This book offers a contemporary look at violence in Mexico and argues for a recalibration in how necropolitics, as the administration of life and death, is understood. The author locates the forces of mortality directly on the body, rather than as an object of government, thereby placing death in a politics of the everyday. This necropolitics is explored through testimonies of individuals living in towns overrun by organized crime and resistance groups, namely, the autodefensa movement, that operate throughout Michoacán, one of the most violent states in Mexico. This volume studies how individuals and communities go on living not in spite of the death that surrounds life, but more disturbingly by attuning to it.

Necropolitics: The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America explores the pernicious and persistent presence of mass incarceration in American public life. Christophe D. Ringer argues that mass incarceration persists largely because the othering and criminalization of Black people in times of crisis is a significant part of the religious meaning of America. This book traces representations from the Puritan era to the beginning of the War on Drugs in the 1980s to demonstrate their centrality in this issue, revealing how these images have become accepted as fact and used by various aspects of governance to wield the power to punish indiscriminately. Ringer demonstrates how these vilifying images contribute to racism and political economy, creating a politics of death that uses jails and prisons to conceal social inequalities and political exclusion.

The concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics have increasingly gained scholarly attention, particularly in light of today’s urgent and troubling issues that mark some lives as more – or less – worthy than others, including the migration crisis, rise of populism on a global scale, homonationalist practices, and state-sanctioned targeting of gender, sexual, racial, and ethnic ‘others’. This book aims to nuance this conversation by emphasising feminist and queer investments and interventions and by adding the analytical lens of cosmopolitics to ongoing debates around life/living and death/dying in the current political climate. In this way, we move forward toward envisioning feminist and queer futures that rethink categories such as ‘human’ and ‘subjectivity’ based on classical modern premises. Informed by feminist/queer studies, postcolonial theory, cultural analysis, and critical posthumanism, Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics engages with longstanding questions of biopolitics and necropolitics in an era of neoliberalism and late capitalism, but does so by urging for a more inclusive (and less violent) cosmopolitical framework. Taking account of these global dynamics that are shaped by asymmetrical power relations, this fruitful posthuman(ist) and post-/decolonial approach allows for visions of transformation of the matrix of in-/exclusion into feminist/queer futures that work towards planetary social justice. This book is a significant new contribution to feminist and queer philosophy and politics, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of gender studies, postcolonial studies, sociology, philosophy, politics, and law. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Gender Studies.

This book comes at a time when the intrinsic and self-evident value of queer rights and protections, from gay marriage to hate crimes, is increasingly put in question. It assembles writings that explore the new queer vitalities within their wider context of structural violence and neglect. Moving between diverse geopolitical contexts – the US and the UK, Guatemala and Palestine, the Philippines, Iran and Israel – the chapters in this volume interrogate claims to queerness in the face(s) of death, both spectacular and everyday. Queer Necropolitics mobilises the concept of ‘necropolitics’ in order to illuminate everyday death worlds, from more expected sites such as war, torture or imperial invasion to the mundane and normalised violence of racism and gender normativity, the market, and the prison-industrial complex. Contributors here interrogate the distinction between valuable and pathological lives by attending to the symbiotic co-constitution of queer subjects folded into life, and queerly abjected racialised populations marked for death. Drawing on diverse yet complementary methodologies, including textual and visual analysis, ethnography and historiography, the authors argue that the distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ dissolves in the face of the banality of death in the zones of abandonment that regularly accompany contemporary democratic regimes. The book will appeal to activist scholars and students from various social sciences and humanities, particularly those across the fields of law, cultural and media studies, gender, sexuality and intersectionality studies, race, and conflict studies, as well as those studying nationalism, colonialism, prisons and war. It should be read by all those trying to make sense of the contradictions inherent in regimes of rights, citizenship and diversity.

In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its “nocturnal body”---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.

This book articulates a contemporary, globalized world as one in which radical disparities in distribution of wealth are being reproduced as the basis for depoliticized social, institutional, and ideological discourses. At its center is a reorientation of global capitalism from the management of life towards making a surplus value from death. This change is presented as a reorientation of biopolitics (bio meaning life) to necropolitics (necro meaning death). Therefore in the book we work with processes of change, of a historicization of biopolitics and its turn into necropolitics that leads to a theoretical trajectory from M. Foucault to A. Mbembe and beyond. This book interprets the sustained perception of existence of dichotomy between these provisional extremes as a trademark of apolitical and/or post-political logics on which contemporary institutional, political, and social discourses tend to be structured upon. More, contrary to the majority of approaches that insists on a profound dichotomy between democracy and totalitarianism, between poverty and free market, and between democracy and capitalism, this book does not interpret these relations as dichotomous, but as mutually fulfilling. The book elaborates, in the context of articulation of these logics, contemporary, imperial racism (racialization) as an ideology of capitalism and states that the First World’s monopoly on definition of modernity has its basis in contemporary reorganization of colonialism. In the book, the authors trace a forensic methodology of global capitalism with which life, art, culture, economy, and the political are becoming part of a detailed system of scrutiny presented and framed in relation to criminal or civil law. Criminalization of each and every segment of our life is working hand in hand with a depoliticization of social conflicts and pacification of the relation between those who rules and those who are ruled. The outcome is a differentiation of every single concept that must from now bear the adjectives of the necropolitical or forensic; therefore we can talk about forensic images, art, projects, and necropolitical life, democracy, citizenship. This will change radically the perspectives of an emancipative project of politics (if it is any possible to be named as such) for the future.

Scholars across fields of education have longstanding histories of critically considering the many ways that inequities in schooling are engendered and maintained, and, just as significantly, how these forms of oppression might be resisted and refused. Drawing from these important dialogues, Educational Necropolitics shares two years of stories, sounds, and powerful images collected through a sonic ethnographic study. What emerges from this work are the reverberations of how students in this context and, more broadly, how youth across the country often negotiate the intersections of race, genders, sexual orientations, class, and other parts of their complex identities in overwhelmingly white high school settings. This book examines what is produced in the wake of educational necropolitics—the capacity for schools to dictate to what degree minoritized students' ways of being can remain intact—and, significantly, it follows the daily lives of youth as they encounter forms of violence through what schools intend to teach, what is left out, what is learned through everyday interactions, and what is valued through the broader emergent cultural contexts. This groundbreaking work includes interactive e-features that invite readers to travel and interact with participants of the study, which utilizes deep listening in qualitative research and reflects the results of this sonic ethnography. A truly timely text for educators and administrators, Educational Necropolitics provides an immersive experience in which leaders can address and correct systemic racist practices in the school setting by drawing directly from first-hand student experiences.

This book examines how Turkey’s ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan produces and employs necropolitical narratives in order to perpetuate its authoritarian rule. In doing so, the book argues that as the party transitioned from socially conservative Muslim democratic values to authoritarian Islamism, it embraced a necropolitical narrative based on the promotion of martyrdom, and of killing and dying for the Turkish nation and Islam, as part of their authoritarian legitimation. This narrative, the book shows, is used by the party to legitimise its actions and deflect its failures through the framing of the deaths of Turkish soldiers and civilians, which have occurred due to the AKP’s political errors, as martyrdom events in which loyal servants of the Turkish Republic and God gave their lives in order to protect the nation in a time of great crisis. This book also describes how, throughout its second decade in power, the AKP has used Turkey’s education system, its Directorate of Religious Affairs, and television programs in order to propagate its necropolitical martyrdom narrative.

The collection comprises contributions from leading artist-theorists in the fields of necropolitics and tactical media, and from increasingly influential scholars of biomediality and urban performativity