societies, especially Africans. He describes the ensuing situation as a crisis about what it means to be called human or to have the right to exist as human in the twenty-first century: Today, human rights are in a state of crisis and this crisis is fundamentally the crisis of being human. … [The] planetary mode of being has fallen under the tyrannical regime of Euro-Western anthropology. The voice of African anthropology, as is the case with other non-Euro-Western voices of anthropology, remains muted. Africans, particularly, have been reduced to beggars in matters of hermeneutics and understanding of being human. They have been compelled and are even today compelled to look up to Euro-West for assistance in self-understanding. In matters that pertain to self-understanding they look for foreign aid. …Having been voided of what they [Africans] are and of the ability for self-understanding they are compelled to look outside themselves to make sense of themselves. (142–43)
Building on critical scholarship on multiple resiliencies, this article takes temporalities seriously as the basis for its analysis. While disasters are usually described by resilience scholars as moments of temporal rupture, the article engages with different notions of temporalities with respect to long-term repertoires and plural lived experiences of resilient practices in Côte d’Ivoire. It involves looking beyond the immediate object or subject of resilience, drawing on a combination of ethnographic, historical and constructivist methodologies to identify alternative and subaltern forms of resilience. It shows how the everyday and emergency blur and become indistinct, revealing the outcome of long processes of slow violence. These are the outcome of racial colonial governance and post-colonial state neglect. Vernacular resilience takes the form of the distrust of the racial and the institutional other and is about cultural resistance. The ecological crisis should not underscore the importance and wealth of water and a way of living. However, the cultures and practices of débrouillardise clearly show the tension between human and ecological time, leading to a breach in the collective governance of resources. Finally, vernacular resilience also takes the form of an imaginary, a hope in the future.
Cities today grapple with crises of inequality, governance, and environmental challenges. Scholarship must also adapt to these evolving issues by developing new practices and generating relevant scholarship. This article examines a case of ‘social extremis’—severe socio-political conditions that threaten or limit life—and explores social practices that challenge such conditions. The study focuses on a city-wide redevelopment project in Mumbai and the subsequent resettlement policy for displaced populations in industrial, environmentally hazardous peripheries. Based on extensive fieldwork, including over 100 interviews, extended community participation, and institutional document analysis, the article argues that neoliberal welfare regimes, while aiming to address housing inequality, resulted in life-threatening (necropolitical) consequences through inclusionary housing policies. While existing scholarship has documented how state and market forces could enable such life-limiting conditions, this article highlights successful grassroots efforts that have reconfigured state power for social change. It demonstrates that social movement emerged within state-led inclusion through new forms of community mobilization. The movement strategically invoked the right to life and leveraged judicial interventions and successfully negotiated with urban political regimes to secure alternative rehousing solutions. These social practices actively resisted life-threatening conditions, illustrating how communities can counteract extremis or life-threatening circumstances.
The images that have emerged from Gaza, capturing catastrophic violence inflicted upon the Palestinian people by the state of Israel, are atrocious, haunting, injurious. Gaza-based photojournalist Motaz Azaiza came to the fore in the early months of the onslaught as a critical source of on-the-ground information, capturing and posting a steady stream of horror to his Instagram account. Social media outlets are replete with images like his, paired alongside pleas to ‘Stop scrolling!’, ‘Keep looking!’ and ‘Don’t look away!’ This article questions what it means to look at images of atrocity within contexts defined by their financialization and instrumentalization, wherein images, now operational, work to fuel online economies and inform developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Reflecting on the images and commentary posted to Azaiza’s Instagram account and building on existing efforts to theorize intersections between spectatorship and photographic representations of atrocity, the article investigates the technical appropriation, financialization and instrumentalization of the atrocious image online, exposing its complicities and identifying how functions of the image that were once lauded are precisely those now being exploited.
This article contributes to debates swirling around one relatively new way of representing LGBTQ pasts: the monumental. This form—which applies “a weightiness, timelessness, and grandeur” to its subjects—only became available to queer Americans starting in the 1980s. Previously, LGBTQ Americans primarily interacted with their pasts in what Thomas Dunn calls “tactical” and “ephemeral” ways. Queer monumentality has helped activists overcome unique memory challenges LGBTQ communities face and forward political projects. The author demonstrates there are dangers in applying monumentality to queer people, however, such as contributing to homonormativity, which represents and empowers some queer people while erasing or disciplining others. Rather than rejecting monumentality, the author argues it is possible to create a robust queer monumentality that addresses these dangers. Her intervention is to propose monumental muralism as one compelling way forward. Specifically, she argues that The Great Wall of Los Angeles , one of the world’s longest murals and subject of a recent exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, can serve as a model for designers of future queer monuments.
Protesting China's zero-Covid policy and intensified state control, the White Paper Movement (TWPM) is often applauded as a landmark anti-authoritarian movement. This article disrupts the claim by examining how women, queers, and Uyghurs were represented and rhetorically positioned within TWPM and their implication for an intersectional politics in China's pro-democracy activism. Through a critical reading of media coverage and digital narratives, I introduce the concept of disposable counterpublics to characterize the dynamics in which the sufferings and efforts of multiply marginalized populations and protesters are persistently subsumed into a monolithic democratic agenda. Engaging with the scholarship on transnational and networked counterpublics, this study advances the conversations by illuminating the power dynamics within (counter)publics and the digitally mediated spaces where (counter)public negotiations unfold in a transnational setting.
Theoretically and practically, how does the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) framework fit with the local specificities and needs of a non‐Western country like Morocco? Struggles for social justice have preceded the formulation of EDI language. This study takes interest in frameworks and practices of engagement in advocacy work, as well as challenges encountered in doing civil society work. The analysis is based on semi‐structured interviews conducted with Moroccan women's rights activists and sub‐Saharan women migrants in Morocco. The interviews show that the research participants have worked on implementing legal reforms to counter discriminatory laws and pursue the empowerment of their communities. Further, they have engaged in creating cultural transformations by presenting nonstereotypical and alternative views. Some of the challenges they encounter include backlashes from religious conservative forces. They “must” navigate integrating external funding demands while mobilizing for the issues that they deem a priority. Although these community organizations are distinct, this study seeks to generate knowledge from the ground up regarding epistemologies and practices, while also illuminating potential future directions for the implementation of social justice agendas.
This article theorizes everyday forms of uncertainty that immigrant and refugee populations negotiate as a form of violence. We argue that while the state has made immigrants and refugees an explicit target on which to exercise sovereignty through detention and deportation, sovereignty also operates through a necropolitics of uncertainty where immigrants and refugees face inconsistent and spatially diffuse states of exception that target their material, social, and psychological wellbeing. To support this argument, we draw on three case studies that illustrate how avoiding or opting out of social services and health care, or by “self-deporting,” are effects of targeted violence.
The Portuguese language preserves the history of colonial violence against non-white bodies and the languages and epistemologies those memory-bodies preserve. This language also narrates conquests and discoveries of territories and civilizing missions to subjugate the original inhabitants of those spaces. Drawing from decolonial theory, this article explores Ellen Lima’s performative utterances, blending Old Tupi and Portuguese. It argues that they build a decolonial grammar that emerges as a reparation grammar. This is a decolonial praxis that resists and challenges the colonial violence silenced in Portuguese.
This review critically examines Aroosa Kanwal’s Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities: Postcolonial Geographies, Postcolonial Ethics, a theoretically ambitious and ethically resonant work that intervenes in the persistent dehumanization of Muslim subjectivities within the matrix of coloniality, neoliberal securitization, and epistemic violence. Drawing on a rich tapestry of postcolonial theory, spatial critique, and Islamic ethical paradigms, Kanwal articulates a decolonial epistemology that restores moral agency and ontological depth to Muslim lives systematically reduced to zones of exception. The review situates the book within broader discursive currents concerned with necropolitics, the global war on terror, and the racialized cartographies of empire, while foregrounding its methodological dexterity and ethical sophistication. Kanwal’s text is ultimately read as a landmark contribution to critical Muslim studies—one that not only destabilizes hegemonic knowledge formations but also recuperates the possibility of ethical relationality in a world fractured by asymmetries of power, violence, and representation.
With a particular view to the workings of intergenerational time and postmemory within (and against) hegemonic power formations, Larissa Sansour’s sci-fi short film In Vitro (2019) examines the biopolitics of temporality under conditions of occupation. Starting from the premise of a post-apocalyptic Palestine, the film stages postmemory as a form of inversed futurity or speculative futurism that provides insight into the enduring repercussions of political world-breaking and world-making. In Vitro thereby highlights the affective operations of political violence by tapping into a wider biopolitical project of feeling, but it also draws attention to the role of technological mediation though narrative, memory and visual culture in maintaining, and also resisting, specific regimes of control. Adding to a discussion about the biopolitics of feeling and temporality more broadly by introducing the notion of apocalyptic affect, the author demonstrates that the film’s poignant illustration of displacement, trauma and nostalgia identifies the temporal unfolding that crafts exclusionary spaces and walled lives, while also attempting a politically vital piecing together of intergenerational time. In Vitro ’s invocation of mnemonic futurity thus provides an emotional and temporal politics of worlding that reanimates the present as presence. Ultimately, such forms of speculative worlding provide insight into how power and violence organize space, temporality and feeling towards taken-for-granted forms of political embodiment that are central to the biopolitical project, but they also matter politically precisely because they challenge the choreography of hegemonic experience in favour of complicating configurations of imaginative futurity.
This essay discusses transformative education through social activities and curriculum de-encapsulation. Using the example of a museum visit, it demonstrates how integrating real-world, situated activities into the curriculum challenges traditional educational models by promoting student agency and critical engagement with the production of knowledge. This approach fosters educational environments where students are not merely passive recipients of predefined content but active participants in constructing meaning through experiences that connect school and life. Curriculum de-encapsulation enables interdisciplinary learning that bridges academic knowledge with social, political, and cultural issues, thus contributing to a pedagogy that is inclusive, critical, and socially responsive. By breaking the boundaries of rigid disciplinary structures, it allows for the integration of multiple perspectives and ways of knowing. This not only enhances students' cognitive engagement but also supports the development of their social and ethical awareness. The article concludes that such an educational orientation has the potential to prepare students to become reflective and responsible agents of social change within their communities. It suggests that transformative learning spaces, grounded in real experiences and dialogical practices, are essential for cultivating a sense of belonging, purpose, and the collective potential to act toward a more just and equitable world.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present an exploration of the intersection of gender, career and reproductive health within the context of Early Career Women Academics (ECA) experiencing neoliberal organizational practices in universities. It considers the possibility of institutional support, the financial implications of reproductive choices and the need for open discussions about fertility treatments, specifically on egg freezing and the controversies of considering sponsored egg freezing as an employment benefit.
Design/methodology/approach
The methodological choice for the research was a longitudinal 20-month ethnographic intermittent shadowing with an heterosexual ECA woman who decided to freeze her eggs. The reflection, analyses and findings were produced by making the ethnography to dialogue with the literature that has helped the researchers to theorize on contemporary academic life in neoliberal academia.
Findings
Findings illustrate broader systemic issues that affect early-career academics, particularly women, and advocate for necessary changes to support their needs and choices. The researchers posit the case of sponsored egg-freezing and the controversies that could arise if universities, following a good number of other neoliberal organizations around the world, start to offer sponsored egg-freezing as part of the benefits offered to their academic staff, in particular ECAs.
Originality/value
The originality of the paper resides in the discussion of a topic-sponsored egg freezing, an emerging resource of neoliberal organizational practice to “benefit” professionals and its methodological conception, based on a longitudinal ethnographic shadowing.
This paper explores possible sites for critical anti- and decolonial solidarity-building between the Black communities and the Indigenous Peoples in Canada. We leverage African Elders Critical Teachings ( ElderCrits ) as a discursive framework to conceptualize the interdependence required for a decolonizing solidarity work between Black and Indigenous People, and to expose how white supremacy and colonialism are maintained overtly and covertly in everyday social relations to implicate Black and Indigenous Peoples’ lives in Canada. We conceptualize ElderCrits as bodies of knowledge emerging from the shared voices, experiences, history, cultures, and viewpoints of Indigenous Elders of Africa and Turtle Island over generations because of sustained attachments to the land, culture, and nature. ElderCrits are knowledge grounded in an Indigenous person as a subject knower. ElderCrits are bodies of knowledge that are treasured and held in highest esteem by community members, and they often inform, shape, guide, organize, and regulate how community members uphold the promise of a better future. Such knowledges speak of society, nature, and culture interface, and serve as teachings that guide social behavior and action in Indigenous communities. They are appropriately termed the local cultural resource knowledge of Indigenous Elders. We draw on ElderCrits to nurture a decolonizing solidarity between Black Peoples and Indigenous Peoples in Canada to incite a resistance politics that flees and abandons the carceral projects (Harney & Moten, 2013) of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism without leaving out the possibilities of creating new futurities based on inclusive, fair, and equitable relations.
This article explores the affirmative dimension of necropolitics by looking at the articulation of the dead as an aesthetic and political subject in the work of the art-activist collective “the party of the dead.” Since 2017, their performances have exposed and challenged an aesthetic order based on the erasure of mortality in Russia. I draw on Rancière’s distinction between “politics” and “the police” to foreground the sensory aspect of that order and call it “necropolice.” In the logic of necropolice, death is insensible, immortality reigns—and therefore life is expendable. Focusing on the visual style, political statements, and ritualistic aspects of “the party’s” artistic practice, the article shows that in trying to speak as the dead, the activists fail to speak as truly dead. That failure is productive—it affirms death as the limit of experience. I conceptualize that affirmation as necropolitical by complementing Rancière’s notion of “politics” with Georges Bataille’s theory of sovereignty, which underlies Mbembe’s formulation of necropower. If sovereignty consists in the transgression of limits, then in the aesthetic order, where death is insensible and so omnipresent, it is the suspense of the illusion of immortality that constitutes the essence of necropolitics.
Cet article présente une nouvelle heuristique pour détecter l'antisémitisme déguisé en forme d'études académiques. Il saisit la phénoménologie de la distorsion historique et d'erreurs et de lapsus stratégiquement utilisés pour cela. Nous abordons ce sujet en utilisant les dimensions de la validité de l'énoncé : 1. la fiabilité des sources, 2. la falsifiabilité des arguments, 3. la cohérence interne, 4. la correspondance avec les faits, 5. la causalité et
The involvement of youth in climate actions is increasingly recognized as critical to a more just and sustainable future. Despite progress in youth climate justice (CJ) activism, research and decision-making, gaps and challenges persist. Drawing on existing literature, first, we identify three key reasons for authorities to take youth involvement in climate actions seriously, namely (a) human rights and justice, (b) efficiency, and (c) legitimacy of policy actions. Second, we propose six critical areas for policy, research, and the youth movement to deliver transformative youth CJ: (1) closing the climate finance (i.e., adaptation and loss and damage) gap in a way that prioritizes youth-responsive activities, especially in climate impact-prone regions of the world; (2) adopting an intersectional approach to CJ that challenges homogenization of the youth CJ movement, accounts for the diverse experiences, needs and perspectives of different youth, and addresses intersecting structural forms of discrimination that particularly hamper the agency of racialized youth in the global South and North; (3) youth must recast their justice frameworks and channel their activism mode (e.g., buycott) toward challenging and resisting green extractivism, the necropolitical and ecocidal effects of which are concentrated in post-colonies and other racialized contexts; (4) knowledge co-production with youth must confront the risk of knowledge coloniality, extraction and power; (5) youth should engage in more-than-human CJ activism, recognizing the intertwined fate of youth and more-than-human nature; (6) as legitimate representatives of future generations, youth should consider claiming their space in legislative arenas to ensure the protection of future generations.
The COVID-19 pandemic raised profound questions about the place of older individuals within political contexts. The visual landscape of the pandemic shapes our collective understanding of the crisis and reproduces societal norms regarding age and mortality. Yet, discourses of political and visual communication, where the interplay of power, representation and governance intertwines, rarely focus on the visualization of elderhood and the aestheticization of ageing. This article addresses this gap by asking how older individuals are visually represented amidst the pandemic and what discourses, ideologies and power dynamics are reflected and constructed through these representations. To capture the significance of pandemic images, this study critically examines visual representations as a lens to explore the intersection of health security and biopolitical debates. It does so through an empirical analysis of content from two German magazines, Der Spiegel and Die Apothekenumschau . Using a visual content analysis, the study interrogates the nuanced transitions in the visual grammar governing the representation of older individuals throughout the pandemic. The modes of depiction recognizable in the findings, this article argues, echo biopolitical forms of visualization. From the collected data, a shift in depicting older individuals becomes evident with the development of vaccinations. By capturing the visual ageism communicated through the pandemic images, it calls for a multifaceted portrayal of elderhood to counteract its negative effects in contemporary society.
Over the past three decades, Giorgio Agamben's works have exercised a profound and widespread influence on social and political theory, particularly through his Homo Sacer -series, which analyses the foundational (bio-)political structures of Western politics. However, his controversial writings on the COVID-19 pandemic, which grossly underestimated the virus and likened government containment policies to fascism, sparked significant debate and criticism from peers. This essay reviews the recent Omnibus Edition of the Homo Sacer -series and a collection of his pandemic interventions entitled Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics . It argues that while there are significant conceptual continuities between Agamben's pandemic writings and his earlier works, they also exhibit notable theoretical divergences. These divergences may stem from his methodological approach, which emphasizes the developmental potential of philosophical concepts and may also serve as a model for subsequent engagements with his work beyond their original contexts and Agamben's own interpretations.
Cet article étudie les modalités de traitement des restes humains des victimes du conflit armé produits par l’activité médico-légale au Guatemala depuis les années 1990 et la manière dont ils ont été mobilisés dans le processus de mémorialisation de la violence politique passée. Ces restes humains sont ceux de populations civiles, majoritairement autochtones, victimes d’une politique de terreur instaurée par les gouvernements militaires dans les années 1975-1983. Après le retour à la paix, la réticence persistante des institutions nationales va conduire les acteurs de la société civile à assumer seuls la prise en charge funéraire et mémorielle des restes exhumés. Leur collaboration avec les anthropologues médico-légaux, qui se poursuit depuis une trentaine d’années, a vu l’intégration toujours plus forte de la pratique médico-légale au processus mémoriel. D’abord mobilisée pour mettre au jour des traces matérielles de la violence, endossant par la suite un rôle actif dans les processus de requalification et la prise en charge funéraire des morts exhumés, la pratique de l’exhumation est finalement elle-même intégrée dans les éléments mémorialisés.
Dans les contextes contemporains marqués par des crises de mortalité, la situation singulière dans laquelle se retrouvent certains restes humains invite à la réflexion. En effet, ces restes humains, bien qu’identifiés comme appartenant à des victimes de violences ou de catastrophes, et ayant fait l’objet d’expertises, et dans certains cas, ayant été individuellement identifiés, demeurent durablement stockés en attente d’un potentiel traitement funéraire ou patrimonial qui n’est jamais certain. Ces situations qui placent des restes humains en réserve, ou en marge du monde, font bien peu parler d’elles et n’ont pour l’instant suscité aucune étude comparative d’envergure. Or, ces stockages invitent à s’interroger sur l’état liminal dans lequel peuvent être durablement maintenus des restes humains, sur les enjeux (politiques, religieux, moraux) de la création de ces stockages et sur les motifs qui sous-tendent leur caractère durable. Prenant principalement appui sur plusieurs séries d’enquêtes ethnographiques conduites en Europe, en Amérique latine et en ailleurs, dans le cadre de deux programmes de recherche consacrés aux restes humains dans les contextes de violences de masse, cet article propose une réflexion sur ce que nous apprennent ces stockages de l’expérience que font certaines sociétés de la mort collective.
The notion of citizenship is a socio-political construct and how it is conceived has consequences for society. It is informed by deep yearnings for belonging and feelings of homeliness, generated from the interlocking of socio-economic and political circumstances that define existential experiences within national spaces. Understanding citizenship assumes different forms and novel directions through existential experiences. There is a need to reassess citizenship in the context of contemporary conditions and demands to avoid the simplistic and narrow scope of the subject. Using NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, I revisit Mbembe’s theorisation and provocative constructs of a postcolony to examine how postcolonial subjects and ruler/s are depicted and accentuated in Bulawayo’s fictive society and its referent, post-colonial Zimbabwe. The reading of the novel is done vis-à-vis the fundamental tropes and motifs of historiography, subversion, grotesque, obscene culture, and buffoonery of those in power. The paper focuses on the focalisation of troubled national spaces and “(un)grievable bodies,” metaphorically trapped in manifold problematics of becoming and being. Challenges encountered by the citizenry speak about anxious virility of repressive leadership that deploys violence to impose its legitimacy. I argue about the perilous existential conditions of postcolonial subjects, troubled conceptions of citizenship, and nationhood in the fictionalised referent, postcolonial Zimbabwe.
Green hydrogen is often presented as a transformative solution to the dual challenges of decarbonization and economic development. This article applies the framework of climate necropolitics to interrogate the contested spatialities underlying such “win-win” narratives. It does so through an extended case study of Hyphen Hydrogen Energy, a USD10 billion green hydorgen project planned for Lüderitz, Namibia. A remote town of 20,000 in a country with a USD12 billion annual GDP, Lüderitz initially appears to be an unlikely host site for the “industrial fuel of the future.” To explain this outcome, I first illustrate how discordant socio-spatial projects—including European energy security, Namibian industrialization, and (sub)national developmentalism—have shaped both the emergence and legitimation of Hyphen and the construction of Lüderitz as an abstracted space for the realization of external ambitions. I then draw on interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic encounters with Lüderitz residents to place these socio-spatial projects in the specific context of Lüderitz. My analysis demonstrates how local interpretations of Hyphen are shaped not by abstract promises of energy abundance and decarbonized development, but instead by concrete experiences of extractive violence and displaced decarbonization. Analyzing these findings through the framework of climate necropolitics, I argue that Hyphen and similar energy mega-projects are enabled by varied and at times contradictory socio-spatial projects that serve to legitimize extractive violence and displace the costs of decarbonized development. This outcome is not inevitable though—energy transitions can be otherwise, and I draw on the perspectives of Lüderitz residents to consider how. I conclude by discussing the implications of this analysis for efforts to pursue more equitable, just, and place-based low-carbon futures.
This paper analyses the intersection of geopolitics and racialisation in EUrope's migration governance by zooming in on the specific case of Lithuania. Since 2021, Lithuania has seen the arrival of migrants from Africa and the Middle East along with Belarusian citizens fleeing the Lukashenko regime and Ukrainian citizens escaping Russia's war in Ukraine. While these mobilities have occurred in parallel, they have evoked a strict categorical hierarchy in the Lithuanian government's discourse and policy response. By bringing Barak Kalir's (2019; Conflict and Society 5:19–40) concept of Departheid into conversation with a growing body of work on race, coloniality, and double hegemony in Eastern Europe, this paper proposes an understanding of Lithuania's migration governance through the intersection of race and geopolitics. As Lithuania wrestles between Western and Russian influences, its ambition of belonging to the “European space” is marked by geopolitical manoeuvres meant to distance Lithuania from the “authoritarian East” and reverberations of coloniality that delineate the expanding horizons of European power. Thus, we argue that the Lithuanian government's response to migration should be understood as a form of Departheid that is distinct to East European countries in the post‐Soviet space.
Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of the exception marks a shift in geographical scholarship and other social sciences. I argue, however, that although equally crucial, the example remains a surprisingly understudied phenomenon even though Agamben views it as the symmetrical opposite of the exception. I thus push forward Agamben’s theorization of the sovereign not only through a reading of the exception but also the example. The provocation of the article, and its key contribution to knowledge, is to step back from the point where Agamben positions these two as indistinguishable and to clearly distinguish between them—simultaneously marking a shift in the current scholarship of the exception by bringing the example in. To achieve this, I present two cases from Bangladesh and Finland that demonstrate how one sovereign’s exception might be depicted as an example by another, and how both the exception and the example can coexist within the same system. Finally, I highlight the importance of reading the sovereign through the figures of both a homo sacer and a homo exemplar because the sovereign’s power is manifested not only via the production of a state of exception but also equally through the creation of a state of example.
DeKalb County, Georgia has been mired in a struggle to defend its forest against the development of a militarised police training facility known as “Cop City”. Drawing on autoethnographic research as a criminalised forest defender and the Stop Cop City movement's social history, I show how forest defenders created abolitionist possibilities beyond policing and prisons within two spaces of struggle: the Weelaunee forest, where forest defenders built and fought for a life‐affirming, cop‐free ecosystem; and inside Georgia's jails, where forest defenders incarcerated for alleged participation in the struggle built solidarity and fought for collective survival. The movement's strategy of “building and fighting” using insurrectionary , autonomous , and procedural abolitionist tactics has accomplished what abolition geographers call the radical place‐making of abolitionist life‐worlds. Wielding eco‐defence and disruptive protest while prefiguring worlds where criminalised people and communities prevail even in the deadliest of places, forest defenders have undermined carceral state power.
Within Western resettlement countries, leisure has been positioned as a tool for achieving top-down policy goals. Yet, minimal attention has been directed towards understanding how young-forced migrants make sense of and experience leisure within the daily physically, psychologically and socially repressive regulations and processes of the UK asylum system. This novel paper examines how young people from refugee backgrounds engage in and make sense of the leisure domain, social action, whereby individuals and communities seek to generate change on issues that matter to them. The paper draws on a 3-year-long participatory action research (PAR) project in London, UK, seeking to co-develop a leisure-based, youth-led social action programme with, and for, young people from refugee backgrounds. Participant observation was used alongside photo voice methods to explore the young peoples' entangled motives and meanings of social action. Our findings critically examine the complex ways that young people understood the social action programme in relation to (i) relational and emotional dynamics, and (ii) identity, culture, and religion. These findings offer a new way to thinking about how young forced migrants experience and negotiate leisure amid the migration-welfare nexus. ARTICLE HISTORY
This chapter examines the role of dead bodies in the construction of political narratives and national identities, exploring the intersection of memory, power, and social politics in the commemoration and manipulation of the deceased. Through case studies of memorials such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, the preservation of Communist leaders like Lenin, and the repatriation of Indigenous remains like Yagan’s, this paper highlights the profound agency of dead bodies in shaping political discourse. Drawing on the concepts of postmortem agency (Crandall and Martin) and dead body politics (Verdery), the chapter analyzes how human remains, through their strategic placement, preservation, and memorialization, serve as conduits for national memory, territorial claims, and the negotiation of collective identities. The paper further explores how bodies of genocide victims—particularly in the context of the Rwandan genocide—become living archives that challenge historical narratives and amplify collective trauma. Through an exploration of the necropolitics involved in the memorialization of these bodies, the paper underscores how the dead continue to exert power over the living, shaping societal values, memory, and identity long after death.
Esta pesquisa aborda a atuação de um portal midiático frente à pandemia Covid 19, tendo como lentes a perspectiva da ética jornalística (Christofoletti, 2012 & Chaparro, 2007) e de conceitos da necropolítica, desenvolvidos por Mbembe (2003). O objetivo é identificar como se deu a cobertura da pandemia Covid-19, tendo em vista a ética jornalística e a mídia como “comando paralelo” da violência do Estado. A pergunta de pesquisa é: Como a cobertura do portal Jovem Pan ocorreu, tendo em vista os princípios éticos jornalísticos? Há elementos dentro da cobertura do portal que podem contribuir para a naturalização da violência simbólica em populações periféricas? Após a pesquisa bibliográfica sobre a ética jornalística e a necropolítica, selecionou-se 26 matérias do Portal da Jovem Pan em 2020, o primeiro ano da pandemia Covid-19. Após a coleta de dados, foi utilizada a análise de conteúdo, de acordo com Bardin (2011). O Portal Jovem Pan foi escolhido pois é um dos principais braços do grupo editorial homônimo e possui grande audiência, sendo conhecido pelo seu posicionamento à direita e em apoio à gestão do então presidente da república Jair Bolsonaro.
This article analyses the interconnection of the resistance practice of hunger striking inside Israeli colonial prisons and forms of solidarity in support of Palestinian political prisoners, both local and transnational. Centered on the settler-colonial and carceral framework, our research examines the Israeli carceral power towards Palestinian society as a whole and, in detail, the use of administrative detention by Israel as one of the most powerful forms of collective punishment. We also look at Israel’s medical negligence that directly impacts life and death inside prisons. Based on fieldwork conducted in the West Bank and online interviews between 2022 and 2023, this article explores one of the most extreme forms of resistance used by Palestinian political prisoners, namely hunger strikes both individual and collective, that are supported by local and transnational solidarity. The interaction between resistance practices inside Israeli colonial prisons and diverse levels of solidarity generated outside prisons is a challenging new field of research to deal with in Palestine Studies, as it looks at the increasing potential of activists’ engagement in intersectional and transnational narratives.
This article proposes a political economy of extraction framework that explains political order and state collapse as alternative outcomes in the face of lootable wealth. Different types of institutions of extraction can be built on lootable resources—with divergent effects on political stability. If rulers are able to forge institutions of extraction that give them control of revenues generated by lootable resources, then these resources can contribute to political order by providing the income with which to govern. Conversely, the breakdown or absence of such institutions increases the risk of civil war by making it easier for rebels to organize. The framework is used to explain two puzzling cases that experienced sharply contrasting political trajectories in the face of lootable resources: Sierra Leone and Burma. A focus on institutions of extraction provides a stronger understanding of the wide range of political outcomes—from chaos, to dictatorship, to democracy—in resource-rich countries.
As in Clausewitz's time, wars are the continuation of politics by other means - though in the globalizing world they acquire a new character of either `globalizing' or `globalization-induced' wars. The first are aimed at the abolition of state sovereignty or neutralizing its resistance potential, and shun territorial conquest and administrative responsibilities; the second are aimed at the establishment of viable local totalities in the void left by the collapse of past structures, and strive to reassert the lost meaning of space. The shift in aims changes the character of both categories of wars.